This presentation explores the ambivalences that trouble the project of pious self-discipline of a young woman whom I met during my fieldwork in Cairo, between 2006 and 2009. Daughter of two return-migrants from the Gulf, Lamya - just as many other young women, coming from Egyptian petit-bourgeois families, who gain access to ‘modern’ educational and labour contexts – was caught up by competing religious, educational and market oriented discourses, promising respectively moral, personal and social improvements. If on the level of individual engagement the young women managed to live up to the manifold and, at times, incongruous expectations these different discourses engendered, on the other hand she experienced the forms of sociality they entailed as totally irreconcilable. When required to conform to the specific social bonds elicited by the pious life she had enthusiastically committed to, soon Lamya became frustrated because of the tensions arising from her different social allegiances, thus started to question her path of virtuous self-discipline. By complementing the analysis of the subjectivation processes inherent to the diverse projects of moral and personal progress, with the description of the forms of sociality these same projects give rise to, this presentation suggests that an ethnography attentive to the relational and social dimensions of grand schemes in daily life is crucial in order to grasp the complexities and the conditions under which their promises are lived.

Many Egyptians working in Ministry of Culture institutions and, increasingly, in youth development NGOs have tried to dedicate themselves to the project of “culturing children and youth” (tathqif al-atfal wal-shabab). A major goal of these projects is to progress the Egyptian nation by teaching young people a variety of skills seen as necessary to building a better future for the society within the world marketplace. This future is defined through longstanding discourses of nationalist developmental modernism, increasingly melded with neoliberal market ideology. But what happens to these aspirations when the material conditions for this developmental modernism in the state sector are subject to neglect and corruption, or when the tedium of corporate audit practices takes over at arts and youth NGOs? How do people manage the tensions within the subjectivation processes of these different institutions, in which material circumstances and daily life are often at odds with institutional discursive practices? This paper explores the lived experiences of culture workers at two institutions in Egypt: a once internationally acclaimed, now dilapidated, government-run youth cultural center; and a relatively new NGO meant to develop youth through the arts which, partly in response to international accolades, is trying to introduce rationalization into its daily operations.

My paper will discuss Southern Yemeni young people's expectations about the role the state should play in building the country's future. Born during the turbulent years of Yemeni unity, these young people have learned from their parents about the relatively stable times of the PDRY when everybody had a job and no corruption prevailed. In the face of massive youth unemployment, wide-spread land theft, favouritism and patronage system that the rule of Ali Abdullah Salih has brought about in the South, disillusionment has spread among the youth. For young men, unemployment means postponed marriage plans, too, and emotional frustration. In response, the young people I met in the Southern Yemeni town of Aden, the former capital of the PDRY, have created ideas of a fair state by drawing on the imagined fairness of the previous regime. During that time, with a state job every young man could afford to marry, as it was legislated in the Family Law (1974). While times are dramatically different today, the ideal state, in the mind of these young people, is the one who hires everyone into the happy family of the nation. My paper explores the discrepancies between youthful expectations and economic realities among politically active young people in Aden. The paper is based on ethnographic fieldwork in Yemen during the course of the late 1980s, 1990s and 2000s, altogether three years.

Anthropologists have long explored the forms of governability and the projects of subjectivation arising from national modernizing projects, and more recently ‘globalization’, in the Middle East and North Africa. Yet the ways in which people in flash and bones imagine their lives and craft themselves under local articulations of market liberalization and globalized patterns of consumption, transnational migration and media technology, require further scrutiny. Drawn upon ethnographic research, my paper investigates the notions of ‘love’ and ‘intimacy’ circulating among young women in a boom town of the Tadla Plain (Moroccan Middle-Atlas). Specifically, it focuses on the everyday practices through which they craft their sense of self by negotiating conflicting subject positions and romantic imaginaries. The narratives of the young women I worked with interweave discourses on ‘love’ and social change, thus revealing the complexity and the ambivalence of their life expectations. While ‘love’ has become a widespread idiom among educated young women to talk about their liaisons and to fantasize about their conjugal life, often the dream of romantic love remains unrealized. By engaging with various discourses on love not only do young women contest ‘traditional’ marriage practices and the ‘backward mentality’ of men writ large, but also they reflect upon the ways in which love, violence and power entangle within their intimate relationships. Meanwhile, they find themselves involved in different notions of ‘modernity’ which illuminate the competing gender politics and forms of subjectivity available in the society they live in. By and large, young women are caught up between powerful and conflicting global-local forces which endeavor to steer social change in different directions. On the one hand, the access to education, the labor market and transnational migration has provided young women with imaginative horizons and paths of self-fulfillment unthinkable for their mothers and grandmothers. On the other hand, Islamic reformism and mosque movements spread gender ideologies and trajectories of self-crafting that reframe the meaning of ‘modernity’ and of being a ‘modern subject’. In my paper, I focus on young women’s expressions on ambivalence to shed light on the contradictory aspirations and desires which inhabit their lives. In doing so, I aim to provide a deeper insight into the complexity of their personal trajectories as well as to emphasize the multiple hegemonic discourses that mould intimate dimensions of their existence in a specific historical, political and social context.

Since the opening of national borders at the beginning of the 1970s, Egypt has become an emigration country, with millions of labourers setting off each year for the neighbouring countries of the Gulf Cooperation Council. However, difficulties to settle in there together with the density of migrants’ transnational networks push Egyptians to return to their home country after sometimes decades spent in the Gulf. Being such a huge and continuous phenomenon over the three last decades, the round-trip to the Gulf has become a central part of Egypt’s national imagination. Hegemonic discourses, whether coming from the intelligentsia or from the state apparatus, tend either to praise returnees for the potential economic rewards they can bring to their home country, or to incriminate them for the “alien values” they are thought to carry along. Knitted within a dense structure of institutional constraints, and pressured by ambitious but ambiguous social expectations, migrants’ experiences remain highly equivocal. Based on a two years' ethnographic fieldwork with returnees from various social backgrounds in the city of Cairo, my contribution will focus on return migrants’ narratives. Insisting on the strict “material” change that migration have triggered in their lives, Cairene returnees do partly legitimize the dream a self-made success offshore. Nevertheless, ethnographic data also helps illuminate the ordeals and sufferings linked with the huge disruption of routine and certitude that travel entails. Travel indeed creates more space for reflexivity and for negotiation within the normative behavioral repertoires of migrants and their families. Confronted with a growing diversification of references available, circular migrants experience ambiguous evolutions of their social ideals and practices, whether on gender, religious or economic issues. How do they manage to combine these apparent paradoxes in their life narratives? What is the social impact of these cognitive and practical changes at the collective level? Such are the interrogations to be addressed in this contribution.