The Great Social Laboratory: Subjects of Knowledge in Colonial and Postcolonial Egypt

by Omnia El Shakry

The Great Social Laboratory charts the development of the human sciences―anthropology, human geography, and demography―in late nineteenth- and twentieth-century Egypt. Tracing both intellectual and institutional genealogies of knowledge production, this book examines social science through a broad range of texts and cultural artifacts, ranging from the ethnographic museum to architectural designs to that pinnacle of social scientific research―"the article." Omnia El Shakry explores the interface between European and Egyptian social scientific discourses and interrogates the boundaries of knowledge production in a colonial and post-colonial setting. She examines the complex imperatives of race, class, and gender in the Egyptian colonial context, uncovering the new modes of governance, expertise, and social knowledge that defined a distinctive era of nationalist politics in the inter- and post-war periods. Finally, she examines the discursive field mapped out by colonial and nationalist discourses on the racial identity of the modern Egyptians.

Genres: Middle East

344 pages, Hardcover

First published October 29, 2007

Reviews

[Mohamed · Rating 2 out of 5]

عنوان ضخم ومحتوي ليس بالمستوي الذي يرقي للعنوان ، كذلك الكاتبة كانت تصر دائماً علي أنها تفعل ما لا تفعل فأغلب الكتاب عبارة عن تقارير لأقوال وأراء أخرين وليس كما ادعت الكاتبة أنها تاخذ الأمور الي النطاق الذي تريده هي .
كذلك هناك ادعاءات غير موضوعية تماماً فى الكتاب مثل كون طه حسين هو أعظم مفكر مصري فى القرن العشرين ، وأن مصر كانت تستعمر السودان فى نفس الوقت الذي هي مستعمرة بريطانية وهذا يعد خلل واضح ورؤية ألية للعلاقات أنذاك

[Justin Michael James Dell · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a densely-packed but smoothly-written monograph on the role played by social scientific methods in colonial Egypt - inherited from British colonialists, but appropriated and modulated by Arab nationalists - in the establishment and structuring of the modern Egyptian nation state. ElShakry is an impressively linear thinker, and she walks the reader through distinct but related phases of the development of social scientific thought in Egypt, starting with the Egyptian Khedive's patronage of the Royal Geographical Society in the 1870s through to the rise of Arab Socialism in the 1950s. Of course, the manner in which ElShakry connects disparate subjects together like beads on a rosary is highly teleological, yet there is something compelling about the unity of her thesis. This book compliments Khalad Fahmy's text "All the Pasha's Men" very well, and you can see the continuities between Mehmed Alis' reforms of the early twentieth century all the way up to the social changes ushered in by Gamal Abdul Nasser.

[Mustafa Hamdy · Rating 3 out of 5]

Usually post-colonial studies postulate the deconstruction of colonial discourses and how the european metropoles exert asymetrical power conestellations on colonised regions . This is atypical study as it analizes bizzare internal relation within one country : Metropolitan cairo and it's westernized elite in relation to the undisciplined masses of the countryside " El Fallaheen " between 1930 and 1940 .

[Sherif MohyEldeen · Rating 4 out of 5]

A smoothly written book, makes you question many of the sources of our modern established knowledge system of social science. I like this kind of books, which dig into and unpack the complexity of the colonialism and how it affected almost everything in our countries, including the origins of the social science.