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The Invention and Reinvention of the Egyptian Peasant

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 January 2009

Timothy Mitchell
Timothy Mitchell
Affiliation:
Department of PoliticsNew York University
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Extract

Among the figures in the scholarly imagining of the post-colonial world, “the peasant” is a strange kind of presence. With this abstraction, a category of human being has become a field of expertise, the subject of his own scholarly journals, and the object of a distinct body of theory and description. “What are villagers in India, in Egypt, in Mexico really like?” the anthropologist George Foster asks, as he begins a brief history of the field. “For nearly fifty years anthropologists (by no means to the exclusion of others) have searched for answers [to this question] …. living with villagers in order to question them and to observe their behavior, describing their findings in books and articles.” At first they called their research the study of “folk” societies, Foster says, but after World War II scholars “came to realize that ‘peasant’ is a more appropriate term, and thus was born the new subfield of ‘peasant studies’.”

Type
Articles
Information
International Journal of Middle East Studies , Volume 22 , Issue 2 , May 1990 , pp. 129 - 150
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1990

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References

NOTES

Author's note: An earlier version of this paper was presented at the Middle East Studies Association annual meeting, Los Angeles, November 1988. I am grateful to Lila Abu-Lughod, Nathan Brown, Terry Burke, Robert Fernea, Fred Lawson, David Ludden, Susan Slyomovics, Stefan Tanaka, Peter von Sivers, and the anonymous IJMES reviewers for their comments. None of them are responsible for the views expressed here.

1 George, Foster, Foreword to Richard Critchfield, Shahhat: An Egyptian (Syracuse, 1978), p. ix, emphasis added.Google Scholar

2 Vivian, Gornick, “Metaphor for Egypt,” New York Times Book Review, 01. 14, 1979, p. 12.Google Scholar

3 Pierre, Gourou, Les paysans du delta tonkinois: Etude de géographie humaine (Paris, 1936), p. 577;Google Scholar English translation, The Peasants of the Tonkin Delta: A Study of Human Geography, vol. I of 2 (New Haven, 1955), p. 664.Google Scholar

4 Henry, Habib Ayrout, Moeurs et coutumes des fellahs (Collection d'études, de documents et de témoignages pour servir à l'histoire de notre temps) (Paris, 1938; reprint ed. New York, 1978), pp. i, 12.Google Scholar In the United States in the same period, Robert, Redfield'sTepoztlán, A Mexican Village: A Study of Folk Life (Chicago, 1930) marked a shift in interest among anthropologists from “primitive” to “folk,” or later “peasant,” societies. The shift was a reaction to the 1919–1920 Mexican revolution, which had its origins in the resistance of Indian villages to the colonization of their land by Mexican sugar estates.Google Scholar

5 Cf., James C. Scott, The Moral Economy of the Peasant: Rebellion and Subsistence in Southeast Asia (New Haven, 1976);Google ScholarSamuel, Popkin, The Rational Peasant: The Political Economy of Rural Society in Vietnam (Berkeley, Calif., 1979).Google Scholar

6 The major editions of Ayrout's work are: Henry, Habib Ayrout, Moeurs et coutumes des fellahs (Paris, 1938; reprint ed. New York, 1978);Google Scholar 2nd revised ed., entitled Fellahs (Cairo, 1942); Arabic, ed., al-Fallāhūn, trans. Muhammad, Ghallāb (Cairo, 1943, 8th Arabic, ed. 1968);Google ScholarEnglish, ed., The Fellaheen, trans. Hilary, Wayment (Cairo, 1945);Google Scholar U.S. ed., The Egyptian Peasant, trans. John, Alden Williams (Boston, 1963).Google Scholar The Russian translation is mentioned in Ayrout, , al-Fallāhūn (1968), p. 7. I have mostly quoted from the Wayment translation of 1945, as this is the version used by Critchfield.Google Scholar

7 Bowles was removed from the State Department in November 1961 and made Special Representative of the President for African, Asian, and Latin American Affairs. He visited Cairo and met with President Nasser in February 1962. William, J. Burns, Economic Aid and American Policy Towards Egypt, 1955–1981 (Albany, N.Y., 1985), pp. 131, 249.Google Scholar

8 Ayrout, , Egyptian Peasant, p. xvi.Google Scholar

9 Ibid., pp. v-vi.

10 Richard, Critchfield, Villages (Garden City, N.Y., 1981, reprint ed., 1983), p. 64.Google Scholar

11 Richard, Critchfield, The Long Charade: Political Subversion in the Vietnam War (New York, 1968), p. 208.Google Scholar

12 Critchfield, , Villages, p. 66. The bulk of the short chapter on Vietnam in this book is repeated from The Long Charade, but quotations from the British military advisers in the first book are repeated in the second without quotation marks, as Critchfield's own views.Google Scholar

13 Mohamed, Heikel, Autumn of Fury: The Assassination of Sadat (New York, 1983), pp. 8–10.Google Scholar

14 See John, Waterbury, The Egypt of Nasser and Sadat: The Political Economy of Two Regimes (Princeton, 1983), p. 261.Google Scholar

15 Robert, Fernea, Review of Richard Critchfield, Shahhat: An Egyptian, Middle East Journal, 33/4 (1979), pp. 506–7.Google Scholar

16 Critchfield, , Shahhat, pp. xiii–xiv.Google Scholar

17 Fred, H. Lawson, “Rural Revolt and Provincial Society in Egypt, 1820–1824,” International Journal of Middle East Studies, 13 (1981), p. 146.Google Scholar

18 John, J. A. St, Egypt and Nubia, Their Scenery and Their People (London, 1845), pp. 378–86; Lawson, “Rural Revolt.”Google Scholar

19 Critchfield, , Shahhat, p. xxv.Google Scholar

20 Ibid., p. 4.

21 Ibid., p. xv.

22 Ibid., p. III.

23 Ibid., p. 195.

24 Ibid., p. 101.

25 Ibid., p. 138. Critchfield seems to be well aware of the effects of this kind of imagery. One of his earlier studies of peasants is an account of a group of Arabic-speaking pastoral nomads in southwestern Iran, written during the regime of the Shah and told through the life of an individual named Ya⊂qub, which Critchfield spells as Jacob. In his preface to the book's second edition (published by Indiana University Press in 1988), he explains that “I spelled Jacob the Biblical way to underscore its old testament quality”—for in those days “nobody mentioned Ayatollah Khomeini,… and Islam, though a total way of life for Bedouins, seemed relatively benign.” The Golden Bowl Be Broken: Peasant Life in Four Cultures, 2nd ed. (Bloomington, Ind., 1988), p. ix.

26 Cf, Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt (Cambridge, England, 1988), pp. 21–32.Google Scholar

27 Critchfield, , Shahhat, p. xiii.Google Scholar This is Critchfield's only acknowledgment of his debt to Ayrout, from whom the passage is lifted almost verbatim: “Under foreign domination for years and centuries at a time, by Persians, Greeks, Romans, Byzantines, Arabs, Turks, French and English,” wrote Ayrout, , “the fellaheen have changed their masters, their religion, their language and their crops, but not their manner of life” (The Fellaheen, p. 19).Google Scholar

28 Ayrout, , The Fellaheen, p. 106.Google Scholar

29 Critchfield, , Shahhat, p. 89.Google Scholar

30 Ayrout, , The Fellaheen, p. 132.Google Scholar

31 Critchfield, Shahhat, p. xvi.Google Scholar

32 Ayrout, , The Fellaheen, p. 20.Google Scholar

33 Ayrout, , The Egyptian Peasant, p. 13.Google Scholar

34 Cf., Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, pp. 122–25.Google Scholar

35 Gustave, Le Bon, Les lois psychologiques de l'évolution des peuples, translated into English as The Psychology of Peoples (New York, 1898), pp. 4–5, 13, 199–200.Google Scholar

36 Gordon, Allport, Handbook of Social Psychology, ed. Gardner, Lindzey and Elliot, Aronson, 2nd ed. (Reading, Mass., 1968), 1:41.Google Scholar

37 Gustave, Le Bon, Psychologie des foules, translated into English as The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind (New York, 1896), p. 36.Google Scholar

38 Ayrout, , The Fellaheen, p. 94.Google Scholar

39 Ibid., p. 134.

40 Ibid., p. 116.

41 Ibid., p. 100.

42 Ibid., p. 116.

43 Ibid., p. 125.

44 Ibid., p. 95.

45 Ibid., p. 33.

46 Ibid., p. 110.

47 Ibid., p. 132–38.

48 Ibid., p. 132.

49 Ibid., p. 154.

50 Ibid., p. 15.

51 Ayrout, , Moeurs et coutumes, p. 132.Google Scholar

52 The peasant, Ayrout explained, “being of a childlike disposition, cannot be presented a model house without being taught, in a kindly way, the ‘directions’ which go with it… This pedagogy is more important than the material realization” ( The Egyptian Peasant, p. 130). For a discussion of this relationship between effects of structure, individuality, and pedagogy in colonial practice, see Mitchell, , Colonising Egypt, pp. 44–48, 92–94.Google Scholar

53 Ayrout, , The Egyptian Peasant, pp. 19–20, 151.Google Scholar

54 There was also an active debate on these issues in the press. In al-Ahrām on 02 17, 18, 19, 1937, for example, Bint al-Shāti⊃ ⊂Ā⊃isha ⊂Abd al-Rahmān), the author of al-Rīf al-Misrī (Rural Egypt) (Cairo, 1935) described the evils of the cotton processing industry, explaining how 25,000 children aged 8–15 were employed that year loading and unloading the ginning machines in cotton ginning and pressing factories, working amid stifling dust from 5 A.M. to 9 P.M. each day without a break (Ayrout, , The Fellaheen, p. 63).Google Scholar

55 Ayrout, , The Fellaheen, pp. 158–59.Google Scholar

56 Ibid., p. 23.

57 The quotations in this paragraph all come from the back cover of the paperback edition of the book.

58 Ayrout, , al-Fallāhūn (1968), p. 7.Google Scholar

59 Ayrout, , The Fellaheen, pp. 41–42.Google Scholar

60 Ayrout, , The Egyptian Peasant, p. 18, emphasis added;Google Scholarcf., Gabriel Baer, “Submissiveness and the Revolt of the Fellah,” in Studies in the Social History of Modern Egypt (Chicago, 1969), p. 102.Google Scholar

61 Ayrout, , The Fellaheen, p. 104.Google Scholar

62 Critchfield, , Shahhat, p. 86.Google Scholar

63 Ayrout, , The Fellaheen, p. 106.Google Scholar

64 Critchfield, , Shahhat, pp. 86–87.Google Scholar

65 Ayrout, , The Fellaheen, pp. 79–80.Google Scholar

66 Critchfield, , Shahhat, p.5.Google Scholar

67 Ibid., p. 63.

68 Ibid., p. 59.

69 Ibid., p. 15.

70 Ibid., p. 51.

71 Ibid., p. 35.

72 Ibid., p. 20.

73 Ibid., p. 55.

74 Ibid., p. 12.

75 Ibid., p. 74.

76 Ibid., p. 35.

77 Ibid., p. 41–42.

78 Ibid., p. 44.

79 Ibid., p. 50.

80 Ibid., p. 60.

81 Ibid., p. 101.

82 Ibid., p. 147–48.

83 Ayrout, , The Fellaheen, p. 30.Google Scholar

84 Ibid., p. 133–34.

85 Critchfield, , Shahhat, p. 38.Google Scholar

86 Ayrout, , The Fellaheen, p. 119.Google Scholar

87 Critchfield, , Shahhat, pp. 29–30.Google Scholar

88 Ibid., p. xv.

89 Ibid., p. 9.

90 Ibid., p. 17.

91 Ibid., p. 16.

92 Ibid., p. 78–79. The book's tone is persistently misogynist; another rape victim is shown in a photograph, smiling at the camera, with a caption that describes her as a “willful, flirtatious fourteen- year-old” (Ibid., p. 103).

93 Ibid., p. x.

94 Ibid., p. 139.

95 Ibid., p. 100.

96 Ayrout, , The Fellaheen, p. 107.Google Scholar

97 Critchfield, , Shahhat, p. 162.Google Scholar

98 Ayrout, , The Fellaheen, p. 109.Google Scholar

99 Critchfield, , Shahhat, p. 89.Google Scholar

100 Ayrout, , The Fellaheen, pp. 109–10.Google Scholar

101 Critchfield, , Shahhat, p. 89.Google Scholar

102 When the villagers have had enough of all the violence, there remains the possibility of kayf, “a word of profound significance” according to Ayrout. He says it denotes “a kind of wakeful passivity which means doing nothing, saying nothing, thinking nothing” ( The Fellaheen, p. 136). Critchfield explains that “in Egypt there is a mental state called kaif when a man does nothing, says nothing, and thinks nothing. It is a kind of wakeful passivity” ( Shahhat, p. 183).

103 Critchfield, , Shahhat, pp. 227–31.Google Scholar

104 Ibid., p. xiv.

105 Ibid., p. 233.

106 Ibid., p. 231–32.

107 Cf., Edward Said, Orientalism (New York, 1978), pp. 160–64;Google ScholarMitchell, , Colonising Egypt, pp. 26–27.Google Scholar

108 Critchfield, , Shahhat, pp. 230–32.Google Scholar

109 Ibid., p. 107.

110 Ibid., p. 227.

111 Ibid., p. xiv.

112 Ibid., p. 30.

113 Ibid., p. 19.

114 Terry Burke, personal communication. The village has two primary schools and one intermediary school, and has also produced two local judges and a medical doctor.

115 Critchfield, , Shahhat, p. xviii.Google Scholar

116 Ibid., p. 107.

117 Ibid., p. 228, 108.

118 Ibid., p. xii.

119 See in this respect Rosalind O'Hanlon's critique of pitfalls of the Subaltern Studies project on the history of subordinate groups in colonial South Asia, “Recovering the Subject: Subaltern Studies and Histories of Resistance in Colonial South Asia,” Modern Asian Studies, 22, 1 (1988), pp. 189–224.Google Scholar

120 lscan, M. Yasar, Review of Critchfield, Shahhat: An Egyptian, American Anthropologist, 82 (1980), p. 961;Google ScholarSam, Beck, Review of Critchfield, Shahhat: An Egyptian, Journal of American Folklore, 93(1980), pp. 487–88;Google ScholarJohn, G. Kennedy, Review of Critchfield, Shahhat: An Egyptian, American Ethnologist, 7, 1(1980), pp. 220–21.Google Scholar

121 Critchfield, , Shahhat, p. xii.Google Scholar

122 Critchfield, , Villages, p. vii. Cf. n. 12.Google Scholar

123 Critchfield, , Shahhat, pp. iv, vi.Google Scholar