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Waẓῑfa as Property: Passing one’s job to their children and local understandings of class in an industrial suburb of Cairo
Abstract
Class analysis is often considered an outdated, teleological and materialist way to understand social life; one that does not take into account the complexity of cultural and political phenomena. Expanding our understanding of class however, suggests that class analysis does not need to be dogmatic and is rather a helpful tool for capturing the intersection of various inequalities. This paper looks at the practice of passing one’s job to one’s children and its implication on everyday politics of labour in Helwan, an industrial neighborhood of Cairo. An expanded idea of class, the paper proposes, requires an expanded idea of property relations. Access to Waẓῑfa (blue collar employment in the public sector or white collar employment) has been historically considered as a form of property (Mundy, 2004). In everyday negotiations of work on the steel plant’s shop-floor where I conducted ethnographic fieldwork Waẓῑfa is similarly understood as a form of property that endows its holder with privileges unknown to those who only have Shughul (work) and often work in the informal sector around the plant. By contrasting the spatio-temporal manifestations of property relations in concepts of Waẓῑfa verus Shughul the paper calls for an intersectional analysis of class that takes into consideration familial, gendered and more broadly indigenous understandings of inequalities. Rather than focus on the struggle between managers and workers on the shop-floor, the paper take seriously the distinctions within working people and their implications on class struggles.
Discipline
Anthropology
Geographic Area
Egypt
Sub Area
Arab Studies