Snapshots of daily life: before and after.This is the third interview in a series on
the dilemmas and contradictions researchers undertake in conducting research in
the Middle East. These interviews attempt to focus on questions of methodology,
and the obstacles encountered by researchers when doing fieldwork in enduring
political upheavals. In this interview with Leila Zaki
Chakravarti, Mona Abaza explores how these issues apply within the context
of contemporary Egypt.
Mona Abaza (MA):
Your pre-Arab uprisings research is published as a formal, in-depth ethnography
of a working garment assembly plant in Port Said. Yet your more recent work
consists of shorter, what you call ‘ethnographic snapshots’ of daily life in
Cairo before and after Egypt’s January 2011 revolution. How much of this shift
in research approach is down to external factors relating to Egypt’s uprising,
and how much of it is just a matter of personal development and preference?
Leila Zaki Chakravarti (LZC): I don’t know of a single Egyptian who
couldn’t tell you where they were at the time Tahrir Square erupted into
revolution. I myself was in London, watching the astonishing scenes on TV. It
wasn’t different from a time of war, when the homeland takes on a vivid, concrete
presence in one’s overseas location. I was as confused as the rest of my
friends (some of whom took the first flight home to become part of the change)
over what to make of it all, and how far things might go. The repercussions of
those heady days are still tangible in the lack of consensus and prevailing
confusion over whether the events of January 25 constituted a popular revolt,
or formed part of the wider regional agenda of political Islam, or were simply
a soft military coup aimed at the ultimate preservation of the system. Even
families are not able to reconcile their differences on these issues.
The deep
polarisation and divisiveness around us reflects a continuing inability,
perhaps even a refusal, to settle on a plausible interpretive framework – and
this has inevitably had a formative effect on my continuing attempts to ‘do
ethnography at home’.
I have had
to modify both my research methods and my preferred modes of publication. The
former have had to become somewhat more piecemeal, though not I hope less
coherent (and certainly no less academically rigorous). And as for the latter,
I have been trying to write in a less specialised language, and publish through
more widely accessible channels than just formal academic journals.
MA:
What were your earliest experiences of ‘Arab Spring Egypt’?
LZC:
My first visit to Egypt in April 2011 made me instantly attuned to the state of
virtual civil breakdown. The police were
clearly in an ‘out of action’ mode, invisible on the streets, and everywhere
around me there were unspoken, less tangible features of public disorder. The sudden absence of public security was being
taken as the first warning of fragmentation or even total collapse of the
state, and there was talk of ordinary Egyptians arming themselves in their
homes with live ammunition out of fear of violence either to their families or
their property.
There were
widespread rumours and stories of mafia-like gangs in control of car-theft
rackets, with owners who reported the theft of their vehicles to the police being
told to go and do deals with middle-men and thugs in order to get their cars
back. Huge sums of money were said to be involved in these exchanges between the
different parties involved in these scripted transactions, including the police.
One family I know had an elderly female relative living alone. She was found
murdered in her living room, which drove the family not to seek the help of the
police, but instead to consult soothsayers to ascertain if the killer would be
found and justice done. These troubling features of public disorder were part
of the day-to-day reality of survival politics, as the economic situation
deteriorated into almost total stagnation, and amplified such problems even
further.
Within such
a turbulent environment (very different from the basically settled – albeit precarious
– circumstances of my factory fieldwork site in Port Said in 2004-5) the very
notion of what constitutes ethnographic research started to appear increasingly
questionable in my mind.
MA: So
what areas for ‘research’ grabbed your interest? And how was that different from the research
you had conducted previously in Egypt?
LZC:
The very first word in the Tahrir protestors’ chanted demands for “Eish, hurriya wi ‘adala igtima’iyya! (bread,
freedom and social justice!)” emphasised how their new vision of a changed
Egypt was to involve a more equitable society, with the gap between the haves
and have-nots being substantively addressed.
Of course, there
is nothing really new in the relevance of the fundamental economic argument.
Analytically, the theme already resonates with what the Tunisian intellectual Larbi
Sadiki in his analysis of the role of bread subsidies in the waves of
economic reforms engulfing the region calls
dimukratiyyat il-khubs (‘the democracy
of bread’). Egyptians still recall the ‘bread
riots’ of 1977, during Sadat’s ‘blood transfusion’ of
the economy (as his infitah – opening
– economic policy was popularly known), or the shuhada’ il-khubs (bread martyrs) of 2008, when Mubarak’s threat of
removing bread subsidies claimed protestors’ lives, and pushed the government
to change its script. And bread and butter economic issues had provided an
important focus for my earlier ethnographic research into the aspirations and
struggles of the young, educated and mixed-gender workforce of a garment
assembly plant in Port Said, caught within a nexus of the intensively
competitive supply chains of the globalised economy. The
Tahrir demand was, however, not simply for khubs
(the classical Arabic word for bread) but for eish (the more multi-layered Egyptian colloquial word which also
means ‘life itself’).
The Tahrir
demand was, however, not simply for khubs
(the classical Arabic word for bread) but for eish (the more multi-layered Egyptian colloquial word which also
means ‘life itself’). And indeed the rest of the Tahrir chant makes clear the inextricable
unity between basic, and long-festering, ‘bread and butter’ issues on the one
hand, and the need for social inclusion, political participation, equality and
human dignity on the other. So it was questions around the multiple,
many-layered meanings being associated with the very word thawra (revolution) – extending to articulations of the need for
finding one’s voice, for individual freedom, or for sexual freedom – which
became an important focus of my work.
But whereas the
fieldwork experience to complete a PhD required total immersion in Port Said (where
I stayed for almost 15 months), my more recent research themes, by contrast, grew
out of personal encounters in my neighbourhood during the lapses in law and
order following the uprising.
The first
encounter took place on the morning of my arrival in Cairo, when I flung open
my garden window to find that an uneducated street vendor from Fayyoum (a rural
oasis some 100km from Cairo) had set up a bustling street cafe business on the
pavement outside, using my garden as a storage place, and drawing the water he
needed to cook and clean from my outdoor tap (for which I was of course paying).
At the time all the high-level political debates filling the TV screens involved
revolutionary and reactionary forces locking horns in a race to replace the old
order, with arguing heads engaged in the thick of personality politics to
ascertain the political and religious credentials of different political
parties.
Grassroots
politics, however, was meanwhile engaged (just as energetically) in doing
battle over more mundane resources, as evidenced by the search by such ‘entrepreneurs
of the revolution’ for economic opportunity, albeit within the more
intimate, but no less ferocious, politics of neighbourhoods.
Entrepreneurs of the revolution.MA:
What research methods turned out to be valuable to your ethnographic research
work? And what were the main themes which emerged?
LZC:
Out of this personal engagement in Egypt’s trials and tribulations came my
first steps in compiling short ‘ethnographic snapshots’, as I came to call
them, of whatever developments grabbed my attention, and about which people
were prepared to talk. Intuition played, and continues to play, a big part in
assessing if an encounter, or something someone said, could be the beginning of
a new line of inquiry. Fieldwork notes became a cathartic tool to capture
snippets of life in my neighbourhood, and in the different areas to which I
travelled during successive trips I made to Egypt, as on an almost daily basis
I diligently kept notes on how change was being experienced at the grass roots
level.
I can now
see how each successive snapshot both represents and sign-posts a particular
stage on Egypt’s post-revolution road map – through rule by SCAF (the Supreme
Council of the Armed Forces), followed by the Muslim Brotherhood’s short stint
in government, and then the eventual return of military-in-all-but-name
government under President Sisi. Each piece drew on observation, questions,
more questions, photographs, and long conversations within neighbourhoods.
These proved
to be ideal settings within which to triangulate data and crosscheck references,
especially when the neighbourhoods were places you knew well from childhood.
The complex entanglements in horizontal networks (as elaborated by John
Chalcraft) became a useful framework for exploring what Roger Hardy
describes as ‘the story behind the story’.
In the street-cafe
vendor’s case, for example, exploring these networks had the effect of
highlighting the hefty bribes he had to pay to local police and officials when
he sought to secure ‘protection’ for his illegal street business – but which
backfired later as opportunities for blackmail when he moved into the local
market and opened a falafel shop, and
his business success caused immeasurable jealousies among other more
established local traders, and even well-to-do and socially prominent families
living in the area.
In a more
recent case that I came across and will publish about later this year (involving
the filming of commercial TV soaps in hired-out private apartments), I found
that such networks and alliances can even cut across entrenched class divides,
and involve short-term negotiated partnerships which would otherwise have
remained out of sight.
I also found
that, for me as a researcher, the standard ‘case-study’ approach was giving way
to more longitudinal methods of fieldwork as I followed the street vendor’s
progress – and setbacks – over successive visits to Cairo. This made it
possible to explore changing patterns and deeper tensions within basic bread
and butter issues, and how these themes interplay with other aspects of
polarisation in local markets and neighbourhoods. These include the
rural/urban and unprivileged/affluent divides found in the experience of the
itinerant vendors who descended on Cairo’s middle class neighbourhoods, or the
hidden gendered features of class in new patterns of female employment brought
about by the changed economic, political and social environment. I also became
aware of how these different mutations could be moulded into opportunities that
either mitigated against or enhanced individual economic and social power. The issue of mobility across the city became an almost
obsessive research focus in 2013, when fears of violent retaliation by the
ousted Muslim Brotherhood affected the livelihoods of informal-sector workers
travelling across the city.
I
specifically recall how the issue of mobility across the city became an almost
obsessive research focus in 2013, when fears of violent retaliation by the
ousted Muslim Brotherhood affected the livelihoods of informal-sector workers
travelling across the city, forcing many to make extremely complicated and
costly travel arrangements. It was interesting how it also led to other
revealing developments, such as the widespread use of illegal tuk-tuks in working class neighbourhoods
– initially a self-help measure set up to protect residents from violence
within their own localities, but later given quasi-legal status by the
government to operate across other prescribed areas within the city.
In these
ways the simple mundane exercise of a ‘journey into work’ became loaded with
class and gender subtexts, showing how the entire process of basic bread and
butter issues is never impartial for the grassroots, and how their daily-life struggles
contextualise the multiple layers of meanings of the chants of January 25.
MA: How would you describe your difficulties in
doing research – and are there ways of overcoming these hurdles? In particular,
where do you stand on the vexed issue of ‘self-censorship’?
LZC: The
restoration of istiqrar (stability) has from the start been the
watchword of the Sisi regime, with its strong emphasis on saving the
institutions of the state from collapse, and its seemingly unending “Harb ala
il-irhab (War on Terror)”.
Yet it is clear to me that
this form of ‘stability
by Presidential Decree’, forcefully implemented by the resilient institutions
of the state, has had the effect of suppressing participation. It has meant
that the public spaces for debate and freethinking have shrunk considerably,
presenting practical problems, and requiring a different approach, to research.
The length of time to collect convincing data is much longer, and I have recently
found that more than one trip is needed to acquire a sense of the internal
coherence to the multiple dimensions of any one story. Many interlocutors seem
unable – or unwilling, at least initially – to express their thoughts freely,
though I don’t believe this is out of fear of state power so much as the
absence of reliable and mutually accepted facts and data. It is nevertheless
the case that, even within the narrower parameters of public spaces, debates
which might lead to issues around accountability and transparency are not
hugely popular in the public eye. It
has meant that the public spaces for debate and freethinking have shrunk
considerably, presenting practical problems, and requiring a different
approach, to research.
Other
difficulties are invariably security-related, with the need for constant
awareness about whether the material being collected might be susceptible to
being regarded as ‘classified’ or ‘subversive’ by hyper-vigilant security
agencies, always on the lookout for ‘collaborators with the enemies of the
state’.
This goes
well beyond basic ethical issues such as obtaining interlocutors’ consent for
interviews and quotations. It extends to the forms in which research results
can eventually be published eg waiting until an issue has ceased to be
sensitive or ‘hot’ (even at the risk of the work appearing dated); or leaving
the political punch to the last paragraphs of a paper (rather than upfront at
the start, as some editors seem to prefer); or sanitising visuals eg to remove
revolutionary graffiti and debris from images of ‘stabilised’ urban scenes; or
avoiding publishing anything on or near anniversaries of critical events.
Every
researcher who has worked under these conditions over the past 6 years must
have assembled their own manual of such precautionary measures. Whether they
combine to amount to ‘self-censorship’ is, I suppose, ultimately a matter of
individual judgement. What seems to me incontestable is that such tactics call
for a heightened degree of agency on the part of researchers as to what, and
how, they are prepared to commit to print, so as to maintain professional and
personal integrity in providing truthful accounts of even those features of
post-‘Arab Spring’ reality which are the most challenging and painful to
witness, analyse and record.