Julia Elyachar

Empowerment Money: The World Bank, Non-Governmental Organizations, and the Value of Culture in Egypt

W ith the antiglobalization protests in Washington, D.C., in April 2000, the term globalization took a new turn on its slippery discursive slope. First surfacing on the pages of the financial and business press in the 1970s, globalization developed into the catchword of a highly successful neoliberal agenda that asserted the inevitable refiguring of state regulatory regimes to increase the profitability of global financial capital.1 From these origins in the world of business and finance, the term spread throughout academia, including the fields of anthropology and cultural studies.2 But with the rise of the antiglobalization movement

Next Practices: Knowledge, Infrastructure, and Public Goods at the Bottom of the Pyramid

In April 2010 Harvard Business Review published a column by C. K. Prahalad, author of the acclaimed book The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid. The column was called “Best Practices Get You Only So Far” (Prahalad 2010a). “Best practices” is a management concept that became central to the funding cycle of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) in the 1990s (Elyachar 2005). The problem with best practices, Prahalad wrote, is that they are tied to the past. Identifying best practices engages us with what went before. Best practices cannot move us beyond an industrial system that has brought us, and our planet, to the brink of disaster (Prahalad 2010a). Managers and business leaders should turn their attention elsewhere — to “next practices.” Next practices can be found at the bottom of the pyramid (BOP) among the poorest of the poor. Management and strategic thinkers could learn from those

Botanical Decolonization: Rethinking Native Plants

In this paper we use an apparently marginal topic—‘native plants’—to address two issues of concern to contemporary politics and political theory: the legacy of settler colonialism, and dilemmas of scholarship and activism in the ‘Anthropocene’. Drawing on the writings of Francis Bacon and based on a case study of California, we argue that planting and displanting humans and plants are elements of the same multispecies colonial endeavor. In contrast to those who equate native plant advocates with antiimmigrant nativism, we see native plant advocacy as part of a broad process of botanical decolonization and a strategic location for ethical action in the Anthropocene.

Upending Infrastructure: Tamarod, Resistance, and Agency after the January 25th Revolution in Egypt

In this paper, I review recent contributions to theories of resistance and agency in the context of anthropology of Egypt. Drawing on ethnography conducted in Egypt after the January 25th Revolution and then after the election of Mohamed Morsi as President, I analyse the mass mobilization movement in Egypt called Tamarod. Tamarod led the effort to have twenty-two million Egyptians sign a call for President Mohamed Morsi of the Muslim Brotherhood to step down, and mobilized an estimated twelve million to come on the street for a mass demonstration on 30 June, after which Morsi was removed from power. Rather than critique the notion of Tamarod as resistance, as a dupe of the Military, or as the legitimate voice of the Egyptian people and their agency, I argue that Tamarod made visible, and rendered available for political goals, a social infrastructure of communicative channels in Egypt. More generally, the paper shows concretely, and as concomitant processes, how agency is embedded in infrastructure and how infrastructure is upended in uprisings.

Comprehending and Regulating Financial Crises: An Interdisciplinary Approach

The 2008 financial crisis revealed that key players in finance, regulation, and the academy failed to understand realities outside their own area of expertise. Within the academy, scholars from an increasing number of disciplines study finance, and yet few of them seem to be in conversation. Perhaps understandably, given the complexity of a phenomenon such as “financial crisis,” no single discipline has yet offered an adequate analysis of what happened in 2008, or what could help prevent another such systemic threat to the economy. In this article, we argue that developing more effective capacity to comprehend and regulate financial markets requires an interdisciplinary approach that moves beyond pluralism and tolerance of other approaches. Rather, in-depth critical engagement with the underlying assumptions, methods, and findings across fields of research and practice is needed. To advance this argument, we discuss four specific, connected intra-disciplinary projects in progress, and show how key assumptions underlying approaches in each are revealed and revised through systematic engagement with other fields.