Julia Elyachar

Position
Associate Professor of Anthropology and the Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies; Interim Director, Sharmin and Bijan Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Iran and Persian Gulf Studies, AY 2024-2025
Office Phone
Office
130 Aaron Burr Hall
Office Hours
Wednesday: 2:30 pm-5:00 pm
Education

Ph.D. Harvard University

Bio/Description

Short Bio
I am an anthropologist broadly trained in economics, history of political and economic thought, political economy, social theory, Middle Eastern Studies, and Arabic language. I received my Ph.D. from Harvard University in Anthropology and Middle Eastern Studies. My M.A. (Harvard University) is in Anthropology, and my B.A. (Barnard College, Columbia University) is in Economics, with a Political Economy emphasis. Before moving to UC Irvine, where I was Associate Professor of Anthropology and Economics and Director of the Center for Global Peace and Conflict Studies, I 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. I also draw on my training and professional experience in dance and improvisation as an ethnographer and teacher.

My research revolves around a set of problems at the intersection of political economy, social theory, and anthropology. My primary research site is Egypt, where I studied and conducted ethnographic research for four and a half years in the 1990s, and where I continue to conduct research for shorter periods to this day. My research is also informed by my work at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and by my research experience in Israel/Palestine and former Yugoslavia, mainly in Slovenia. I have been conducting research on finance and debt since my undergraduate studies.

In my first book, Markets of Dispossession: NGOs, Economic Development, and the State in Cairo, I show that popular notions of the invisible hand and the free market are more “folk theory” than an accurate portrayal of how markets work and can be sustained. I make my argument by drawing on 2 years of fieldwork I conducted with bankers, borrowers, bureaucrats, workshop owners (and their wives and sisters), child workers, and NGO officials, and by engaging with longstanding debates in moral philosophy and political economy about the market, ethics, debt, and economic subjectivities. In Egypt, I propose, “empowering debt” to solve problems of the poor came at the expense of long-termer sources of economic value. This kind of development policy became possible in the late 20th century after social scientists discovered that cultural practices (such as hanging out in coffeehouses, hanging out, visiting, and socializing) once condemned as a “waste of time” were in fact a source of “social capital” and economic value. But turning culture and sociality into new sources of profit, I argued, was a new and insidious form of dispossession. Promoting short-term gain and the endless expansion of the neoliberal free market would, in local terms, provoke the attacks of the evil eye. Neoliberal free market expansion would eventually implode.

I followed up on my initial theorization of NGOs, states, and international organizations as part of one field of power in my second project, where I turned to analysis of management theory, business practice, and NGOs on a global scale. This resulted in a series of articles on NGOs, the corporate world, and social theory, focusing on the concepts of “best practices,” “next practices,” “bottom of the pyramid,” and “tacit knowledge.”

In my third project, I brought together political economy with linguistics and semiotics to develop a theory of social infrastructures. My conceptual work here was motivated by a simple question: why did practices of consumption, movement, and comportment analyzed so brilliantly by Egyptian writers and filmmakers that were central to political economy disappear in social analysis, with the exception of occasional references to “popular,” or sha‘bi Cairenes?  In this project I retell the history of “capitulations” inherited by the Ottomans from the Byzantine Empire that created a different financial and property infrastructure for those self-identified as “local” versus those linked to foreigners. I draw on theories of Pierre Bourdieu, George Henry Mead and others to explain how the constitution of sha‘bi identity is central to a longer history of political economy and political practice in Egypt. I develop the concept of “phatic labor” to show how gendered labor of making and maintaining channels of communication creates stable “social infrastructures of communicative channels” that can be understood as a semiotic commons of the Egyptian masses. In my writings on the Egyptian Revolution of 2011 and its aftermath, I go on to show how these social infrastructures and exemplary figures from sha‘bi culture became agentive mobilizing devices in times of political revolt. I am finishing this book for publication in 2016.

My research is also informed by my years of living and working in Slovenia, former Yugoslavia. At first glance, Egypt and Slovenia  could not be more different. Egypt is the most populous country  of the Arab world. Slovenia is a small country with only 2 million  inhabitants and is part of the European Union. The comparison  I make in my research began with accidents of my own biography:  I have family origins in Palestine and married into Slovenia. And yet these two countries used to be part of a now disappeared  political geography. They are both “post-socialist” and “post-Empire” in a political geography that ended with the end of WWI.  With the hundredth anniversary of WWI, and the current devastation  of the post WWII Middle East order, those once obscure histories and geographic intersections  have reemerged in important ways that demand immersion in history, geography, and ethnography. This perspective informs my current work in multiple ways, in writing on “Botanical Decolonization” with Tomaz Mastnak and Tom Boellstorff; and in my  forthcoming book On the Semi-Civilized: Channels of Mobility and Finance in Cairo and Beyond.

Selected Publications

BOOKS

Markets of Dispossession: NGOs, Economic Development and the State in Cairo (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005). Winner of the American Ethnological Association, Sharon Stephens First Book Prize, 2007.

On the Semi-Civilized: Channels of Mobility and Finance in Cairo and Beyond. (Durham NC: Duke University Press, forthcoming 2024). 

Mülksüzleştirme Piyasaları. Istanbul: Alfa Publishing, December 2023. Erkan Ünal, translator. (Revised updated edition of Markets of Dispossession: NGOs, Economic Development, and the State in Cairo. Duke 2005.)

Thinking Infrastructures (co-editor with Martin Kornberger, Neil Pollock, Geoffrey Bowker, and Joanne Nucho), Research in the Sociology of Organizations book series, Emerald Publishing Limited, 2019. 

Arabic Translation of Revised Edition, Markets of Dispossession: NGOs, Economic Development, and the State, (with new introduction and revised chapters), National Center for Translation, Cairo Egypt, forthcoming 2025. 

The Factory: Commerce, Colonization, and Capitalism from the Age of Exploration to the Age of Amazon (In process, under contract with Madelaine Milburn Agency, UK).  

PEER REVIEWED ARTICLES 

(Please contact me by email if you are unable to access any of my work online and I will send you a pdf).

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Upending Infrastructure: Tamarod, Resistance, and Agency after the January 25th Revolution in Egypt, History and Anthropology, 2014.

Botanical Decolonization: Rethinking Native Plants. With Tomaz Mastnak and Tom Boellstorff. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space. 2014.

Regulating Crisis: A Retrospective Ethnography of the 1982 Latin American Debt Crisis at the New York Federal Reserve Bank, Valuation Studies, 2013.

Next Practices: Knowledge, Infrastructure, and Public Goods at the Bottom of the Pyramid, Public Culture, 2012.

Before (and After) Neo-Liberalism: Tacit Knowledge, Secrets of the Trade, and the Public Sector in Egypt, Cultural Anthropology, 2012.

The Political Economy of Movement and Gesture in Cairo, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (JRAI), 2011.

Phatic Labor, Infrastructure, and the Question of Empowerment in Cairo, American Ethnologist, 2010.

Best Practices: Research, NGOs, and Finance in CairoAmerican Ethnologist, 2005.

 

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Striking for Debt: Power, Finance, and Governmentality in Egypt, Anthropological Notebooks (Društva antropologov Slovenije), Volume 10, no. 1,  (Ljubljana, June 2004): 27-56.

Mappings of Power: The State, NGOs, and International Organizations in the Informal Economy of CairoComparative Studies in Society and History, 2003.

Empowerment Money: The World Bank, Non-Governmental Organizations, and the Value of Culture in Egypt. Public Culture, 2002.

REVOLUTION AND COUNTER-REVOLUTION IN EGYPT

Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Egypt a Year after January 25th. Edited collection of 17 articles about the January 25th Revolution in Egypt and its Aftermath. Co-edited with Jessica Winegar. Cultural Anthropology, Hotspots. January 2012.

Writing the Revolution: Dilemmas of Ethnographic Writing after the January 25th revolution in Egypt, Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Egypt, January 2012.

Jadaliyya: A New  Form of Producing and Presenting Knowledge in/of the Middle East (Interview with Bassam Haddad).

OTHER ARTICLES (SELECTED)

The Passions of Credit and the Dangers of Debt, Theorizing the Contemporary: Finance, Bill Maurer, ed., Cultural Anthropology, online feature posted May 2012.

Julia Elyachar Interviews Timothy Mitchell, Public Culture, Vol. 24, no. 3, 2012.

Infrastructure: Commentary from Anand, Back, Elyachar, and Mains. Infrastructure: A Curated Collection, edited by Adonia Lugo and Jessica Lockrem, posted online November 2012.

Finance internationale, micro-crédit et religion de la société civile en ÉgypteCritique Internationale (Paris, November 2001): 139-152.

REVIEWS AND COMMENTS (Selected)

Retooling Anthropology,  Anthropology Today (Editorial). Coauthored with Bill Maurer, vol. 25, no. 1, February 2009:27.

Fiscal Policy in Crisis,  Anthropology News. Coauthored with Bill Maurer, vol. 29, issue 9, December 2008:24.

Review of A Culture of Corruption: Everyday Deception and Popular Discontent in Nigeria, by Daniel Jordan Smith. American Ethnologist, vol. 36, no. 1, Winter 2009: 191-192.

REVIEWS OF MY WORK (partial list):

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