The Ways of The Bosh: Garbage Avoidance for Real Police Detectives

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They are too numerous to all be mentioned, but I would like to give special thanks to the fol- lowing. Romani Badir except that you ruined my health with Sa'idi sheesha to- bacco , Rizq Yussif and his mother, grandmother, and sister, Ezzat Naem Guindy, Adham and Musa, Safwat, Shahatta the lawyer, Talaat Ibrahim, Farag, his wife, and especially their son Kirolos and his redheaded cousins, Shahatta al-Mogaddes, Sabir and his brother, and all of the Habaysha for playing along with the joke when I said I was from their clan.

In Ezbet el Nakhl: I would also like to thank the nuns of the Banat Maryam who agreed to meet with me for interviews and allow access to their institutions. I owe an indescribable debt of gratitude to my two research assistants, Ahmad Salah and Ishaq Abbas. Their patience and willingness to spend long hours under what were not always easy condi- tions, especially for Ishaq, were phenomenal. In Ishaq's case, I also owe a special debt of gratitude to his wife, Taghrid, and their three children Sara, Mishu, and Raju. I am especially grateful to Taghrid and Sara for sharing with me something of life as a woman in Egypt, which apart from through them, I rarely had the chance to see.

I have dedicated this thesis in part to the memory of Ishaq, who passed away in the fall of , never having seen his country emerge from Mubarak's yoke. I cannot enumerate all those who agreed to provide interviews, but I am extremely grateful to each of you for taking the time you did. Rafiq, and the stagiaire Salem. Also wish to give special thanks to CID and Laila Iskandar for sharing so many documents, and for taking the time to meet with me repeatedly.

APE as a whole and those staff and board members who agreed to give me tours and interviews, especially Sohair and Yousriya Loza. Nicholas Hopkins also provided helpful guidance for which I am grateful. Al-Ahram weekly and Dena Rashed in particular for making that newspapers' archives available. A special thanks to the colleagues with whom I had the chance either to share ideas or time in the field. John Salevurakis and his wife Julie, allies and friends at AUC who provided initial guidance and enthusiasm, and a refuge.

Also a special thanks to Tiff Vora, for similar reasons. Sylvia Chiffoleau was instrumental in making that connection after she inspired me with several of her publications, and I would like to express a special thanks to her, and to all of my French colleagues for their warm welcome. I wish to express special thanks to Alexia Devray at the cartography department of the Maison de l'Orient for her assistance in producing maps. A similar thanks to Karine Bennafla for help with the maps. Thanks to Hala Alrashi for assistance transcribing a passage in Arabic for Chapter 4. OXFAM and its archivist Chrissie for making available files relating to Zabbaleen projects funded by that organization.

Thanks to the organizers of all those events and the participants for their useful feedback. American University in Cairo students cleaning up Tahrir Square 5 2. Church in Manshiet Nasser 19 3. Mosque in Ezbet el Nakhl 20 4.

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Emmanuelle in her shack at Ezbet el Nakhl, 62 9. Emmanuelle swimming at Abu Sultan 67 The teacher, in her classroom 87 Emmanuelle's early collaborators 89 The 'Centre Salam' in Ezbet el Nakhl, during construction, and today 90 Poster advertising the film Watch Out, Gentlemen Sketches of Zabbaleen houses and proposals for their modification 18B. Mechanized vehicle used by Zabbaleen Zabbaleen loading waste scavenged from dumpsters in public A zabbal scavenging 23A.

An employee of a foreign waste management firm scavenging on behalf of the Zabbaleen 23B. Employees of the foreign firm and the Zabbaleen working side-by-side A garbage dumpster from which the likeness of a mosque had to be removed News clippings showing birds and pigs together News clippings showing people pigs together In such cases the usage that has developed is perpetuated, even if the transliterations are technically not correct.

In most cases, including people's proper names, I have tried to give a correct translitera- tion in the first instance, and then employ anglicized versions thereafter. The body of the dissertation goes on to examine that struggle in a specific manner and through a particular case-study, described in the introduction. Starting the day Mubarak stepped down, groups of youth—protecting themselves with surgical masks and rubber gloves from what they perceived to be the risk posed by bodily contact with gar- bage or inhalation of its foul smells of decomposition—descended into Cairo's streets to physically clean up and 'beautify' Tahrir square and other key spaces.

According to one account: Hundreds of young people had turned out for what was called "Tahrir Beautification Day. A Call to Civic Responsibility. It is through these trying times that societies show what they are made of, and Egyptians did not fail to deliver. Although she is praised for attending the protests and not allowing the fact that she was 'female in the midst of all the violence' to deter her from shouldering 'what she believed were her re- sponsibilities as an Egyptian citizen,' Eldidi's real contribution began '[a]fter the protestors success- fully managed to overthrow the regime.

This mattered to me because I saw that these people really cared about the future of this country and were serious about rebuilding it the right way. It proved to be a civilized revo- lution. To me, it meant that if we could clean Tahrir Square, then we could also clean the rest of the country together. It taught the younger generations good values. I hope that this level of enthusiasm doesn't weaken over time so that we can really continue to give back to this country and live a dignified life.

What were Eldidi and the editors of the magazine trying to say? In the aftermath of Mubarak's departure, AUC was in danger of looking like it was if not on the wrong side of history then at least detached and remote from the most important political events of a generation; as though it had been caught off guard and only showed up once the party was over. Its buildings had long stood on the edge of Tahrir square, but in it moved to a distant desert site that, far from what officials and the upper class increasingly perceive as a 'menacing, dirty, polluted, unsafe, unhealthy' downtown Singerman Ghunim, for all that he deserves to be praised, was the revolutionary equivalent of a weekend warrior: The university needed to demonstrate that its students, too, had shown what they were made of, had not failed to deliver, had attended to their civic duties.

Not just the article on garbage, but most of the spring edition of the magazine was devoted to that goal. At the same time, however, AUC is what it is. A certain number of readers of its alumni magazine are the type of unre- pentantly upper class people who probably saw the revolution as a prime example of why the move out to the desert was a good idea. Thus the second, and in many respects countervailing objective was to reassure anyone who was unsettled by the way the unwashed masses had been agitating that it 'proved to be a civilized revolution.

This point was made through the lens of garbage and cleanliness because as critical signs of under-development, they are touchstones of Egyptian upper class disdain. Ghunim's comment and the post-revolutionary cleaning brigades were not so much causally connected as co-occurences of similar forms of expression. The examples could be multiplied. Not just because garbage accumulated uncollected all over the city, but also because the issue was constantly in the media and on the tips of people's tongues. This is of course a physical struggle to deal with the actual unwanted stuff people throw away.

But it is also a struggle over meanings. Metaphors of garbage and cleaning were trafficked in articulations and interpretations of urban life in Cairo since long before the Revolution. In fact, garbage and cleanliness have been lightning rods of sorts for Egyptians' dissatisfaction with the status quo.

Shorthands for everything wrong with the country, they became vehicles for expressing, on the flip side, ideas about dignified life, 'civilization,' and the future. It had two main components, the first of which was deliberate name-and-shame. Readers were invited to send in photos of the most disgusting garbage piles from around the city, and the winners the most egregious cases were regularly published, along with the name of the location where the photo was taken, and details of who was supposedly responsible for cleaning that area.

The second component of the campaign consisted of citizens' cleaning parties much like the post-revolutionary ones. In the terms of a thumbnail sociology, those who took part were often the types of Egyptians who, if they were Indian, would play cricket in white flannels. This is a category in which the American University in Cairo students cleaning up after the revolution Figure 1 , the kind who speak their own special blend of Arabic and English and that many Egyp- tians would mistake for foreigners, feature heavily.

No one could have been under the illusion that by getting together on the weekend with friends, theatrically donning exaggerated protective clothing, and daintily picking up a few pieces of litter, they could dent the garbage problem of a city that sup- 3 'Square,' broadcast on ARTE, 8 January But that is not to say the actions were meaningless. It would not be good anthropological method to assume that 'environment,' the lens through which a Westerner might see the waste issue, is the most appropriate or compelling in this context. The error would only be compounded by then assuming, for instance, that what threatens 'the environment' is 'pollution'—or that pollution is even a category concerned with things like air and water contami- nants.

For instance, there is no doubt that air quality is a major problem in Cairo, and it is the infa- mous 'black cloud,' produced by farmers' annual burning of rice straw, that is often credited with hav- ing produced a ferment in consciousness around 'environmental' issues Hopkins, Mehanna et al.

Respondents' number one definition of pollution was—garbage. They also gave a series of responses conveying a metaphorical conception of pollution with religio-moral overtones, identifying the poor, drugs, hooliganism, sex, and other failures to observe religious prescriptions concerning morality as sources of 'pollution.

The city's boulevards were hung with signs promoting cleanliness. There were also special banners that year be- cause of swine flu, but these were permanent signs designed to remind passers-by of the norms of proper behaviour. They convey something of the public authorities' sensibility, just as the way people react to them conveys something of theirs. For instance, interpreting an 'amusing photograph' of people relieving themselves under a sign in Calcutta bearing the particularly British turn of phrase 'commit no nuisance,' Kaviraj says that even in such unreflecting moments […] people are taking a philosophical stance, or at least a position with conceptual implications.

In their appropriate contexts, both concepts made sense In the West, it is not uncommon to see the slogan 'Protect the environment: But after shaking us down a bit, and registering my identity and travel plans, the police officer let me go. I was accompa- nied by a friend and research assistant who vouched that I was the son of his brother who had married a foreign woman and that I had been brought up in the West.

The excuse of being Christian pilgrims to the religious festival which was true no doubt importantly facilitated things. As I wrote this introduction, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation reported that a Canadian about my age was killed in the region when his vehicle refused to stop at an illegal roadblock. This is part and parcel of the way the message simultaneously reflects and seeks to reconfigure a particular sense of the associa- tion between being 'civilized,' on the one hand, and cleanliness, on the other.

If the phrase is likely to leave most English-speakers scratching their heads, that is precisely why I felt it crystallized what in my research had often left me scratching mine. Fascinated by this usage, I made a point for a while of saying 'clean' or 'cleaner' every time I wanted to say 'good' or 'better' in a sentence. Everyone seemed to know exactly what I meant, and we never missed a beat. Of the many such nuances one of the most striking is the way that, in Egypt, cleanliness has a central place in the conception of the hierarchy of peoples, one which emphasizes secular cleanliness as a token of social progress, even while often commingling sacred purity and profane cleanliness forms.

For example, students in the fifth grade learn, or rather are forced to memorize, passages like this: Cleanliness is next to Godliness [al-nidhafa min al-iman], and distinguishes a Muslim person, be- cause our Islamic religion impels the Muslim to it […] Cleanliness is a token of advancement and civilization, strongly bound to the progress of peoples, for advanced peoples are cleaner in their attire than others, and in their food and drink, and their streets.

A verbatim quote translated by Starrett If, as Starrett invites us to do, we read the textbook as referring, at least in part, to the 'public' sphere streets and so forth , then it becomes a challenge to hold the quoted passage and the daily reality of the city in one's head at the same time. If the city's dirtiness is not an outright existential attack, either on one's 'Islamicness' or on one's rank on the ladder of advancement and civilization, then there is at least a problem of cognitive dissonance.

One way of overcoming it—and this requires assuming that a Western cleavage between public and private is operative—is to read the textbook's imperative as being concerned, first and foremost, with cleanliness of the 'private' sphere the body and so forth.

The dirtiness of the public sphere no longer confronts people with information contrary to their beliefs, but rather is the product of those beliefs. In the absence of a proper collection service, one has to choose: If the private trumps, then the inundation of the city with trash merely translates the paramount importance placed on maintaining 'cleanliness'—albeit of a particular kind e.

Waste should, in other words, ideally be removed from the home on the same day it is produced, a necessity not typically felt in the West. There is perhaps a risk in any anthropology of the Middle East, a fortiori one purporting to touch on the issue of 'cleanliness,' that 'Islam' will be too much with it, late and soon. It is therefore important to emphasize that the challenge of reconciling, in a sys- tem where cleanliness is the critical civilizational yardstick, one's sense of a city's greatness with the countervailing physical reality of its dirtiness, is by no means a problem exclusive to Cairo, the Middle East, or 'Islam.

Paris, with its blackened buildings, had struck her as being dirty' []: No doubt encouraged to think so by the expatriate French Professeurs who taught at her university, who were sent abroad to educate for- eign elites in a deliberate strategy of augmenting France's cultural influence, she believed Paris to be the city of lights, the Mecca of intellectual and cultural sophistication, in short, a 'capital of moder- nity,' to echo David Harvey's title Since these virtues were, for the Brazilian student, irreconcilable with dirtiness, yet the dirtiness was an indubitable physical reality, there was but one conclusion: Paris was not the place she imagined.

Where greatness is derived from history, the value of things is the scars that time has left on them, whereas in a 'system with no temporal dimension' ibid. While Sennett is more con- cerned with what he calls the 'purification impulse' than with the desire for 'modernity,' I think we may fairly say that he was describing and critiquing a certain conception of what it meant to be 'mod- ern,' especially since cleanliness, both narrowly and broadly defined, is a central trope in American society. Bielo , for instance, argues that purification impulses and the associated desire for seg- regation in the American city are a kind of modernity narrative.

Conversely, he sees the rejection of spatial separation and the celebration of mixing as a critique of modernity, or a 'postmodern reimagining' of organization, style, and practice. And if it damages their image as tourist destinations and tarnishes their reputation in general, I suppose that upsets them. Nevertheless, if as Sarrett suggests, a certain number of Egyptians have been raised on the idea that their cleanliness distinguishes them as 'Muslim persons' and communicates their high degree of 'advancement and civilization,' then it is at least plausible that a problem with garbage, particularly a perennial rather than a punctual one, may threaten a Cairene in a different way than it would a Marseillais, a Napole- tano, or an idealistic girl from the New World suckled on myths of French civilizational grandeur.

This disserta- tion examines how Cairo's 'traditional' or 'informal sector' waste collectors Zabbaleen have been differently represented and construed, from the s to the present day, by a series of outsiders. The outside viewpoints examined are those of a Catholic nun Chap. The articulation of their various view- points was a process of constituting the Zabbaleen as an object of intervention; it lead to attempts to alter the garbage collectors' places of residence, collection systems, 'mentalities,' etc.

The dissertation's objective is to understand these outsiders' perceptions of the garbage collec- tors, the rationales for intervening in their lives, and the objectives of such interventions—roughly speaking, 'what it was they sought to change, to what ends, and through what means' Murray Li Following a well-established genre in development studies e. It is not a study of the Zabbaleen themselves. Each chapter is in some way devoted to exploring these different meanings and interpretations, which are associ- ated with, and give rise to, different ways of seeing.

As a shorthand, these are referred to as 'meta- phors of waste. The objective with respect to this theme is not only to demonstrate how such categories may be differently interpreted, but also how such interpretations have been central to the shaping of interventions on the Zabbaleen, and more broadly, imaginaries of 'development.

The chapters each correspond to a different way of seeing and form of action, associated with a specific actor or group of actors and a time period during which they were in the ascendant. The dissertation begins with the earliest events and ends with the most recent, covering a very specifically defined period, from to The first substantive chapter Chap. Chapter 4 concerns the representa- tions of the Zabbaleen in a popular Egyptian film that appeared in , at a time when the World Bank made loans to Egypt for 'urban development,' a portion of which concerned solid waste man- 1 It is important to emphasize, as a caveat to this structure, that many of the actors and their ways of interpreting the Zabbaleen were present over the entire period.

For instance although the chapter on Sr. Emmanuelle is placed first in the chronology because her connection to the Zabbaleen began in the early s, she did not leave Egypt until , and her institutions continue to function up to the present day. So the transitions are in no way intended as datable 'paradigm shifts' that wiped the slate clean of all predecessors, but more like points at which new actors and ideas entered the fray.

There is a great deal of interpenetration and overlap, and the transformations described were slow and often incomplete. Nevertheless, an effort was made to pick, for each time period, what seemed like the dominant 'new' mode of perceiving and acting on the Zabbaleen. Chapter 5 describes the work of the World Bank as well as that of the consulting firm it hired, which continued to push forward Zabbaleen development projects on its own, primarily with OXFAM and Ford Foundation funding, through the s and into the early s.

Chapter 6 concerns the arrival in Cairo of private European waste management firms in the wake of tender offers issued by the Egyptian state in the early s. Chapter 7 concerns the slaugh- ter of all Egypt's pigs raised by the Zabbaleen in the late s, which provoked a firestorm in the newsmedia and generalized panic among many Cairenes resulting from the H1N1 influenza 'swine flu' epidemic.

The bookends correspond to the beginning of outside development interest in the Zabbaleen and the last major outside intervention to take place during my fieldwork. There are good reasons for choosing that particular starting point, but there is nothing definitive about the endpoint. For much of the period covered the lens through which the Zabbaleen were perceived and the repertoires of action deployed to deal with them belonged to what could be called a 'developmentalist mode.

From the social development that grew out of post-Vatican II Catholic mission, through the World Bank's ambitious infrastructure projects, to development's envi- ronmental turn—the Zabbaleen have seen many of the key ideas, principles, buzzwords, and tech- niques of development come and go over the past forty years. However, this is more than a study of how thinking and practice within the field of development has changed.

It also tries to gauge the im- portance of the developmentalist mode in different forms relative to other paradigms. The thesis advanced with respect to this point is that there has been a decline in 'developmentalism' or the de- velopmentalist mode of perceiving and intervening, in favour of neoliberal and biopolitical modes.

It then goes on to emphasize, in the second section, the vast and sustained attention the Zabbaleen have been paid by development organizations NGOs, the World Bank, etc. This justifies the choice of the Zabbaleen as a case-study of outside intervention. Up till then, Cairo's municipal authorities had employed a fleet of equipment and employees to 'cleanse' as the word is often translated, based on my own fieldwork and e.

Farsi and Hammouda the city's public spaces such as streets and marketplaces. Door-to-door waste removal, on the other hand—what we might think of as the handling of wastes in and around 'private' space—was not considered a 'public' service, and the city did not hold itself responsible for providing it see e. Wilbur Smith Associates This created a void in the area of household and business waste.

Many of Cairo's poorer residents had to fend for themselves, for instance burning or chucking their waste in canals or empty lots and alleys behind their homes to decompose or, hopefully, having now entered the public space, eventually be picked up by municipal street cleaners. The garbage-filled streets of these quarters, rather than evidencing a structural problem in the provision of services, of- ten reinforced the commonplace opinion that the residents lacked the habits of cleanliness that are the mark of civilization and modernity.

Since much of this literature overlaps and an 'accepted' account has emerged, pinpoint citations are not provided. Readers may wish to consult some of the following: It should not be read to mean that the situation no longer exists since in fact not a great deal has changed. Women do have an important role after the waste is collected, as ex- plained in a moment.

Most street sweepers or salaried 'garbagemen' who wear uniforms and ride around on compactor trucks would resist being called 'Zabbaleen,' however. Thus, the 'real' Zabbaleen are the 'informal sector' or 'traditional' waste collectors, even if a certain number of them are now employed by companies. They marry mainly endogamously with the 'traditional' 'Arab' preference for patrilateral parallel cousin marriage and share common residence in about seven enclaves around Cairo, Map 1.

It does not mean 'corral' since it is not a large space for noble herd animals like horses or camels, but rather has the connotation of being a muddy place for smallish creatures. For reasons that will become apparent, the best transla- tion is probably 'pig sties. However, they would typically not join the trade or be considered, by themselves or others, as 'Zabbaleen. It is also a stigma, although according to one study, less of one than entertaining belly dancing , prostitution, money lending, and paid mourning van Nieuwkerk The profession is highly territorial.

The Zabbaleen collect in specified areas, along fixed routes. These are often defined by hereditary ownership. The Zabbaleen are therefore not scavengers, despite sometimes being classified that way e. Thus, '[i]n contrast with many major metropolitan areas in the Third World, scavenging on municipal dump sites is a rela- tively limited phenomenon in Cairo' Neamatalla, Assaad et al. This has been changing somewhat since the arrival of foreign waste management firms, which has tended to limit Zabbaleen access to waste at the source, while simultaneously placing dumpsters in public areas, making natural scavenging sites.

But on the whole, the Zabbaleen system remains one of waste collection, not scavenging. It is the role of women and children to separate it. They usually work barehanded, which makes them very vulnerable to disease, especially hepatitis one very prized form of waste, be- cause of its high plastic content, is hospital waste.

Thus, while the task of the male Zabbaleen is hardly pleasant, the worst tasks are reserved for women. Inorganics such as plastic, metal and paper are sold through Zabbaleen and non-Zabbaleen middle-men, making their way to formal busi- nesses mainly in Egypt but increasingly around the world, especially China.

Collection fees are not a significant source of revenue. In fact, in some cases the Zabbaleen actually pay for the right to collect a business's garbage. For example, in the Nile Hilton received LE approx. In the presently known history of the Zabbaleen,5 which stretches back to the beginning of the 20th century, there have actually been two distinct groups of Zabbaleen, though that fact would not be apparent to service recipients: The Zabbaleen used to be differentiated into Wahiya and Zarrabeen.

The Wahiya, like the Zarrabeen, shared kinship ties, but unlike the Zarrabeen, they did not reside together in enclaves. The transition between the two groups began in the s, but peaked later, after the revolution. The people who would become the Zarrabeen, and ultimately those who are today referred to as Zabbaleen, were primarily fellaheen [peasants] who laboured on the large, often Christian-owned, quasi- feudal Upper Egyptian estates that grew cotton and sugar cane.

Land reform, initiated after the revolution, was a key factor contributing to their migration. It put estate owners out of business by parcelling up their holdings and redistributing them, which gave the fellaheen an asset but took away their wages. Many decided to seek their fortunes in the city, and sold the plot to pay for the trip. Why the Zarrabeen took over from the Wahiya is in my view best explained by differing cultural endowments in the area of religious taboo, on the one hand, and evolutions in Cairo's market for waste, on the other.

In the early 20th century and no doubt earlier still , waste was mainly organic, and was dried for use as fuel. Wood is scarce in Egypt. When oil and gas made dried waste obsolete 5 I did not conduct significant oral history interviewing for this dissertation and rely here mainly on published ac- counts, cited above. These were not contradicted in the historical conversations I did have.

The interpretation ad- vanced here is my own, however. However, the Christians were not able to just take over: The Wahiya instead entered into a relationship whereby they provided the waste to the Zarrabeen after collection. Over time the Zarrabeen became increasingly responsible for collection, with the Wahiya retaining a posi- tion as middlemen alone. In some cases the Zarrabeen were able to buy out the Wahiya, and in many newly built neighbourhoods they obtained the right to collect ab initio, excluding the Wahiya from the equation.

There continues to be a discreet Wahiya presence in the profession up to the present day, however. On the books, they may appear to own waste collection companies. In fact, these are empty shells used to mediate between the Zabbaleen and the bureaucracy, or any other interlocutor requiring registration numbers, papers, and the rest, such as foreign companies looking for subcontractors. Cairo's garbage collecting system, as a result, consists of a patchwork of cross-cutting relationships that vary from neighbourhood to neighbour- hood, street to street and even building to building.

For instance, I knew a zabbal who collected from businesses around Falaky Street, as well as a single apartment in a residential building the rest of the building belonged to another Zabbal. He had established a personal relationship with the occupants some years back, which carried on from new tenant to new tenant. There are as many such 'excep- tions' as there are households producing garbage in Cairo, making it impossible to generalize about the system and difficult even to characterize or schematize it.

The perception, especially among foreigners, is often that the Zabbaleen are all Christian. Since it can seat several tens of thousands of people, that is no doubt true. However, Muslims do live in the neighbourhood and there is actually a mosque on the main road, but people rarely notice because it has made itself very discreet. The main church of the Manshiet Nasser cliffside monastery. In terms of the number of people it can seat, probably the largest church in the Middle East.

In fact, I knew some Muslim Zabbaleen who confided that they did eat pork, because it was readily available and cheap, and they were poor and lived surrounded by people who did not consider it problematic to do so. Most, it is true, do not eat the pigs they raise, and I some- times saw Muslim Zabbaleen wrap their bodies in plastic bags and put on gloves when handling the animals.

An exceedingly inauspicious location for a Mosque: The domes in the foreground to the left are a church. Christians are compelled in a predominantly Muslim setting to perform the most ignominious tasks. Many Christians in Egypt, including the Zabbaleen themselves, not only tacitly endorse this view, but actively promote it, since it serves a discourse of victimhood upon which they can then attempt to capitalize in various ways.

My point is not that there is no discrimination against Christians on relig- ious ground in contemporary Egypt—in fact, there clearly is—but that the Zabbaleen are not the best case for illustrating it. If most of Cairo's garbage is picked up by Christians,6 this is not because Muslims pushed them into the business but because they pushed the Muslims out. They do not col- lect garbage and raise pigs because they are stigmatized but rather are stigmatized because that is what they do. South Asian conceptions of caste and ritual pollution map onto them in a manner that accords them 'privileged access' to waste-related jobs Beall My interest in those two sites in par- ticular came from them having been the two primary focal points of development activity.

This has led to a tendency to assume that what is true of Man- shiet Nasser is true of the Zabbaleen on the whole. But the same reasons that make the site unavoid- able—it is the largest, has a spectacular setting, and has received significant outside attention—also make it an exception. Because it is on desert land in an old stone quarry and hemmed in by cliffs, its pattern of urbanization is very different from that of Ezbet el Nakhl, which was built up on agricul- tural land, with significantly less spatial constraint on its expansion.

This is because the irrigation grid was used as a pattern for laying down streets. As the Manshiet Nasser Zabbaleen built permanent homes, they erected them directly on top of the plots they originally occupied, creating a layer-cake style of vertical separation between different sorts of spaces. It is not unusual in Manshiet Nasser to see waste sorting on the ground floor, a human living space on the first floor, and goats, sheep, chickens and other animals on the subsequent floors up to the roof, which is often used as a storage space for recyclables Figure 6.

The Ezbet el Nakhl Zabbaleen, in contrast, built homes in the fields around the animal enclosures where they themselves used to live, slowly separating themselves from garbage and animals in a hori- zontal manner Figure 7. People now live in the surrounding buildings, having separated their living spaces horizontally from waste sorting areas. These are essentially indistinguishable from the non-Zabbaleen residents' homes, except for small signs such as the vehicle parked in front.

The religious demographics of the two sites, as mentioned, are also very different. Development-oriented intervention began with the French Mother Theresa figure, Sr. After she put the Zabbaleen on the map in the s, a deluge of NGOs, for-profit consulting firms, engineers and urban planners, development-oriented foundations e. Ford Foundation , international institutions e. World Bank , religious charities, and others, carried out projects targeting the Zabbaleen.

Looking back on it all in the mid-to-late s, the consulting firm Environmental Quality International EQI , which implemented many Zabbaleen development projects through the s, reminisced understatedly that 'financial resources were forthcoming since the project was quite popular among funding agencies' EQI a: Devel- opment projects with the Zabbaleen had been so much the in-thing that one critique of the process was simply that there were '[t]oo many projects and too much outside funding' Assaad and Garas Microcredit, income generation for female-headed house- holds, composting, small industry, child health and hygiene, advisory support for grassroots institu- tions, and veterinary vaccination programmes is but a partial list.

It has been said that 'most known development principles were present' Assaad and Garas Today, the Manshiet Nasser Zabbaleen neighbourhood is a showcase of sorts, and its two main NGOs have in important respects become tourist destinations. On any given day it is possible to meet one or more groups of foreigners taking a tour of the Association for the Protection of the Environment's recycling and needlework projects, or Spirit of Youth's Montessori 'recycling school.

It would be a mistake to assume that the state has been any less interested in some- thing it would call 'development,' however. As pointed out above, it would be un-anthropological to take the meaning of development as a given. Rather, its meanings—the plural is critical—in their various historically and socially situated and contingent forms, are what the anthropologist seeks to investigate. The question is not who practiced development and who did not, but what different ac- tors understood by that notion.

In the context of the bureaucracy's 'explicit goal to modernize, beautify, and brand its city' Singerman Although constitu- tive of the 'contemporary' if not exactly the 'modern' city, they nevertheless do not fit the idea of such a city. As someone once put it to me, in the minds of many Egyptians, the solution to Cairo's long- standing garbage collection problem is to 'get rid of the garbage collectors. The profession is also often cast as one in which people are lured by money into giving up dig- nity and the norms of civilized life becoming, literally, filthy rich.

Historically, as soon as Cairo expanded to encompass them within itself, the Zabbaleen neigh- bourhoods were bulldozed and moved to the outer fringe. Since the city never stops expanding, the pattern would repeat itself, locking the Zabbaleen into a kind of dialectic of perpetual displacement.

As part of this same strategy of invisibilization, the Zabbaleen have been forced to collect waste al- most entirely at night. The bulldozers are used more sparingly today than in the past,7 but the Egyp- tian state has not ceased to be interested in the Zabbaleen: Thus, in the early s, the Egyptian state contracted several foreign firms to manage Cairo's waste.

The key concern seems to have been that the companies operate as in the West, in the full symbolic and technical sense: Perhaps above all, the Zabbaleen system and all that it represented—against which the public authorities had been inveighing for decades—was to be, at last, eliminated. The Zabbaleen persisted, however, and in , during the world-wide H1N1 influenza 'swine flu' pan- demic, the Egyptian state formulated another intervention on the Zabbaleen, which consisted of slaughtering the entirety of the pigs that they raised on organic waste.

During the time of the pan- demic, the Egyptian public and in particular the news media were ablaze with discussion of the insa- lubrious Zabbaleen neighbourhoods in which they raised the taboo animal, and the role the bodies of 7 Not because of increased sympathy on the part of the authorities. First, there has been a certain abandonment of the strategy of keeping undesirable elements out of the core of the city. Many of the rich have instead moved them- selves to the margins: Second, the Zabbaleen today have an increased capacity to resist compared to thirty years ago.

Destroying the Zabbaleen neigh- bourhood in Manshiet Nasser, for example, would be a monumental task, almost impossible. But in the cases where the Zabbaleen have not succeeded in auguring in and making themselves virtually un-evictable, the danger persists. The proximate cause was to allow a French archaeological excavation of the site, which is how I learned about it, since the director of the dig had kept 'before and after' photos, which he showed me with passing remorse. First is the critical literature from the discipline of development studies.

This literature's primary contribution is in framing the object of study and determining how it is ap- proached from an 'anthropology of development' and not a 'postdevelopment' perspective. This body of literature provides theoretical tools and orientations: However, since the object of this study is not the Zabbaleen but interventions on the Zabbaleen, it should be clear why, for all its merits and inter- est, this literature does not constitute a point of departure for the analysis and arguments put forward here and therefore will not be referred to.

I nevertheless tried to keep firm to a commitment to the 'method of particularities' Dresch Accordingly, each chapter has ana- lytic sub-parts tailored to the specificities of the events, people and facts discussed. In certain chap- ters a summary of literature on Egyptian cinema or evolving notions of Christian mission will be necessary, to 'render obscure matters intelligible by providing them with an informing context,' as Geertz once said is the role of the ethnographer Since those bodies of literature are bridges necessary to make certain crossings along the way but do not give the dissertation its overall analytic thread, they are referred to as the need arises rather than in this introduction.

Critical Development Studies The critical development studies literature includes ethnographic and historic studies of specific de- velopment projects or locales e. Ferguson ; Mosse ; Elyachar ; Murray Li , wider-ranging empirical works, historical or anthropological in varying degrees e.

Escobar ; Mitchell ; Rist , and works of a theoretical or programmatic character, which may for ex- ample outline positions on how development should be researched e. Fassin ; Ghandour ; Gabiam ; Feldman The topics explored in this literature remain relatively understudied by Middle Easternists, de- spite some notable exceptions for example in the work of Dawn Chatty e. Vice versa, the Middle East as a region is under-represented in development studies.

The object of study was defined with that in mind, through reference to predecessor works in the development studies literature, particularly anthropology of development, in a manner that will now be explained. In other words, the object of study is things like 'programs that set out to improve the condition of the population in a deliberate manner' Murray Li For instance, describing the object of study in his book The Anti-politics Machine, Ferguson is careful to specify that [u]nlike many anthropological works on "development," this one takes as its primary object not the people to be "developed," but the apparatus that is to do the "developing.

The distinc- tion invoked by Ferguson can be described as that between anthropology of development the aim of this dissertation and development anthropology anthropologists who work for development agencies. Development is not a thing or an agent, but a process, a series of ideas or objectives, etc. It is not necessary to take a position on that debate for the distinction to serve the purpose for which it is used here.

Thus, in a similar vein to Ferguson, Mosse introduces his ethnography of aid policy and practice, Cultivating Development, by explaining that his book's objective is 'not to produce a project overview, a commentary on appropriate approaches or "best practices", not to make an evaluation, or pass judgement; it does not ask whether, but rather how development works' Murray Li explains that her purpose in The Will to Improve is 'not to condemn.

Rather, I seek to understand the rationale of improvement schemes' Thus, she neither dismisses the efforts of proponents of 'schemes for improvement,' nor does she 'offer a recipe for how improvement can be improved' id.: This doctoral project's research design and approach to development studies were elaborated along similar lines. In practice, by drawing lines of continuity with sharply condemned practices and periods e. That is in any case how they are received by practitioners of development: Mosse and Murray Li both refer to the upset their works caused to the people whom they studied.

The anthropology of development approach fol- lowed in this dissertation must nevertheless be distinguished from the more programmatic and radi- cally critical postdevelopment literature. That distinction is all the more important in light of the dis- sertation's contention that there was a decline in developmentalism qua paradigm for framing the Zabbaleen 'problem' and supplying repertoires of techniques for solving it over the period studied.

While that may appear to be a 'postdevelopment' -type thesis, in fact it is not. For example, in terms of its function, Ferguson argues that development has a depoliticizing effect and that while it often fails at reducing poverty, it does achieve other unin- tended ends, like reinforcing and extending bureaucratic state power. The aim of postdevelopment scholars, who are devoted to 'preparing the ground for "post-development"' Rist This lead Escobar to say, in the new Preface to the edition of Encountering Development, that '[i]n its most succinct formulation, postdevelopment was meant to convey the sense of an era in which development would no longer be a central organizing principle of social life.

This did not mean that postdevelopment was seen as a new historical period to which its proponents believed we had arrived' Escobar Thus, postdevelopment scholars do not detachedly observe that 'Age of Development' is, as a matter of fact, over, but quite the opposite: Since they believe they can attack 'Development' by demonstrating its numerous deleterious effects, or supposed such, postdevelopment scholars at times seem to make development responsible for everything bad to have happened since the end of the colonial period. This puts them in the paradoxical position of lending greater power and weight to development than even its most fervent proponents, generating a misnomer that would be corrected if postdevelop- ment were called 'antidevelopment.

Postdevelopment scholars, he says, were not interested 'getting it right' because their agenda was 'constructing an object of cri- tique for debate and action' id.: The present study does not aim to praise interventions for having left the Zabbaleen better off though many undoubtedly did , nor does it comb through them in an evaluative light in order to suggest how they might be done better in future—essentially, approaches belonging to development anthropology.

It limits itself to examining what outsiders saw when they saw the Zabbaleen, what reasons they gave for then intervening in the latter's lives, and what form that intervention took. The questions posed were of this sort: Who were the various actors who intervened on the Zabbaleen over the period studied? For what motives did they act? What aspects of the lives of the Zabbaleen did they seek to change? In the name of what?

How did their beliefs shape their stances toward the Zabbaleen, generating differing types of interventions? What kind of a city was thus being imagined, and created?

All Points Bulletin

There is one important difference between the way this dissertation's object is framed and the way the object is typically defined in anthropology of development. I have preferred to speak of 'in- tervention' in general and not limit this to 'development interventions' or interventions carried out by what is normally thought of as 'development apparatuses. This makes it possible to address a question that anthropologists of development may have trouble speaking to: Murray Li ac- knowledges this problem when she notes that 'development schemes are only one of many social forces transforming the world.

I believe that ethnographers should attend to them but not necessarily give them center stage' But that is difficult to achieve when the study's object is defined as 'development' from the outset, since that ipso facto places development centre stage. In addition, speaking of 'development interventions' at the outset risks using an unproblematized, normative no- tion of what development means. This can be avoided through the kind of conceptual shift that oc- curred when scholars began speaking of multiple modernities Appadurai , locating 'modernity' in this case, 'development' in the idiom of the actors, not that of the observers Ginzburg Speaking of interventions simpliciter avoids foreclosure of the meanings of 'development.

Anthropological and historical literature on waste The theoretical apparatuses elaborated and deployed in development studies by authors such as Fer- guson , Mitchell or Murray Li , concerning depoliticization, 'rendering technical,' and the power of expert knowledge have great relevance in understanding one episode of Zabbaleen development, involving the World Bank, in the late s and early s. Beyond that, however, they did not appear in the present case to be the invariable and inevitable characteristics of all 'develop- ment,' and they provide little leverage in understanding many of the other actors and periods studied here.

The primary analytic inspiration for this dissertation comes instead from another body of litera- ture, which concerns waste, in the broad sense. Douglas' classic, Purity and Danger, is an important point of de- parture in this literature. Douglas examined many different kinds of pollution beliefs, although she focussed a great deal on substances that enter and leave the body food, bodily fluids, excrement, urine, etc.

A somewhat different way of doing this kind of an- thropology, one which is particularly promising in a contemporary urban setting, is through the sub- stance of waste itself, particularly household waste. She demonstrates how ideas about pollution, purity and con- tamination are rendered visible through people's relationship to household waste, and how, recipro- cally, that relationships is shaped by such ideas see e.

What the discipline seems to have primarily retained from Douglas is her argument on the rela- tivity of cleanliness. When Malkki argues in her book Purity and Exile actually, takes as a given, within the context of her discipline that 'as an empirical question, of course, "cleanliness" is of little inter- est' In her view, only 'considered as a form of social commentary on the relations of opposition in which people found their lives embedded, [does] it be- comes more significant' Coming at it from a different angle, history also provides the means for relativizing notions of cleanliness.

Vigarello's Le propre et le sale , for example, examines some of the different ways bodily cleanliness was imagined through time in France. What Vigarello tries to show is that there is no absolute scale of cleanliness on which civilizations, epochs, or individuals can be measured, only a multiplicity of ways of imagining what it means to be clean. For example, in Europe, bathing was for a long time not considered a technique of bodily hygiene, but rather a rank form of luxuriance that inclined those who partook in it toward lustful, lewd behaviour.

In short, baths were a source of dirtiness rather than a means for cleaning. Consequently, people who bathed once a year, or never at all, were perfectly capable of seeing themselves as clean, and indeed in some cases thought their ab- stinence from baths was what preserved them. This is not to say that they lacked means for achieving external cleanliness: Such relativizations are an important point, particularly as the basis for elaborating critiques of the instrumentalization of hygiene discourses more on this in a moment.

Books by John Needham

This dissertation accepts and further develops this insight. But it also seeks ways to push our reflection in new and different directions, beyond the mere idea that dirtiness is in the eye of the beholder. I agreed, and let him know that Roger, Mike, and I would reach Long Beach a day ahead of most convention-goers. I am rarely surprised by the surreal coincidences life offers, but during our stroll I noticed a bloke working on the pavement, installing a new star. The bloke making the star smiled at me. And as we snaked through the area we spotted a residence with a Union Jack flag flapping in the wind.

Thanks to Google, we soon discovered it was the L. Larry said he had, and that he was currently sightseeing with the three of us. Excitedly, we scribbled down the Hollywood address, checked that we were all carrying proper identification to get us through the studio security gate, and then Larry hit the accelerator. Mike Connelly joined us presently, and we headed off to their writing studio, which resembled my image of a proper L. The debut of such TV dramas as True Detective , The Killing , American Horror Story , and Breaking Bad convinced him that the small-screen, episodic format would better accommodate his style of storytelling.

We met an ex-LAPD officer who acted as technical consultant, and he indicated that at times he felt as if he were right back at work. Here are a couple of exclusive clips to illustrate the filming process: At that moment, from the corner of my eye, I saw Titus Welliver appear on the set.

I must have looked a little worried. Connelly explained that the new Bosch series combines elements from his novel, The Concrete Blonde , but the spine of those 10 episodes please pardon the pun is based on City of Bones. Connelly introduced us all: We talked some more about films, and he was very amused by my anecdote concerning the use of a Hoskins impersonation to escape personal injury, which comes from an encounter Roger Ellory and I had during Bouchercon in Baltimore back in Over wine and desert I quizzed the author about the task he faced in casting Harry Bosch for the small screen.

Connelly explained that finding the right actor to portray Bosch had been difficult, as they needed someone who could command the stage in minimalist fashion i. But either way, I very was saddened to hear of his passing [in ]. After dinner, we thanked Michael Connelly for a most excellent afternoon, and drove back to our Bouchercon hotel in Long Beach.

Even my wife, who is rarely excited by my adventures in crime and thriller fiction, was checking Facebook to see what I was up to in California. Posted by Ali Karim at Bosch , Michael Connelly , Videos.

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