AME-You Say You Want a Revolution? Anthropology, Media, and Agendas for Radical Change in the Middle East
Panel 241, 2011 Annual Meeting
On Sunday, December 4 at 1:30 pm
Panel Description
Western calls for regime change in the Middle East hail media users as nascent democratic subjects desiring freedom of expression. Indigenous activists use decentralized technologies such as audiocassettes, Youtube, Facebook, Twitter, and blogs to build coalitions for shaking the foundations of oppressive states. By contrast broadcast media and cinema occupy pivotal positions between upholding the authority of states and building socially accessible counterpublics capable of challenging state hegemony. Engaged with communities seeking change from different perspectives, anthropologists studying the life-worlds of Middle Eastern media bring a range of analytic tools to the analysis of both political radicalism and state hegemony.
Anthropology provides the means to dissect discourses of looking at Middle Eastern media strictly through their alleged capacity to “revolutionize” the region, which is a double-edged sword —superficially embraced by both neoliberals in the West and activists in the Middle East, but understood very differently. A self-conscious radical requires an oppositional Other. Constructs of the radical self and its Other function to build group identity, highlighting — for the radical — patterns of corruption and abuse and demanding accountability. But we do not take the oppositional Other for granted. Even as registers of public opinion, hegemonic media socialities reflect a re-evaluation of identity markers and the traditional loyalties they presuppose. Anthropology’s long investment in holistic approaches to social phenomena underscores the ways mediated communities, bodies and texts conform to practices that often conceal more than they betray. Media “events” in relation to history’s grand narratives are performances that invite reflection not just on the radicals who capture the attention of observers and scholars, but also on the social and political motivation of hegemonic states and, more broadly, dominant signifying habits. From this perspective, retreat to domains ordinary, mundane, ambivalent and eventless may entail radical change indeed.
What can anthropology say about struggles to force an “encounter” with the seductive regimentations of mass-media? What new vocabulary and analytic tools are required to account for this interface? Drawing from anthropological theories of ritual, exchange, performance, texuality and religion, presenters will investigate these questions through case-studies drawn from ongoing work on the January 25th Revolution in Egypt, documentary filmmaking in Iran, internet activism in Palestine and sound recordings of Usama Bin Laden from the Arabian Peninsula. Even as radical encounters are situated in specific regional homelands, panelists will give special attention to the ways media users expand horizons of radical change beyond their local theaters.
Disciplines
Anthropology
Participants
Dr. Walter Armbrust
-- Organizer, Presenter, Chair
Dr. W. Flagg Miller
-- Organizer, Presenter, Chair
While the importance of new media in sparking Egypt’s January 25th Revolution is unquestionable, the Revolution itself now exerts tremendous influence on how people view themselves and society. What ruptures will the Revolution cause in the mediascape? My paper contrasts state media broadcast during the Revolution with media practices generated in the zone of free expression established for two weeks in Midan al-Tahrir. I will also analyze the reconstitution of Egyptian broadcast media after the fall of the regime. Ethnographic analysis of the interplay between texts and social performance provides the conceptual underpinning of the paper. New media may transfer the January 25th movement to virtual space, but will the diminution of physical space in which diverse subjects worked together dissipate the Revolution’s energy? Can Egyptian broadcast media (as opposed to foreign media reporting on Egyptian events) re-establish credibility after being castrated by the fall of the regime? What role will media play in the emergence of democratic subjects from the January 25th Revolution?
My main focus on state media during the Revolution will be on recordings from the Mehwar channel. Mehwar, owned by regime crony Hassan Rateb and loyal to Mubarak to the end, is a talk-show channel. Its programs during the Revolution amply reveal the regime’s logic of rule. Dead-air time between Mehwar shows were filled with patriotic music videos, some made as anti-Revolution propaganda, others old songs re-montaged with contemporary imagery. The textual conventions of this material provides rich links to historical practices extending to the colonial era. Post-Revolution broadcast media has not yet emerged. I will be in Egypt throughout the next year, and therefore in a good position to monitor new developments and assess their impact.
The Tahrir commune was a carnivalesque zone of free expression generating discourse that Mehwar sought to combat. Revolutionary Tahrir was socially porous to all classes, genders, generations, and cultural sensibilities. No such space existed in Cairo in the years leading up to the Revolution (or perhaps ever). Speeches, signs, poetry and music performed the downfall of the regime. But the commune was also a site of documentation, as onlookers photographed and recorded pro-democracy performances. Photography and videography themselves became a kind of performance. Some of these recordings fed back into the new media that helped create the Revolution. Others became personal archives attesting to the presence of their owners, enabling the Revolution to live on in family histories.
Anthropology offers scholars of the Middle East valuable resources for exploring the social motivation of new media. Visual and televisual media have proven especially generative topics of inquiry, especially where they enable area studies scholars interested in links between aesthetics and power to draw upon anthropological forays into critical theory, post-colonial theory and media studies. In this paper, I focus on anthropological studies of sound, especially as elaborated through models of language use, exchange, and ritual, in efforts to highlight new directions in anthropology’s contributions to media research.
In early 2002, Cable News Networks acquired a collection of one thousand five hundred audiocassettes from Usama Bin Ladin’s abandoned residence in Qandahar, Afghanistan. Approaching the collection of over two-hundred featured speakers as a sound archive whose assembly, contents and usage offer a conflicted rendition of what has come to be known as the al-Qa?ida organization under Bin Laden’s leadership, I focus in my paper on the ways speakers on the tapes turn sound production into an ethical resource for evaluating dominant assignations of voice and authorship. The critical leverage of sound studies for revisiting Western and American assumptions about modern authors and the limits of rationality are revisited through considerations of Bin Laden’s figuration within discourses of terror both popular and scholarly. As media studies theorist Jonathan Sterne (2008) has argued, Bin Laden’s voice unsettles Western listeners even as it licenses new initiatives of surveillance and control. Most of my paper, however, examines the ways in which the ethics of sound in Islam has been elaborated in relation to contending discourses of Muslim theology and hermeneutics. I focus in particular on one audiotape that features an extended conversation between Arab militants in an Afghan kitchen. Through ritualized exchanges of tea and food that are intentionally and irreverently upended, participants explore the differences between their own models of asceticism and those of idealized militants, including Bin Laden himself. Ultimately, I argue that the image of Bin Laden as the West’s antipodal Other, his voice shorn of bodily accompaniment well before his final live video in October 2004, provides speakers in the collection with a modern rendering of asceticism whose secular, self-inaugurating and existential elaborations prove most threatening to traditions of authority within rather than beyond the house of Islam. Agents of sound production in Bin Laden’s former cassette collection offer lessons on the pitfalls of misconstruing global jihadis’ primary goals and targets.
The internet has been transformative for grassroots politics in the Middle East long before the revolutionary epoch of January 2011. The internet appeared on the scene with the outbreak of the Second Intifada in 2000 and the regional impact of ‘9/11’. In Palestine the internet reconfigures political expressions and inspires new forms of struggles. While doing so it (unintentionally) recalls unresolved national liberation struggles. But how online political resistance corresponds to offline material practices is understudied, as if the technologies are more interesting than the reasons that people use them. Rather than adding to a growing literature about internet politics I wish to contribute ethnographic flesh from fieldwork in Palestine and Lebanon to the theoretical and journalistic frameworks. I will reflect on the implications of the internet in everyday life and in contexts of war. This means taking the arguments of the activists themselves as a starting point. Consequently this paper challenges the implicit Cartesian divide and goes beyond mainstream online/offline and virtual/material divisions. Revolutions challenging imperialism or dictatorships do not lend themselves to ‘weak tie’ online engagement such as ‘liking’ or ‘sharing’ a Facebook cause. It appeared that precisely because the stakes are very high, and a matter of life and death, a unique revolutionary role ascribed to the internet has no resonance 'in the field'. Furthermore, the research shows that an over-emphasis on the internet as a tactical tool can even be risky. In the case of Palestine, for example, internet usage paradoxically brings activists even closer to the panoptic gaze of the occupying powers; and increasingly to that of the proxy authority (the PNA) of the very nation that activists aim to liberate. This results in double surveillance that strongly challenges liberationist internet discourse and the role of the internet as a necessary basic tool of subversion. But even where the success of political movements online is apparent, research shows that this would not have been possible without successful on-the-ground practices. For instance, Hamas and Hezbollah’s growing popularity is represented by their popularity in online networks, not the other way around. This paper proposes to understand the internet as inherently inhabiting a double power. This dual character subsequently results in a dual dialectics of the internet as a blessing and a curse which I shall demonstrate through an analyses of several grassroots Palestinian campaigns that are embedded in online and offline spheres.
While Al-Azhar shied away from supporting protesters on the eve of the January 25th Revolution, many of Egypt’s most prominent televangelists – such as Amr Khaled, Mustafa Hosni and Moez Masoud – were vocal in their support of thawrat al-shabab (the youth revolution). In Mubarak’s Egypt, these televangelists’ authority with their primarily youthful publics derived not from a mastery of the authoritative textual canon of the Islamic tradition a la Azharite scholars, but rather from their projected status as an “ordinary Muslims” struggling to lead an Islamically-correct life. They had authority not because they were different from the youth they preached to, but because they were just like them.
Islamic televangelists capitalized on this source of authority in the weeks leading up to Mubarak’s resignation to reach out and lend their support to revolutionary youth. Indeed, many Islamic televangelists were eager to publicize their physical presence in Tahrir, a presence which was amplified a thousand-fold through its mediation on a variety of platforms, from satellite television to Facebook.
Appearing on state television for the first time in his career, Amr Khaled told the program host that he “saw God in Tahrir.” Along with other televangelists, he framed Tahrir Square as an exemplar of a “New Egypt,” a utopian space of tolerant faith and positive action. Following the success of the revolution, televangelists called on youth to “build Egypt” (ibniy masr) with the ethos of Tahrir as a template. So far, such calls have not acquired a specifically Islamic content, but rather revolve around nationalist notions of good citizenship and neo-liberal notions of economic productivity. At the same time, the call to “build Egypt” articulates with the televangelical stress over the past decade on Muslim youth as agents of societal change (taghyeer igtimia’ii) and positive energy (taqaa mugeeba).
Drawing on on-going fieldwork with Islamic televangelists in Egypt and an analysis of televangelical media and writings, this paper explores the assumptions about religion, nation and youth that inform televangelical framings of the January 25th Revolution. What does it mean to both be an exemplary Muslim and an exemplary Egyptian youth within televangelical discourse in post-Mubarak Egypt? What role do televangelists ascribe to (religious) media in shaping such subjects? What continuities and ruptures can be traced in Islamic televangelist discourses before and after the revolution with regards to both their own role and the role of youth in effecting change in Muslim societies?
