On the Semicivilized by Julia Elyachar is a sweeping analysis of coloniality that shaped—and blocked—sovereign futures for those dubbed barbarian and semicivilized in the former Ottoman Empire. Drawing on thirty years of ethnographic research in Cairo, family archives from Palestine and Egypt, and research on Ottoman debt and finance to rethink catastrophe and potentiality in Cairo and the world today, Elyachar theorizes a global condition of the “semicivilized” marked by nonsovereign futures, crippling debts, and the constant specter of violence exercised by those who call themselves civilized. Originally used to describe the Ottoman Empire, whose perceived “civilizational differences” rendered it incompatible with western dominated global order, semicivilized came to denote lands where unitary territorial sovereignty was stymied at the end of WWI. Elyachar’s theorizing offers a new analytic vocabulary for thinking beyond territoriality, postcolonialism, and the “civilized/primitive” divide. Looking at the world from the perspective of the semicivilized, Elyachar argues, allows us to shift attention to embodied infrastructures, collective lives, and practices of moving and acting in common that bypass lingering assumptions of territorialism and unitary sovereign rule.

Julia Elyachar is an anthropologist broadly trained in economics, history of political and economic thought, political economy, social theory, Middle Eastern Studies, and Arabic language. She received her Ph.D. from Harvard University in Anthropology and Middle Eastern Studies. Elychar's M.A. (Harvard University) is in Anthropology, and her B.A. (Barnard College, Columbia University) is in Economics, with a Political Economy emphasis. Before moving to UC Irvine, where she was Associate Professor of Anthropology and Economics and Director of the Center for Global Peace and Conflict Studies, Elyachar taught and held research positions in Near Eastern Studies and at the International Center for Advanced Studies at New York University and at the Academy of Sciences and Arts in Ljubljana, Slovenia. 

Discussant: Fadi Bardawil, Duke University

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