Connected in Cairo

by Peterson, Mark Allen

• ISBN13: 9780253223111
• ISBN10: 0253223113
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2011-05-06
• Publisher: Indiana Univ Pr

Summary

For members of Cairo's upper classes, cosmopolitanism is a form of social capital, deployed whenever they acquire or consume transnational commodities, or goods that are linked in the popular imagination to other, more "modern" places. In a series of thickly described and carefully contextualized case studies -- of Arabic children's magazines, Pokémon, private schools and popular films, coffee shops and fast-food restaurants -- Mark Allen Peterson describes the social practices that create class identities. He traces these processes from childhood into adulthood, examining how taste and style intersect with a changing educational system and economic liberalization. Peterson reveals how uneasy many cosmopolitan Cairenes are with their new global identities, and describes their efforts to root themselves in the local through religious, nationalist, or linguistic practices.

Author Biography

Mark Allen Peterson is Professor of Anthropology and International Studies at Miami University of Ohio. He is author of Anthropology and Mass Communication: Media and Myth in the New Millennium and coauthor of International Studies: An Interdisciplinary Approach to Global Issues.

Table of Contents

Preface	p. ix
Acknowledgments	p. xiii
Note on Transliteration	p. xvii
Toward an Anthropology of Connections	p. 1
Making Kids Modern: Agency and Identity in Arabic Children's Magazines	p. 28
Pokémon Panics: Class Play in the Private Schools	p. 64
Talk Like an Egyptian: Negotiating Identity at the American University in Cairo	p. 96
Coffee Shops and Grander in Translocal Spaces	p. 138
The Global and the Multilocal: Development, Enterprise, and Culture Brokers	p. 170
Epilogue	p. 215
Dramatis Personae	p. 219
Notes	p. 225
References	p. 237
Index	p. 253
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