What happens when the market tries to help the poor? In many parts of the world today, neoliberal development programs are offering ordinary people the tools of free enterprise as the means to well-being and empowerment. Schemes to transform the poor into small-scale entrepreneurs promise them the benefits of the market and access to the rewards of globalization. Markets of Dispossession is a theoretically sophisticated and sobering account of the consequences of these initiatives.
Julia Elyachar studied the efforts of bankers, social scientists, ngo members, development workers, and state officials to turn the craftsmen and unemployed youth of Cairo into the vanguard of a new market society based on microenterprise. She considers these efforts in relation to the alternative notions of economic success held by craftsmen in Cairo, in which short-term financial profit is not always highly valued. Through her careful ethnography of workshop life, Elyachar explains how the traditional market practices of craftsmen are among the most vibrant modes of market life in Egypt. Long condemned as backward, these existing market practices have been seized on by social scientists and development institutions as the raw materials for experiments in “free market” expansion. Elyachar argues that the new economic value accorded to the cultural resources and social networks of the poor has fueled a broader process leading to their economic, social, and cultural dispossession.
Markets of Dispossession: NGOs, Economic Development, and the State in Cairo
Julia Elyachar
296 pages (October 2005)
Julia Elyachar
296 pages (October 2005)
Cloth - $84.95 | 0-8223-3583-2 |
| [ISBN13 978-0-8223-3583-2] | |
Paperback - $23.95 | 0-8223-3571-9 |
| [ISBN13 978-0-8223-3571-9] | |
“Markets of Dispossession is a brilliant study of contemporary forms of market ideology and practice. Exploring central questions about value and social resources, debt and dispossession, culture and power, it offers an original and outstanding contribution to the anthropological analysis of the economic.”—Timothy Mitchell, author of Rule of Experts: Egypt, Techno-Politics, Modernity“Ethnographically rich and analytically powerful, Markets of Dispossession fundamentally reshapes the debate over the informal economy, microenterprise, and economic development and points to the complex and many-layered world-conjuring work of that which we have come to call neoliberalism. Based on evocative accounts of craftsmen’s workshops in Cairo, Julia Elyachar shows how the market expansion promoted by the World Bank, NGOs, and others poses critical challenges to both everyday lives and contemporary social analysis.”—Bill Maurer, author of Mutual Life, Limited: Islamic Banking, Alternative Currencies, Lateral Reason
Julia Elyachar is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of California at Irvine.
Co-winner of the 2007 Sharon Stephens First Book Award
American Ethnological Society
American Ethnological Society
Acknowledgments
A Note on Transliteration
Chapter 1 Introduction: The Power of Invisible Hands
Chapter 2 A Home for Markets: Two Neighborhoods
in Plan and Practice, 1905-1996
Chapter 3 Mappings of Power: Informal Economy
and Hybrid States
Chapter 4 Mastery, Power, and Model Workshop
Markets
Chatper 5 Value, the Evil Eye, and Economic
Subjectivities
Chapter 6 NGO's, Business, and Social Capital
Chapter 7 Empowering Debt
Conclusion: The Free Market and the
Invisible Spectator
Notes
Bibliography
Index
A Note on Transliteration
Chapter 1 Introduction: The Power of Invisible Hands
Chapter 2 A Home for Markets: Two Neighborhoods
in Plan and Practice, 1905-1996
Chapter 3 Mappings of Power: Informal Economy
and Hybrid States
Chapter 4 Mastery, Power, and Model Workshop
Markets
Chatper 5 Value, the Evil Eye, and Economic
Subjectivities
Chapter 6 NGO's, Business, and Social Capital
Chapter 7 Empowering Debt
Conclusion: The Free Market and the
Invisible Spectator
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Related subjects:
Middle East Studies
Anthropology/Ethnography
Sociology