When Class Matters: Interdisciplinary Inquiries on Class in the Middle Eastern Cities
Panel 172, 2015 Annual Meeting
On Tuesday, November 24 at 8:30 am
Panel Description
This panel is mainly concerned with promoting a productive conversation on the interpretative capacity of "class" as an analytical tool to study the political landscape of the Middle Eastern cities. By unpacking the theoretical and methodological potentialities, as well as the challenges of utilizing class within analyses of diverse political and social spaces, policies, practices, movements, finally visions and subjectivities, we ultimately hope to contribute to general understanding of power, authority and identity in the Middle East. Instead of defining class as a static fact, which uniformly determines social life, we are foremost interested in intersectionality, i.e. the multifaceted ways in which class interacts with other analytical categories, such as state, space, gender, nationalism, sectarianism and religion. Although many studies have provided rigorous discussions on religion, secularism, gender, nationalism, violence and modernity, very few studies on Middle East linked those concepts to social class.
In the context of growing frustrations among the unemployed, disenfranchised, and marginalized groups, on the one hand, and intensifying forms of violence, control and discipline, on the other, what could scholarly attention to the relationships of class offer? How do we recognize and disentangle class in multifaceted cultural narratives, urban connections, embodied practices of consumption and language? Is class an analytically useful category to explore urban mechanisms of exclusion, discipline and marginalization? What types of commonalities and shared interests produce class? What types of aspirations and desires are entailed within the narratives and practices of the alliances made by different classes, or among competing classes? Are claims to modernity, cosmopolitanism, knowledge or piety related to the issue of class?
As one of our major goals is to promote intersectionality in the analysis of the institutions and everyday practices, we ask when and how "class" becomes a useful analytical category. How can we recognize the relevance or irrelevance of "class" even when our research is mainly located in state, ethnicity, kinship, gender, youth, space and religion? When the groups, communities and individuals we study do not frame their identities with references to class, how do we use it to analyze their narratives and practices? How do we define and theorize class in ways which are not deterministic or ahistorical, but in ways that contribute to a rigorous and productive analytical enquiries of power and authority? Through their ethnographically rich material and specific focus on intersectionality, the panelists will explore those imperative questions.
Disciplines
Anthropology
Economics
Geography
Political Science
Sociology
Participants
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Dr. Farha Ghannam
-- Discussant
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Dr. Kirsten Scheid
-- Chair
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Ms. Dina Makram-Ebeid
-- Presenter
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Momen El-Husseiny
-- Presenter
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Dr. Feyda Sayan Cengiz
-- Presenter
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Dr. Yasemin Ipek
-- Organizer, Presenter
Presentations
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Dr. Yasemin Ipek
Beirut is often highlighted as a necessary passage-point toward upward mobility and eventual emigration, since many aspirant youth from smaller cities and villages in Lebanon move to Beirut in order to obtain their college degrees and find jobs. Nevertheless, amidst the postponed presidential elections, dysfunctional state institutions, soaring rates of youth unemployment and lurking sectarian tensions, many of these aspirations are also blended with feelings of frustration, fear and being stuck. Particularly for youth from low-income families with weak wasta ties (mediating connections) promises of upward-mobility were limited. What do young people do when they feel desperately “stuck,” or when they do not want to feel stuck like (or among) the majority?
I focus on the everyday performances of class to explore these complex experiences that are affectively articulated through the narrative tropes of dreaming and fear, utopias and dystopias. Thus, I situate complex sets of youth aspirations and practices within the shared narratives of crisis, survival and hope. In addition to in-depth interview data, I bring in observations on popular spaces where young people from diverse sectarian backgrounds intersect, (such as NGOs, trainings, universities, and work-spaces), in order to interpret the everyday efforts of low-income youth to expand their connections and to build their own wasta networks. Interestingly, expanding one’s networks also requires deemphasizing one’s class background or sect-based identity markers in order to appear less “traditional,” more “modern,” and to gain wider social acceptance.
The material for my discussion comes from my fieldwork (2011-2014) in Msaitbeh area, Beirut with university educated youth from low-income families. With rare exceptions, class in the Middle East has been surprisingly under-theorized. Most social studies on Lebanon similarly privilege analyses of sectarianism, religion, public space, gender, and sexuality to understand power and contestation in Lebanon. By focusing on youth’s everyday affects and embodied practices, this paper is an attempt to theorize class within the perspective of intersectionality advanced by feminist studies. I treat class not as a pre-defined self-evident category but instead as a cultural performance that is produced in relation to other locally relevant social categories of sect, the urban/rural nexus, and gender.
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Momen El-Husseiny
Highlighting the role of private security in disciplining the social class inside gated communities, this paper analyzes the content analysis of the training manual of security guards that focuses on the protection and surveillance of subjects living in “Al-Rehab City” enclave in Cairo. In the process of “protection and surveillance,” security guards are trained on perceiving residents in different categories other than the monolithic “upper-middle” class structure. The notion of class itself is sub-divided into groups for security purposes related to residents’ political affiliation, religious identity, military status, and foreign citizenship. The data collected on residents are then mapped onto the architectural and urban layout of the gated community. This forms the basis of what the security chief of the private security, who is a retired military general, calls the “strategic security map”. Based on the collected data of residents and their projections on the map, the chief decides on the zones of interest that require more guards than others for surveillance. Class is transcended from a collective social structure into a Foucaultian project of subject control and discipline. The panopticon, however, as an optical instrument of ‘fixed’ surveillance is transformed into an animated map with active updates and correlated feedback loops of security calculations.
In addition to analyzing the process of “protection and surveillance” that deconstructs the collective class into sub-categories for scrutiny, in this paper I use ethnographic research from 2010 to 2012, to analyze two disputes between residents and the private security unit on issues related to drinking alcohol and allowing visitors into the gated community. This aims at showing how security is practiced on the ground and its moral basis of interpretive judgment of residents’ class (inspired by the militarized security training), when it comes to the everyday interaction.
Many urban scholars wrote on Cairo’s gated communities, how they drive the neoliberal forces and the social segregation within the city, analyzing their residents as a homogenous group that belonged to the upper-middle class – but little has been said on the social class dynamics and their heterogeneity from within. This paper fills in this gap using a materially grounded analysis by first looking at the contours of the upper-middle class from the viewpoint of a private security unit in one of Cairo’s gated communities, and secondly showing how security – as a practice and mapping – is dynamically shaped by the intersections of class and identity politics.
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Dr. Feyda Sayan Cengiz
This paper looks into the ways in which lower- middle class women with headscarves are categorized as a specific type of labor force in the retail labor market in Turkey. Much has been written about the social and political implications of the headscarf in Turkey among middle class, educated, Islamic activist women and the struggle they have waged against the homogenizing imaginaries of secular, Westernized woman in the public sphere. Yet, how the connotations of the headscarf unfold in the context of insecure, low status private sector jobs hardly count among the concerns of public and academic debate regarding women, Islam and headscarves in Turkey. This paper traces the ways in which the connotations of identity attributed to the headscarf intersect with social class in the making of lower middle class, non-university educated women’s experiences in work life. In doing that, the paper questions the dominant pattern of taking the headscarf as a blanket of religious identity which uniformly defines the experiences of women with headscarves regardless of class, status and level of education.
The study relies on ethnographic research conducted in different retail settings in five cities of Turkey. The research includes data from focus group discussions and in-depth interviews conducted with saleswomen with headscarves, as well as with employers in retail. The data uncovers demarcation lines in the retail sector with regard to employing or not employing women with headscarves. These demarcation lines reflect a multiplicity of assumptions which lead to categorizing women with headscarves as a specific type of labor force that would ‘fit’ only in certain retail settings. What kind of assumptions related to class, gender, religiosity and identity are at work in the construction of these demarcation lines? By looking into both the employees’ and employers’ narratives, the paper traces the interactions between the socially and culturally loaded assumptions about the headscarf and perceptions of class in drawing demarcation lines in the retail labor market.
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Ms. Dina Makram-Ebeid
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.
