Connected in Cairo
Growing up Cosmopolitan in the Modern Middle East
Global goods, class, and identity in urban Egypt
"Excellent . . . original . . . sophisticated." —Christa Salamandra, City University of New York
"Offers a strong contribution to the anthropology of the Middle East, global studies, political economy of neoliberalism, and to scholarship on urban life and class and gender relations in the contemporary Global South. . . . [A] wonderful teaching tool." —Paul Amar, University of California, Santa Barbara
"A beautifully nuanced account of the interpenetrations of global and local media practices, other consumption practices, and the people for whom they are relevant. . . . A model for the use of ethnographic work for understanding how and why media practices have the impact they do on the lives of their consumers, producers and critics. It is a very smart and sophisticated book." —Bambi B. Schieffelin, New York University
"Offers a strong contribution to the anthropology of the Middle East, global studies, political economy of neoliberalism, and to scholarship on urban life and class and gender relations in the contemporary Global South. . . . [A] wonderful teaching tool." —Paul Amar, University of California, Santa Barbara
"A beautifully nuanced account of the interpenetrations of global and local media practices, other consumption practices, and the people for whom they are relevant. . . . A model for the use of ethnographic work for understanding how and why media practices have the impact they do on the lives of their consumers, producers and critics. It is a very smart and sophisticated book." —Bambi B. Schieffelin, New York University
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.
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