Mass Culture and Modernism in Egypt

Mass Culture and Modernism in Egypt. WALTER ARMBRUST. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996; 275 pp. (paper).

The creativity and intellectual sharpness of Armbrust's book will come as a relief to readers who had begun to suspect that "popular culture" and "thin ethnography" were made for each other. Armbrust's ethnography, conducted in middle-class Cairo, is as rich as any work based in Egypt's Bedouin camps and peasant villages. Moreover, this richness is achieved through an analysis of films, magazines, cassette tapes, posters, and newspapers: mass mediated artifacts designed to circulate widely and reinforce imagined (and necessarily composite) national identities. To lend situational nuance to his analysis, Armbrust develops an ethnographic style which, in his own words, "is more like what Orientalists do with medieval texts-relating them to each other, comparing them with other textual traditions, juxtaposing them, classifying them-than like the anthropologist's fantasy of spending a year with `informants,' `picking up the language in the field,' and relying on 'theory' to do the rest" (p. 6).

Armbrust's method will prove radically unfashionable in some quarters, but the emphasis he places on systematizing mass market texts is effective. It makes sense of Egyptian popular culture in much the way a good grammar makes sense of a language. Armbrust is careful, however, to avoid a purely external system of classification. Instead, he explores the well-wom notion of isnad, or "authenticating genealogy," which underlies modernist discourse in Egypt. The modern is rendered authentically Egyptian, Armbrust argues, by linking it to the classical Islamic heritage and the...