Browsing by Author "Stein, Rebecca L"

This dissertation research explores the practices and aspirations to national belonging among Evangelical Egyptians, converts to a distinctively Euro-American form of Protestant Christianity through the proselytizing efforts of European and American missionaries between the mid-nineteenth to mid-twentieth centuries. Although Evangelical Egyptians have historically been known as politically quietist, in the wake of the January 25 Revolution, leading Evangelicals began to adjust their practices of public engagement with the revolution, civil society, and political activism. Through participant observation, in-depth person centered interviews, and archival research, this dissertation argues that far from severing Evangelical Egyptian imaginations, desires for, and practices of national belonging, conversion from the historic Coptic Orthodox church and to a more internationally connected form of Christian community, in fact provides Evangelicals with some of their most potent tools for articulating their historical and contemporary place in the nation-state of Egypt. This dissertation aims to bring timely and productive debates on the anthropology of religion to bear on the shape of global evangelicalism in the global south as a key shape of politics and sociality. Indeed, this dissertation argues that it is precisely the ‘will to the global’ as the future imagined community of ‘God’s kingdom’ that paradoxically roots Evangelical Egyptians in a robust nationalistic articulation of their faith.

When we look up toward the sky, what do we see? The answer may seem to be worlds detached from the colonial conflicts on our own, but in this dissertation, I contend that the sky reveals the contemporary struggles that Palestinians in the West Bank are facing. At a moment when the Palestinian condition is haunted by political malaise, I turn to these expanses overhead through an ethnography of Palestinian astronomy that unearths how ambition and exhaustion take shape in tandem in the airs above the West Bank. Astronomers’ projects frequently encounter Israel’s increasingly atmospheric military occupation, revealing the contemporary dimensions of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, one eking into the sky. Yet at the same time, their profession balances the epistemological wonders of the universe with such wreckage of settler colonialism, providing new grammars for understanding civil aspirations and possibility today in Palestine.

Based on three years of ethnographic fieldwork alongside Palestinian astronomers who are largely based in Ramallah and its surrounding environs, this dissertation unfurls around their everyday labors to bring interstellar phenomena to diverse populations across Palestine through workshops, camps, lectures, community initiatives, and stargazing events. As they deal with land seizures and air raids, atmospheric pollution, Israeli surveillance from drones, helicopters, and even satellites, many astronomers attest that their work to learn about the galaxy also entails learning about how outer space is subject to human extraction, including the colonial appetite. The sky, then, is not simply an object of scientific study for Palestinian astronomers, but it becomes a scale of political reckoning through which they learn how forms of governance—Israel’s occupation or otherwise—can impact their own lives and enterprises.

Rather than ending my analysis at an understanding of the sky as political as such, I also query how these political transformations bear on the social legibility of Palestinian astronomers. By working to build up Palestinian educational fields that Israel has long targeted, and fulfilling a civil duty many would expect from Palestinian governments or municipalities, these astronomers understand that their work directly interfaces with the political histories that have led to present feelings of hopelessness in Palestine. And now that the sky houses Israeli byproducts of these histories, they frequently encounter the assumption—from other Palestinians and those abroad—that they have pursued astronomy to counter Israel’s occupation and be political agents themselves. I detail how these astronomers navigate such political expectations, attentive to their frustrations that astronomy must fit into political scripts that Palestinians have inherited since 1948. How they navigate the weight of these inheritances, I argue, reveals a contemporary portrait of political life for young Palestinians in the West Bank. I both draw from and add to the fields of postcolonial science and technology studies, Palestine studies, and political anthropology by thinking past these political affordances and, instead, more critically examining how the scale of colonial history can coopt Palestinian astronomers’ own subjectivities, implanting impersonal intentions within them.

As a whole, The Sky, Upended seeks to offer a political and decolonial anthropology of the sky that does not rely on existing political rhetorics, but instead uses ethnography to craft a social theory that more robustly illuminates the dimensions, effects, and affects of Israeli settlement today—along the y-axis in particular. By attending to these geophysical transformations and their relationship to Palestinian subjectivity, I offer new directions for recognizing and reconceptualizing Palestinian sovereignty and futurity under our shared sky.

This dissertation is an ethnographic study of the independent music scene in Cairo, in which music producers and cultural entrepreneurs who came of age during the 2011 revolution and 2013 counterrevolution hope to constitute alternative music cultures and markets in the neoliberal digital age under an authoritarian regime.

This media culture is in part defined by its refusal of the dominant urban middle- class social values, the values and aesthetics of the established media industry, and the authoritarian state’s control of media cultures. Yet independent music producers do not present their scene as a political one. Rather than confronting post-2013 authoritarianism head-on, the producers of the independent music scene invest their hopes in entrepreneurial practices and artistic labor that attempt to constitute an alternative media culture beyond the ambit of the state. These independent music producers are consistently engaged in an ongoing tug-of-war with the authoritarian state over the control of the affect of hope. On the one hand, independent music producers’ aspirations push them to undertake collective endeavors to create artwork, music enterprises, concert venues, and events that expand the independent music scene. On the other hand, the arbitrary manner in which the state has wielded its power since the 2013 counterrevolution makes it impossible for the musicians to ever feel entirely safe from potential state interference. This fosters a climate of uncertainty, ambivalence, and a sense of stuckedness in the lives of independent music producers, which impedes their entrepreneurial hopes and expansions into public life. Thus in this study I ask: How is hope mediated through the process of independent music production under authoritarianism in Egypt? By tracing the ways independent music producers attempt to cultivate hope in their entrepreneurial practices under authoritarianism in Egypt, I suggest that we can unveil a field of affective politics, in which we can examine the formation of political imaginaries and the structures that undergird or impede the social production of hope. And by gaining a deep understanding of the hopes animated by the 2011 revolution, we can also examine the thickness of independent music producers’ lives as they bear the brunt of despair under authoritarianism in Egypt.

This research is based on thirty-three months of fieldwork in Cairo among the musicians, studio and venue managers, cultural entrepreneurs, and fans of the independent music scene, between 2011 and 2018. The analysis pays close attention to the forms of labor, entrepreneurial practices, and aesthetic forms by which social actors anticipate their futures. As such, the study is organized along three affective registers— ambivalence, aspirations, and fantasies—which capture the journeys of the social actors who strive to endure and practice hope in spite of the despair propagated by authoritarianism. By bridging between affect theory and Arendtian political theory, I explain how the spreading of affective forces of hope constitutes alternative publics beyond the control of the state, revealing some of the factors that contribute to the crisis and persistence of authoritarianism in Egypt.