Description
Book SynopsisThis book charts the development of the social sciences—anthropology, human geography, and demography—in colonial and postcolonial Egypt, exploring the broader significance of knowledge production and its relationship to colonialist and nationalist ideologies.
Trade Review"Omnia El Shakry's contribution is a rich and erudite one. It draws on a range of archival sources in Arabic, French, and English, offering original readings of texts and political events of Egypt in the first half of the twentieth century. Her argument is eloquent and the evidence compelling.
The Great Social Laboratory is an essential addition to courses across the critical social sciences and humanities." --
Journal of Middle East Women's Studies"
The Great Social Laboratory is a brilliant study of the tension between imperial projects and nationalist imaginings. Examining the ways in which colonial Egypt became a site and object of social scientific knowledge, Omnia El Shakry offers a seminal contribution to debates about the place of colonialism in the development of modern science." -- Timothy Mitchell * New York University *
"This excellent and well-researched book recounts the formation and application of colonial knowledge—especially of ethnography, human geography, and demography—in the attempts to modernize and govern Egypt. It makes a significant contribution to the important debate about colonial modernity that has so far been largely confined to India." -- Talal Asad * City University of New York, author of
Formations of the Secular *
Table of Contents@fmct:Contents @toc4:Acknowledgments iii Note on Transliteration iii Abbreviations iii @toc2:Introduction: Colonialism, Nationalism, and Knowledge Production 1 @toc1:I The Anthropology of the Modern Egyptians: From the Fin-De-Si'cle to the Second World War @toc2:Chapter 1 The Ethnographic Moment 000 Chapter 2 Anthropology's Indigenous Interlocutors: Race and Egyptian Nationalism 000 @toc1:II From Ethnographic Realism to Social Engineering: The Problem of the Peasantry, 1925-1945 @toc2:Chapter 3 The Painting of Rural Life 000 Chapter 4 Rural Reconstruction: The "Road to a New Sanitary Life" 000 @toc1:III The Problem of Population, 19251945 @toc2:Chapter 5 Barren Land and Fecund Bodies: the Emergence of Population Discourse 000 Chapter 6 Body Politics: Gender, Reproduction and Modernity 000 @toc1:IV The Revolutionary Moment @toc2:Chapter 7 Etatism: Theorizing the Revolutionary State 000 Conclusion 000 @toc4:Notes 000 Bibliography 000 Index 000
