Julia Elyachar_Phatic Labor, Infrastructure and the Question of Empowerment

JULIA ELYACHARUniversity of California, Irvine

Phatic labor, infrastructure, and thequestion of empowerment in Cairo

A B S T R A C TIn this article, I draw on ethnographic research inCairo to analyze outcomes of Egyptian womenspractices of sociality. In Cairo, phatic labor createsa social infrastructure of communicative channelsthat are as essential to economy as roads, bridges,or telephone lines. Projects to empower Egyptianwomen via finance made these communicativechannels visible as an economic infrastructure forprojects oriented around the pursuit of profit. Asocial infrastructure that had functioned as a kind ofsemiotic commons became visible as a resource thatcould be privatized or formatted as a public good.[Egypt, political economy, empowerment, semiotics,social theory, infrastructure, women]

Idont like womens talk [kalam as-sittat], said my infor-mant Usta Ahmed more than once during fieldwork I car-ried out in Cairo in the mid-1990s. I heard the same phraseany number of times from other men who owned and op-erated small industrial workshops (wirash) and who came

from poor central neighborhoods of Cairo. Nor did these men want anywomen (other than customers) in their carpentry, machine tool, or car-body shops. Men who owned microenterprises they had opened up withfunding from the state, development agencies, and countless NGOs voicedthe same sentiment, although many of them worked in more women-friendly fields, like textiles. Toward the end of my fieldwork, I was thussurprised to learn that, in his capacity as president of a local NGO, UstaAhmed was helping to organize meetings in his neighborhood to promotewomens empowerment. He was not alone in this endeavor. A few othermen in the NGO were helping as well.

Meanwhile, most of the women I knew in this neighborhood were busywith their daily pursuits, living a life apart from themale world of the work-shops. They spent a great deal of time on housework and provisioning theirhouseswith food and other necessities, like women anywhere. Their neigh-borhood was new and did not have the density of shops, homes, and peo-ple on the street characteristic of older parts of Cairo. My informant Hananonce complained to me about how strange it was to go outside specificallyto buy bread. All her life she had just bought it on her way somewhere else.Despite such problems, she and her friends were busy and active. Theywould visit one another, most often in their own block of apartments butin other parts of the neighborhood as well. They visited women they knewfrom themosque, friends they hadmade through other friends, and, some-times, women they had met at the greengrocer. They also maintained tiesto friends and family in other parts of Cairo, and much of their week wastaken up with visiting around the city (which, with its population of 18mil-lion, took both time and effort). There was often no obvious purpose tothose visitsno goal to accomplish, no occasion to celebrate, no fixed ap-pointment to meet.1

AMERICAN ETHNOLOGIST, Vol. 37, No. 3, pp. 452464, ISSN 0094-0496, onlineISSN 1548-1425. C 2010 by the American Anthropological Association. All rights reserved.DOI: 10.1111/j.1548-1425.2010.01265.x

Phatic labor ! American Ethnologist

The notion that poor womens lives could be changedfor the better by empowerment through microfinance wasextremely popular in the development world in the 1990s.In policy discussions of the Middle East, the need forwomens empowerment was usually situated within dom-inant liberal notions of rights and the failure to achievethose rights for women in the region (Abu-Lughod 2009:8487). Most academic anthropologists used ethnographic re-search to critique the notion of empowerment (Cheater1999; Elyachar 2005; Gupta and Sharma 2006; Leve 2007;Weiner 1997; Willigen 2002:7273). Some critiqued the em-powerment of women via microcredit (Karim 2008; Moodie2008; Rahman 2001; Rankin 2008), NGOs (Hemment 2007),development (Friedmann 1992; Zellerer and Vyortkin 2004),or bettermodes of governance (Misra 2008). Some Egyptiananthropologists who worked in development organizationson womens empowerment had studied all the critiques ofanthropology and development while getting Ph.D.s fromelite Western universities, published ethnographies withtop academic presses, and also founded NGOs to channelmicrofinance to poorwomen inCairo (Bibars 2001; el-Kholy2003).

By 2005, when I returned to Cairo after a long absence,microfinance had gone mainstream. Conversations aboutwomen and microfinance continued, but they were just aslikely to be conducted in a Microsoft or Intel company of-fice that could be anywhere in theworld as theywere to takeplace at a development conference sponsored by theUnitedStates Agency for International Development (USAID) or inthe context of doctoral research. Telecom companies in-vesting in the booming cell-phone business in Egypt (andelsewhere) studied the social networks of poor women andmen to better design their products and marketing plans.Vodaphone, Visa, PayPlus, MasterCard, and Intel worked tounderstand networks created by poor women in Egypt andelsewhere in efforts to benefit from the payments spacethose poor people had helped create (Maurer n.d.).

Amid the endless talk of womens empowerment andthe movement of womens empowerment from develop-ment circles into the corporate world, it is certainly pos-sible to think about the absence of women in economicenterprises in Usta Ahmeds community as an instanceof failure. One could conclude that programs to empowerwomen in Egypt had failed to accomplish their goals. Expla-nations for such failure lie easily at hand. Things often seemto fail in the Middle East. Or perhaps empowerment failedbecause it was a form of development, which is itself a fail-ure with its own generative effects (Escobar 1994; Ferguson1990). Empowerment may also have failed because of trick-ery. The Egyptian people, the popular classes in particular,are skilled in deploying weapons of the weak (Scott 1987).So perhaps they just pretended to support empowermentof women to get access to the resources provided for thispurpose. Or perhaps empowerment failed because of the

cultural specificities of Muslim societies and their concernsabout preserving womens honor by keeping their bodiesout of view in male-gendered space.2 Any of these explana-tions might be true. But none is satisfying. Equally dissat-isfying is a story of triumph: the triumph of neoliberalismin the movement of empowerment money (Elyachar 2005)into the private sector.

In this article, I bypass talk about failure or success andgo in a different direction altogether. With the gift of hind-sight, I argue that the era of empowerment via finance wasnot primarily about changing womens lives at all. Look-ing back at the Egyptian context, at least, and despite clearinstances of microfinance making a real difference for spe-cific groups of women, I have concluded that transformingwomens lives was not the point of empowerment finance.From the standpoint of the present, it seems to me, spe-cific outcomes of womens social practices were empow-ered, instead.

Anthropological writing on microenterprise, empow-erment, and finance usually draws on theories of politicaleconomy, finance, and development. My analysis is equallygrounded in those bodies of literature, but I drawon linguis-tics, semiotics, and information theory as well. As a start-ing point for my analysis of the outcomes of womens socialpractices, I turn to Bronislaw Malinowskis (1936) conceptof phatic communion.3 With this concept, Malinowskishows how language such as gossip and chatting can be ameans of establishing ties for their own sake, rather than forthe purpose of conveying any information in particular. Inthe spirit of other projects that bring together semiotics andlinguistics with political economy (Keane 2008; Kockelman2006, 2007; Pedersen 2008), I bring together Malinowskiwith Karl Marx to introduce the concept of phatic labor.I argue that this labor produces communicative channelsthat can potentially transmit not only language but also allkinds of semiotic meaning and economic value. The pe-riod of empowerment finance, as I show below, made com-municative channels created through phatic labor visibleas a social infrastructure on which other projects orientedaround the pursuit of profit could be constructed. My argu-ment is grounded in ethnographic research that I and oth-ers carried out in Cairo. I rely heavily in my account on thetales of three women I came to know during my long-termfieldwork there in the mid-1990s.

Um Muhammed and the Grand CentralCoffeehouse

I conducted part of my fieldwork in a neighborhood con-structed at the beginning of the 1990s to house industrialand service workshops relocated from other areas of north-ern Cairo that planners had decided were unsuitable forthem. The new neighborhood was missing many thingswhen residents first arrived. Streetlights were few, streets

453

ap42310Highlight

ap42310Highlight

ap42310Highlight

ap42310Highlight

American Ethnologist ! Volume 37 Number 3 August 2010

were unpaved, and many workshops were without the wa-ter they needed to open for business. Workshop mastersquickly organized themselves into an association to voicetheir interests directly and vigorously to the government.They went on strike to force the municipality to finish theprovision of essential infrastructure for their work: light-ing, electricity, and paved roads. Workshop masters did notstrike for a coffeehouse. Yet the coffeehouse was also part ofthat essential infrastructure.

In workshop neighborhoods of Cairo, the coffeehouseis a place where deals are made, information exchanged,workers located, and opportunities pursued. The coffee-house is a beehive of socialilty, where men from workshopschat and gossip over instruments of conviviality such as cof-fee, tea, and water pipes (shisha). Workshop masters cometo the coffeehouse to settle disputes, arrange deals, andlearn about new customers, supplies fromnew sources, andwhether workers with skills they need are available for hire.Workers share information about possible jobs and gossipabout their current employers. The coffeehouse has beencalled an informal institution of the Egyptian labor mar-ket (Assaad 1993).More broadly, it is a placewhere channelsof communication in the public economic space of work-shop communities come together and become visible, liketrain tracks come together in Grand Central Station in NewYork City.

Um Muhammed contributed to the maintenance ofthat infrastructure. Her apartment was above the coffee-house. Her furniture was simple but colorful, and thewalls of her apartment were dotted with pictures of fam-ily members, framed posters of Alpine scenery, and framedsurah from the Quran. Among the photos was one of UmMuhammed with her husband, Abu Muhammed, at theirmarriage, one of the couple with their two young chil-dren together with Um Muhammeds mother, and oneof Muhammed, the couples son, when he was young. Inone corner was a television and video player tucked awaybehind piles of videocassettes, which Abu Muhammedbrought home each day from the coffeehouse, where heshowed them to children and adolescents whoworked untillate at night. Children came and went to and from the cof-feehouse: One might carry a flat of 24 eggs up the stairs tothe apartment while another carried down plates of sweetsfor the coffeehouse or hot food that Muhammed sold fromthe pushcart in front of the coffeehouse.

Abu Muhammeds family had been in the craft ofsweets making for many generations in their original homein a neighborhood of central Cairo. From the proceeds ofthe sweets she made, Um Muhammed took out money tocover the costs of running the household, giving the restto Muhammed to put toward his marriage expenses. Un-like many of her neighbors, Um Muhammed kept prettymuch to herself. She stayed out of the back and forth ofcommunication and exchanges that marked neighborly re-

lations in this community. Other women I knew would al-ways go to a neighbor if they needed something, but notUmMuhammed:

If I needed something like sugar I would never go to aneighbor. That wouldnt look good! The wife of a cof-feehouse owner, hes got all that sugar in his shop, andshes going around asking for sugar from her neigh-bors! No, that wouldnt be good. If I need something,I go and buy it. I have little to do with my neighbors, Iknow them from the balcony, but we dont go into eachothers houses.

Um Muhammed moved around much less than herneighbors: She generally moved only from her apartmentto her husbands coffeehouse to the homes of her imme-diate relatives and back again. Her limited mobility mayhave been due in part to a slight limp. But if so, the con-tours of her social world had become shaped around thoselimitations to quite productive ends. Her life was orientedaround her nuclear family and her time was spent insidethe home, but Um Muhammed was not a housewife. Nordid she spend her day reproducing labor power to be soldon the market for a wage. As a loving wife and mother, UmMuhammeds affective labor and skills were crucial in creat-ing the possibilities for her son to become a fully social manwho could marry and head an economic enterprise andfor her husband to enjoy his reputation as a man of honorwho had the resources and the temperament to help othersin their times of need. But she did more as well. In popu-lar communities of Cairo, the coffeehouse is a place wherepractices of sociality integral to male productive work areprominently on display. It is a communicative hub of phaticlabor, as mymore detailed discussion of this concept belowmakes clear. UmMuhammedwas amaintenanceworker onessential infrastructure of economic life in Cairo.

Wasta, networks, and infrastructure

The notion that practices of sociality have outcomes, andthat those outcomes are essential to the political economyof life in Cairo, has resonance in Egyptian native conceptsand in ethnographies of Cairo. One example can be found inHoma Hoodfars (1997) ethnography of poor Cairene fami-lies.WhenHoodfars informant, UmHani, needed to get herfamilys apartment connected to the water line, she wentabout this task in classic Cairene fashion. She went on vis-its. She visited each of her neighbors in turn until she foundsomeone who knew someone in the right office to take careof this matter. If I go not knowing anybody, Um Hani toldHoodfar, they will not deal with me and send me from oneoffice to the next and will askme to return day after day. Butif I know someone who knows the rules and knows the peo-ple, the whole thing may not take more than a few hours.Here nobody helps you if you do not have connections

454

ap42310Highlight


(1997:230). In this case, Um Hanis visits were interested.But Um Hani also visited back and forth with her neigh-bors many times with no goal in mind. Most of the time,she and her neighbors were just being sociable. The disin-terested nature of their visits did not contradict their state-ments about the importance of the connections that social-ity forged. Such is the nature of phatic labor.

When talking about connections and their importance,Cairenes often use the words alaqat (relations) or wasta(intermediaries). The concept of wasta is pervasive inEgypt and many other Middle Eastern societies. Cultivat-ing wasta entails great investments of time and energy. Itis not a phenomenon of the poor alone: Wasta is central tolife among elites as well (Inhorn 2004).4 A concept similarto wasta is found in other cultures: The native concepts ofguanxi in China (Hutchings and Weir 2005; Kipnis 1997)and nepotism in the United States (Bellow 2004) both re-fer to the importance of cultivating networks of personalconnections to get things done. Wasta is sometimes glossedas corruption or patronage and is an object of concern forthose studying the conduct of business in the Middle East(Hutchings and Weir 2005; Loewe et al. 2008). Anthropol-ogists often gloss this phenomenon in terms of networks.Somehave used spatialmetaphors to denote different kindsof networks: There are both horizontal networks and ver-tical networks (Hoodfar 1997:229230; Singerman 1995).Wasta can denote a vertical network that reaches into stateor other powerful bureaucracies. The notion that networkscreated by poor women of Cairo are at the core of Egyp-tian political life has been argued by political scientist DianeSingerman (1995). In Singermans view, informal networksorganize, coordinate, and direct individual actions . . . theyaggregate the interests of the shaab [the people] (1995:133).

Given the frequency of my informants talk about con-nections and relationships, not surprisingly, I began to ana-lyzemy findings in terms of networks during the course ofmy research. In this article, I take a different approach. I donot look at the network as an interlocking web of individ-uals, as a coordinator of individual interests, or as a frame-work for action. Instead, I analyze communicative channelsthat I maintain are an outcome of practices of sociality ontheir own terms, as distinct objects of inquiry.

A number of clues within and around anthropologysuggest how such an approach might look. One can, for ex-ample, think of channels in much the way Pierre Bourdieuwrites about practical reason, in terms of beaten tracks orpathways that are reallymaintained and used (1990:35). Ifone takes an approach common in linguistics since RomanJakobson (1990), then one can think of channels as exist-ing wherever physical proximity and psychological contactbetween a speaker and addressee allow them to send andreceive messages. One could also take an approach com-

mon in communications theory, in which a channel usu-ally refers to the medium used to convey information or totransmit a signal of some kind to a receiver (Shannon 1948).More recentwork in network theory refers to channels with-out the concept of a fixed transmitter or receiver and builds,instead, on a random-networkmodel constructed with the-ories from statistical physics (Franceschetti and Meester2007:12).

By recognizing that channels can rest on social con-vention as much as on a specific, one-to-one physical orpsychological connection, one can understand a channel asanything that relates a signer to an interpreter such thata sign expressed by the former may be interpreted by thelatter (Kockelman n.d.:3). Understood in this way, com-municative channels can be analyzed as a collective re-source for all kinds of semiotic communication in addi-tion to language per se (Elyachar in press; Kockelman n.d.).And once the analytical focus shifts away from humansbrought together in networks to channels themselves asa relatively stable outcome of human practices, then dif-ferent kinds of metaphors come to mind as to what thismight imply. Specifically, one can think of sets of channelsas infrastructure.

Infrastructure is something people tend to think aboutwhen it breaks downwhen bridges collapse, when roadshave potholes, when telephones do not work. A new bodyof work on infrastructure influenced by the perspectiveof science and technology studies, loosely conceived, hasshown this to be the case in varying ways (Barry 2005,2006; Mitchell 2009; Otter 2002, 2004). The near collapseof the financial system in the United States in 2008 helpedbring the question of financial infrastructures into publicdebate; ongoing crises in public finance have helped keepit there. Infrastructure is a classic public good, a set of re-sources available to all and whose use does not decreaseits availability to others (Samuelson 1954; Stigliz 1999). Thesmell of infrastructure is the smell of the public (Robbins2007:26).

Economies cannot function without infrastructure.This is a commonplace in all kinds of economic theory. Involume two of Capital (1956), for example, Marx shows thecentrality of infrastructure to the circulation and realizationof value: The creation and maintenance of infrastructure isnot itself directly productive of value and yet is essential tothe capitalist system of production. Nor, from the stand-point of a neoclassical theory of value, does infrastructurecreate price. But if you cannot link a product to the market,then that product will spoil and become worthless. If youcannot link a buyer to a seller, then a market cannot func-tion. Linking buyers and sellers entails more than physi-cal transportation of goods. Infrastructureroads, airports,ports, and bridgesallows producers to realize the poten-tial economic value of a product as well.

455

ap42310Highlight

ap42310Highlight

ap42310Highlight

ap42310Highlight

ap42310Highlight


A madam of infrastructure and the potentialityof labor

To further develop my point, I now turn back to ethnogra-phy and introduce Khadija, a madam and hashish dealer inCairo whose story I first heard from one of my informants(whowas himself amaster storyteller). Although I neverwasable to independently verify everything that he told my col-league Essam Fawzi and me, his account of Khadijas storywas both entirely plausible and denied by no one. The storyof her role in the establishment of workshops in the neigh-borhood where I conducted fieldwork gave me a new per-spective on my research there and on how outcomes ofwomens practices of sociality become essential infrastruc-ture in the political economy of Cairo.

Khadijas main trade was in womens bodies; she alsosold hashish to her male clients.5 She invested her profits inproductive workshops in a neighborhood on the outskirtsof another, middle-class, neighborhood built in the early20th century. Two of my informants were workshop ownerswhose livelihood and social standing in their communityKhadija had made possible. Her name, like the source ofher investment capital in these male workshops, remainedveiled. Nothing indicated that the original investor in themens workshops had been a madam rather than a bank oran NGO.

Khadijas professional life as madam, drug dealer, andinvestor was at its height in the 1970s, the period of An-war el-Sadats infitah, or economic opening. The wordentrepreneur was barely heard at that time. Sadat openedup Egypt to a tidal wave of consumer goods imported fromabroad. The flood of consumer goods was accompanied bya rapid change of life situation for those who latched ontothe large or petty trade in these goods and the associatedparaphernalia of the high life. The economic opening alsomeant the opening of the labor market and the possibil-ity of migrating for higher wage labor in the Gulf states,which Egyptians did in droves. Wages at home for skilledworkers in the construction and craft trades shot up as well,and lots of cash flowed. Business for people like Khadijatook off.

As Khadijas business grew, she needed lookout boys towatch out for the police. So she brought in youths (shabab)from the neighborhood. One of the boys she brought in wasa nephew who would become my informant in the 1990s.Khadija needed to do something with her profits. She alsoneeded to buy the silence of those who knew too muchabout her and could sell her out to the police. Khadija ac-complished both objectives by turning her preadolescentlookout boys into fictive kin. She did for them what anymother would do for her sons. Just like Um Muhammed,she created material possibilities for her sons to becomefully social men. This meant buying them workshops andhomes in which they could be masters and providing them

with wives. She arranged marriages for themto her rela-tives and to the girls in her prostitution ring.

In time, Khadija controlled 14 workshops. When thoseworkshops were closed down in 1991 for urban renewal,some were moved to a new neighborhood and gained legalstatus. I met Khadijas nephew in that new neighborhood.He was by then a man well into his forties, of full body andlarge smile, who liked to dress in black button-down shirts.He was known as a generous man. He was not always thefirst to comply with the letter of the law or to follow instruc-tions from the local NGO about community development.He preferred to watch out for poor people in and aroundthe neighborhood who needed his help. He also worked oninfrastructure maintenance of a very practical kind: Whenwomen I knew had their electricity cut off because of non-payment of their bills, he would help them reconnect thewires to bypass the cutoff. He helped maintain an alterna-tive infrastructure of garbage collection as well, by stayingloyal to a young Bedouin girl whose family had been evictedfrom their home and who now survived by collecting andrecycling garbage. He resisted pressure from the local asso-ciations to switch over to the formalized fee-based garbagecollection system that they organizedwith themunicipality.

He was, in short, a man of honor: He was gada, aman who looked out for others in his neighborhood andprotected those who needed help. To be gada also meantthat he protected the collective goods and infrastructure ofhis community. The resources his aunt had afforded himthrough the mobilization of womens bodies had createdthe possibility for his generosity and ability to maintaincommunity resources. Khadija had put towork thewomensbodies she controlled, captured the surpluses, and investedthose surpluses in workshops interlinked by kin, fictive kin,wives, secrets traded, andmoney transferred. Khadija trans-lated the most physical of links into essential infrastructurefor the male productive world, which her nephew helpedmaintain.

Khadijas labor seems the opposite of that carried outby UmMuhammed. UmMuhammed was the consummatefamily woman, whereas Khadija was a hashish dealer andmadam. But I argue that they had a great deal in common.Through phatic labor, both produced and maintained setsof communicative channels in the male economic spaceof the workshop. Um Muhammed did so via her husbandand son in the coffeehouse. Khadija did so by establish-ing a set of new workshops interlinked through fictive kin-ship, run by men who helped maintain the collective goodsof their community. Unlike the kind of pathways referredto by Bourdieu in writing about practical reason or thechannels modeled by C. E. Shannon for information sys-tems, the channels Khadija helped construct left no markson the ground or algorithms for engineers to reproduce.Traces of these channels might have been documented inthe womens talk of which Usta Ahmed was so leery. But,

456

ap42310Highlight

ap42310Highlight


until the appearance of empowerment finance and new ac-tors who took an interest in mapping out those channels,they remained an invisible infrastructure in the politicaleconomy of Cairo.

Labor, potentia, and the phatic function

How can one characterize labor that produces outcomessuch as these? It does not make sense to see UmMuhammed only as a housewife carrying out unpaidwomens labor in the home. Nor does it suffice to saythat Khadija reveals only the import of prostitution in eco-nomic life and power structures in theMiddle East and Asia(Dunne n.d.; Wilson 2004). Scholars need a different way tothink about the outcomes of these two womens practicesand how they relate to political economy. The same is trueof the visiting, gossiping, and traveling around Cairo thattook up so much of my women informants time and thatI claim is related to the endless talk about empowermentand the absence of women in the workshops during myfieldwork.

Unlike housework or prostitution, visiting, movingaround a megacity, chatting, and consolidating friendshiphave not been conceptualized as labor in Western socialtheory. Such practices are not a form of metabolism be-tween people and nature through which men produce thevital necessities that must be fed into the life process ofthe human body (Arendt 2000:172). Nor are they work inHannah Arendts sense, as that which fabricates the sheerunending variety of things (2000:173),6 or the actualiza-tion of labor power, that reified human capacity to labor,whose use by its purchaser, in capitalism, produces surplusvalue. Also inappropriate to capture what is at stake hereis the concept of unpaid labor in the sense analyzed inthe value of labor power debate of the 1970s and 1980sin feminist political economy (Agger 1998:111113; Brodkin2006:135136; Jagger 1994:9799). Nor were any of these so-cial practices that took up so much of my women infor-mants time understood by anyone I knew in banks, NGOs,or development organizations as having anything to dowithempowerment.

The affective turn in social sciences (Clough 2007;Hardt 2007) opens another way to think about social prac-tices carried out by these women, which are motivated byaffect and Egyptian family ethos (Wiken 1996) as much asby economic interest, strictly speaking. Political economyhas always been linked with affecta point that was clearin themoral philosophy fromwhich it emerged (Hirschman1997; Mandeville 1988; Smith 1984) but which got lost in itsoffspring of economics. The literature on affect also points,via the influence of Baruch Spinoza and Marx, to the im-portance of the category of potentia in Western politi-cal theory in a way relevant to my ethnographic material.UmMuhammed, Khadija, and their neighborswere not car-

rying out any specific act of exchange, transfer of goods,or metabolic process between humans and nature in theirpractices of sociality. Rather, they created, maintained, andextended channels through which all kinds of resourcescould potentially flow. Can social practices creating poten-tia be considered labor?

I see grounds for thinking so. The category of potentiawas central to Marxs theorization of the human capacity oflabor power and how it produced surplus value under capi-talism. Economics originally focused only on male produc-tive labor but has long been expanding the scope of whatit studies, to the extent that some accuse the field of eco-nomics imperialism (Fine 2000). But by calling practices ofsociality labor, I do not mean to say that the friendlinessand sociality of the Egyptian people constitute a kind of op-portunistic functionalism. Cairene women are not pursu-ing instrumentally rational behavior when they go to visitfriends on a public-sector bus. At the same time, the out-come of that work of forging connections is economicallyvital. That kind of labor is necessary for the preservationof privilege among the upper classes. It is necessary for thepreservation of life itself among the poor of Cairo, for whomit is both time-consuming and fragile in its outcomes. Justas poor people have to contend with fragmented physicalinfrastructure in all aspects of their lives (Larkin 2008), theyhave to invest more time in the maintenance of infrastruc-ture of communicative channels as well.

In an essay on primitive language published in 1923,Malinowski provides some hints about what this kind oflabor might involve. When a number of people aimlesslygossip together, says Malinowski, a situation is createdthat consists in just this atmosphere of sociability andin the fact of the personal communion of these people(Malinowski 1936). Each utterance is an act, he goes onto say, that serves the aim of binding hearer to speaker by atie of some social sentiment or other . . . language appears tous in this function not as an instrument of reflection but asamode of action (Malinowski 1936:464). Malinowskis datafor his brief discussion of phatic communion concerns hisinformants engagement in face-to-face conversation in asmall island community. Malinowski makes clear that whatis at stake here is not just talk. Phatic communion, he as-serts, is a form of social action.7 Other forms of communi-cation could be brought under the rubric of this kind of so-cial action as well. Phatic communion in Cairo also takesplace, for example, through collective locomotory prac-tices in urban space that normally remain in the back-groundof perception but throughwhich the collective iden-tity of the poor masses is both expressed and reproduced(Elyachar in press). Such regularized if relatively unstudiedforms of bodily practice and gesture are immediately recog-nized by others who are part of the same semiotic commu-nity (Kockelman 2005:261262); they helpmaintain and re-produce communicative channels in Cairo.

457

ap42310Highlight

ap42310Highlight

ap42310Highlight

ap42310Highlight

ap42310Highlight

ap42310Highlight

ap42310Highlight

ap42310Highlight

ap42310Highlight

ap42310Highlight


Malinowski is more famous for his analysis of an-other form of social action: interisland kula trade carriedout by elite Trobriand men, whose success required brav-ery, linguistic mastery, and collective memory. Trobriandmen created value and fame by effecting the circulation ofvaygua, or kula shells, over time across a chain of islands(Malinowski 1999; Munn 1986). At numerous points in hisethnography,Malinowskimaintains that his analysis of kulais relevant for Victorian England. Most famous, perhaps, inthis regard, is his offhand comment that the vaygua cov-eted and traded among men in the Trobriand Islands weremuch like the crown jewels in Great Britain: Ugly, useless,ungainly, even tawdry and yet worshipped as essential tocollective identity (Malinowski 1999:68).

Malinowskis concept of phatic communion has beenrelatively overlooked, outside of its influence on linguisticsvia Jakobson (Kockelman n.d.). Jakobson (1990) adoptedMalinowskis concept of phatic communion to identifythe phatic function of the speech act. The phatic functionis one of the six functions of the speech event he identifies.The expressive function focuses on the speaker; the cona-tive focuses on the addressee; the metalinguistic focuseson code; the poetic focuses on sign; the referential focuseson the object, or referent, of a speech act; and the phaticfunction focuses on the channel through which speech isconveyed. Despite the wide range of these functions, lin-guistics has generally focused on the referential function ofthe speech event alone (Kockelman 2005:260261, n.d.). Itmight be time for anthropology to return to Malinowskisformulation of phatic communion as away to think througha number of theoretical dilemmas confronting critical so-cial analysis today.

Jakobsons concept of channels created by the phaticfunction depends on both physical proximity and psycho-logical contact of the sort discussed by Malinowski in thecase of the Trobriands. In Cairo, a city with a huge pop-ulation, phatic connectivity does not rely on direct physi-cal proximity or immediate one-to-one psychological con-tact. As the ethnographic material I present in this articlemakes clear, Cairenes have a more generalized dispositionto create, maintain, and extend communicative channelsthan a one-to-one model of contact would allow. To makesense of this ethnographic material in Cairo, one needs tosee the channels created by phatic labor in a more expan-sive senseas relating signers to interpreters so that signsof all kinds (and not just language) expressed by the formercan be immediately (even if not consciously) interpreted bythe latter (Kockelman n.d.).

In Cairo, the potential economic import of the out-comes of phatic communion and phatic labor are morevisible than in the Trobriands as well. That potential be-came clearer in the 1970s and 1980s during the vast wavesof circular migration of millions of Egyptian men to theGulf states.8 Communicative channels originally created on

the streets of Cairo extended into the Gulf region togetherwith migrants and were maintained through flows of affect,money, information, and faith. Those channels were usedby migrants and their families to transfer money, emotion,and news andmaterialized in forms as simple as a neighborcarrying an envelope and news, a friend carrying a cassette,or a fellow worshipper carrying cash. Some of those chan-nels were formalized in institutions like the Islamic invest-ment companies that channeled a large portion of Egyptianmigrants savings during this period and grew to play a keyrole in the political economy of theMiddle East in the 1980s(until they were crushed by the Egyptian state when theywere felt to be a threat to it). These channels were concep-tualized as well in terms of the informal economy that be-came so important in the development world of the 1980sand 1990s.

Payments space and the story of a phatic pimp

Communicative channels created through phatic labor arebeing studied and mobilized in new contexts. Malinowskismodel of the kula has already been adopted as a busi-ness model by Vodafone, and talk of the kula is impor-tant in viral marketing (Knight 2004). It has served as aconcept in alternative economic projects as well (Narotzky2008). Perhaps it was just a matter of time until otheraspects of Malinowskis research, such as his concept ofphatic communionwould also bemobilized for economicprojects.

Communicative channels are being mobilized as in-frastructure in numerous projects currently underway tounderstand, format, and build on payments space (Maurern.d.). Throughout areas of the global South, in which thevast majority of the population have never been able to ac-cess collapsing and underbuilt infrastructure, a myriad ofactors are busy creating systems to support new modali-ties of banking and financial services to millions of poorpeople and members of their extended families overseas(Maurer n.d.). The notion of payments space is a nativeone in this world of corporate, philanthropic, and academicactors. Systems being constructed in payments space aretransforming channels created by poorworking peoplewhohave migrated overseas and send money home and whohave developed all kinds of ingenious ways of transferringthis money, as well as information and affect, that anthro-pologists and development organizations have studied andsupported as the informal economy. Whereas microfinancefocused on supporting the individual actors within thatinformal economy, this new systemic focus places muchgreater emphasis on uncovering, developing, and mobiliz-ing existing forms of infrastructure created by the bottom ofthe pyramid, the worlds poorest, and building on them tocreate new kinds of financial and information services for aprofit.

458

ap42310Highlight

ap42310Highlight

ap42310Highlight


Visa, Vodafone, Mastercard, and Intel are all active inthis space, introducing mobile payments systems, Internetbanking, and electronic banking using cell phones (Maurern.d.). A mix of corporate, philanthropic, and academic ac-tors is involved in these projects for the creation of for-malized, for-profit systems of transferring information, af-fect, and money across time and space. As anthropolo-gists, we need adequate conceptual tools to make sense ofwhat is going on here, beyond condemning the practices in-volved as neoliberal or embracing them as an example ofempowerment.

We need to ask how payments space relates to phaticlabor. Phatic labor has long produced outcomes that can becompared with the laying of cables or fiber-optic lines orthe building of railroads. It has allowed for goods and usevalues of various kinds to flowif quite different use valuesthan those analyzed in classical political economy or Marx-ist thought. The outcomes of phatic laborcommunicativechannelshave allowed for the flowof reputation, informa-tion, and emotion. They have allowed for the transfer of fi-nance and the creation of new kinds of equivalences. Theyhave been a necessary if not a sufficient condition for the re-alization of other, more classic forms of economic value aswell. Increasingly, they are being recognized as having usevalue, and intrinsic value, in themselves. But the process ofmaking those channels recognizable as supporting the cre-ation of economic value, and as economically valuable inthemselves, does not happen on its own. The story of myinformant Huda, one ofmany global players in this process,is instructive in this context.

Huda came of age in quite a different moment thanKhadija and Um Muhammed, who had been children dur-ing Gamal Abdul-Nassers rule. Huda came of age whenHosni Mubarak was president. The public sector createdunder Abdul-Nasser was then being privatized. Disinvest-ment in state-owned infrastructure had become the norm.Huda grew up in public-sector housing built by Abdul-Nasser and named after him, graduated from high school,and went to work as a secretary. Her brother was a car me-chanic who had run his business on the street until he wasshut down by themunicipality, after which he relocated to anew neighborhood. The municipality gave him a workshopin the new neighborhood, along with an apartment, whichhe sold to his sister. Huda was at home among the work-shop families, given that her brother was a workshop mas-ter and she was from a baladi (popular, i.e., local indige-nous urban-class) family. But because of her employmentas a secretary for a consultant, she felt herself to be not onlymore educated but also better than her neighbors.

Huda was the only woman I knew in the neighborhoodwho held down a regular waged job. She commuted to workevery day, catching a ride with one of the masters she knewthrough her brother or waiting on the dusty road half a milefrom her apartment for the minibus to make a stop on its

way to points south, which, not long ago, had lain on thenorthern reaches of Cairo. Her employer had given years ofhis life to leftist oppositional politics and, like others whohad paid a high price for their politics with their bodies andyears in jail, had made a new life for himself in the 1990s onthe fringes of the development world. He was one of manyformer activists to work in consultancies and NGOs theythemselves created to catch the wave of NGO developmentfunding. All this was in line with the old Egyptian familyethos of watching out for the future of the next generation(Wikan 1996) and of providing children with the necessitiesof middle-class life, which were increasingly monetized bythe 1980s.

Huda sometimes worked at home. She would bringhome the manual typewriter from her workplace on theweekends or when her young son was sick. Part of her jobwas to supply her boss with local color about baladi womenshe knew for reports he authored for various funding agen-cies. During the hot summer months, she sometimes leftthe doors and windows of her apartment open. When atroublesome male neighbor chose to understand the openwindows as meaning that Huda was open to an approach,rather than as a concession to the heat, he walked in totest his interpretation. Huda kicked him out. Her brotherand other male relatives immediately confronted the manto make clear to him and others that she was not, as shetold me later, just from a family of some clerk (muwazaf),all alone in the world with no one to defend her and herreputation.

Toward the end of my fieldwork, Huda began to searchfor women that her boss could call empowered in his re-ports to development funders. Like Usta Ahmed, she tookadvantage of the ethnographers in her midst to seek outmore names than she would have been able to uncover onher own. Who did we know in the neighborhood? Wherewere these women? Could we introduce her to any of ourinformants? The information she and Usta Ahmed gath-ered and the reports they helped write were then incorpo-rated into other reports. I suggest that Huda was part of avast global process in which individual agents and agen-cies mapped out apparently random data about who knewwhom, who helped whom, who trusted whom, and whofunded whom. This activity might all seem to be about so-cial networks once again, but I argue that something elsewas under way.

The phatic labor ofHudas neighbors and forebears hadcreated countless nodes of connectivity within the semioticcommunity of Cairo. Huda facilitated the creation of newkinds of nodes in those channels. Those new nodes incor-porated different kinds of receivers for which signs had tobe translated and interpreted. The insertion of such nodesinto existing communicative channels subtly altered the na-ture of social infrastructure in Cairo. The process of uncov-ering channels and translating their meaning to new kinds

459

ap42310Highlight

ap42310Highlight

ap42310Highlight


of actors was an essential step in making legible and acces-sible to outsiders the social infrastructure of communica-tion that had been built up over the centuries by the phaticlabor of Hudas forebears.

Here it is useful to think for a moment back to Khadijaand the men of honor she helped create. As Malinowkishowed long ago, honor, fame, and value are created andreproduced through the flow of communicative resourcesin spacetime (Malinowski 1999; Munn 1986). Fame, repu-tation, information, and value can be rerouted to differentend points and undergomaterial and symbolic transforma-tions in the process. Hudas phatic labor helped effect suchtransformations. Signals moving through channels that hadbeen instantaneously understood by members of a semi-otic community in Cairo were entering into new chains ofmeaning and equivalencies. Names, reputation, and gos-sip acquired not only use value but other kinds of value aswell. In the process, channels along which signals and signscould travel were themselves being reshaped as a particularkind of signas a commodity (cf. Kockelman 2006).

If Khadija was a procurer of womens bodies, Hudamight be thought of as a phatic pimp. Khadija prostitutedwomens bodies. Huda, by contrast, prostituted signs ofwomens bodies and outcomes of phatic labor. She helpedgenerate and transmit signs of women to new actors in anemerging political economy in which communicative path-ways would have strategic economic value. The channelsfor which she provided nodes of access were empoweredby Hudas transformative labor. Through practices recog-nizable to her peers as sociality but with newly implantedgenetic content, Huda made subtle but crucial shifts inthe infrastructure of communicative channels in Cairo. Sheapplied some of the lessons she learned through her experi-mental labor to her own family ethos as well and opened upan NGO of her own in 2005.

Empowering phatic labor

In this article, I have argued that empowerment, in the clos-ing decades of the 20th century, was more about empow-ering the outcomes of womens practices of sociality thanabout effecting real changes in womens lives. Women em-powered in Cairo in the 1990s were like Nikolai Gogols(1997) dead souls, their names harvested for the value theyrendered without reference to the actual women at all. De-bates about whether empowerment worked and what it hasachieved are, in my view, beside the point. I do not meanto imply here that empowerment efforts failed. Somethingwas empowered by these efforts: a social infrastructure ofcommunicative channels built through historically culti-vated practices of sociality in Cairo. The concept of phaticlabor, I have argued, allows scholars to theorize the linkbetween communicative practices of sociality, the creationof infrastructure, and the use of that infrastructure in eco-

nomic projects oriented around a variety of goals, such asthe extraction of economic surplus or the capturing of com-munity resources for collective goals.

Infrastructure needs to be made visible, BruceRobbins has said, in order to see how our present land-scape is the product of past projects, past struggles(2007:32). Robbinss text reveals social struggles hidden inthe invisibility of infrastructure. My point is different: Un-like Robbinss social struggles, womens practices of social-ity have never been foregrounded as political or meaning-ful. Norwas it amalfunction that led to awareness of a socialinfrastructure of communicative pathways, as is often thecase with infrastructuresas when sewage systems fail andbridges collapse (Robbins 2007). The creation of new nodesin communicative channels by actors such as Huda wascrucial in fostering this awareness. She helped translatethat which had been immediately understood by membersof a semiotic community in Cairo into more explicit codethat could be accessed by those outside that community. Inthe process, she and other agents of empowerment financehelped illuminate, as it were, communicative channels andmake them available for new kinds of economic projects.Those historically constituted channels could begin to serveas infrastructure for new infrastructures, much as existingbridges and roads can be deployed as an infrastructure forsensor area networks (Mehta and El Zarki 2004:401).

Until the era of empowerment, an infrastructure ofcommunicative channels had functioned as a kind ofsemiotic commons (Kockelman 2005:262) in the politicaleconomy of Egypt. Communicative channels, talked aboutthrough the native concept of wasta, were essential forthe preservation of privilege among privileged Egyptians,among whom they were relatively stable and easy to for-mat and access through rents. Communicative channelswere accessed by poor baladi Cairenes through differentmeansthrough shared membership in a semiotic com-munity (Kockelman 2005:262). Members of a semioticcommunity shared resources of signs, gesture, and chan-nels. Empowerment finance helped make that semioticcommons visible as a resource that could be put to otheruses.

The cultivation of the channels of communicationthrough which resources could potentially flow, I have said,was not economically motivated. Womens practices of so-ciality operated according to one kind of scale of value andthen later were hooked up to a monetary scale of value(Guyer 2004). This began to be clear when global interestin lending circles started to grow with Keith Harts (n.d.) in-vention of the concept of the informal economy. The eco-nomic import of keeping channels open so that informa-tion could flow through them became increasingly obvious.What initially was of interest as an anomaly or piece of ex-oticism about a foreign place was revealed as a strategic re-source by which poor people survived without reliance on

460

ap42310Highlight

ap42310Highlight

ap42310Highlight

ap42310Highlight

ap42310Highlight

ap42310Highlight

ap42310Highlight

ap42310Highlight

ap42310Highlight


the state. In the period of empowerment, channels them-selves became of direct economic import.

Will the empowerment of communicative channels fa-cilitate their recognition as a public good available to all,as a collective good available to some, or as a privatizedinfrastructure through which historically produced com-munity resources can more easily be exploited? Once em-powered, the potentia of the CaireneEgyptian popularclasses can more easily be captured by the potestas of theglobal political economyglobal market. But such an out-come is not inevitable. As I mention above, social infras-tructures of communicative channels are being formattedas social ecologies for user-driven telecommunications likemobile phones (Horst and Miller 2006) and as paymentsspace in projects undertaken by corporations like Voda-fone, Visa, Mastercard, and Intel in cooperation with theBill andMelinda Gates Foundation and other philanthropicfunders (Maurer n.d.). Companies like Intel, Vodafone, andVisa employ ethnographers and integrate Malinowskis the-ories of the kula into their business models (Banks n.d.;Knight 2004; Madrigal 2008). When corporations institutebusiness models for telecommunications projects in theglobal South, they find a ready-made infrastructure for theirinvestments.

But outcomes of such projects are not clear-cut. Thereis no inexorable march toward the triumph of a capitalistfree market (Gibson-Graham 1996, 2005). Increased recog-nition of a communicative commons and social infrastruc-ture of communicative channels need not be commensu-ratewith enclosure in the sense associatedwith Karl Polanyi(1957:77103) or the usual stories of the tragedy of the com-mons (Peters 1994:121). Scholars know far too little aboutphatic labor and its outcomes to be sure of what will un-fold:Much ethnographic and theoreticalwork remains to bedone. In all the places where women have been absent frommale productive space butwhere they have visited back andforth across the reaches of megacities crammed with traf-fic, gossiped with friends, and sent letters to husbands andsons transported across borders to labor, an infrastructurewas being created through phatic labor that is now beingturned to different ends through the efforts of our infor-mants, our collaborators, and even ourselves. To just whatends remains to be seen.

Notes

Acknowledgments. I am grateful to the Fulbright Commission,Institutue of International Exchange, Egypt, and the Social ScienceResearch Council and to theMacArthur Foundation Program in In-ternational Peace and Security in a Changing World for supportingmy research in Egypt 199496. I am indebted to Essam Fawzi for hiscrucial contribution to the research on which this article is based.I wrote an earlier version of this article while a fellow of the Inter-national Center of Advanced Studies (ICAS) at New York University,

200607. I am grateful to the director of ICAS, Thomas Bender, andto Timothy Mitchell, director of the ICAS project The Authority ofKnowledge in a Global Age, for their support. I am indebted to LilaAbu-Lughod, Tom Boellstorff, Bill Maurer, Tomaz Mastnak, threeanonymous reviewers from American Ethnologist, and, especially,Paul Kockelman, for their suggestions and insightful comments.Mythanks as well to Linda Forman for her thoughtful copyediting. Allremaining errors are my own.1. Cell phones in Cairo were still extremely rare when I con-

ducted the research on which this article is based. Landlines werealso rare among the working poor. By 2005, when I returned toconduct short-term research in Cairo, cell phones had becomeubiquitous.2. The relationship between male honor and womens bodies is

addressed by a vast literature in anthropology and related disci-plines. For a classic approach to honor, shame, and womens bod-ies in the Mediterranean area, see Delaney 1987, Gilmore 1987,Peristiany 1966, and Peristiany and Pitt-Rivers 2005. For more re-cent approaches, see Abu-Lughod 2000, Akpinar 2003, Heath 2008,Peirce 1993, andWeidman 2003.3. I am indebted to my interlocutor Paul Kockelman for suggest-

ing I turn to the concept of phatic communion to think about mymaterial in Cairo, for coining the term phatic labor in an e-mail ex-change about an earlier version of this article, and for stimulatingdiscussion about channels and infrastructure.4. I am indebted to an anonymous American Ethnologist re-

viewer for reminding me of this point.5. There is an important body of literature in anthropology on

sexuality and prostitution. For a sample, the interested reader canturn to Dunne n.d., Kandiyoti 1994, andWilson 2004.6. Those practices do, however, create something of that which

constitutes the human artifice, the world we live in (Arendt2000:173), if artifice is understood to include communicativechannels.7. In Max Webers classic formulation, social action is action in

which the actors behavior is meaningfully oriented to that of oth-ers (1978:23).8. MyPh.D. dissertationprojectwas originally on the circularmi-

gration of Egyptians to the Gulf states and its impacts on the pro-duction of urban space in Cairo. I draw from some of my researchoutcomes in the paragraph that follows in the text (Elyachar 1993,1995).

References cited

Abu-Lughod, Lila2000 Veiled Sentiments: Honor and Poetry in a Bedouin Society.Berkeley: University of California Press.

2009 Dialects of Womens Empowerment: The International Cir-cuitry of the Arab Human Development Report 2005. Interna-tional Journal of Middle Eastern Studies 41(1):83103.

Agger, Ben1998 Critical Social Theories: An Introduction. Boulder, CO:Westview Press.

Akpinar, Aylin2003 The Honour/Shame Complex Revisited: Violence againstWomen in the Migration Context. Womens Studies Interna-tional Forum 26(5):425442.

Arendt, Hannah2000 The Portable Hannah Arendt. Peter Baehr, ed. New York:Penguin.

Assaad, Ragui1993 Formal and Informal Institutions in the Labor Market, with

461

ap42310Highlight


Applications to the Construction Sector in Egypt. World Devel-opment 21(6):925939.

Banks, KenN.d. Africas Grassroots Mobile Revolution: A Travelers Per-spective. Receiver Magazine 20Emerging Markets. http://www.receiver.vodafone.com/20-africas-grassroots, accessedSeptember 20, 2009.

Barry, Andrew2005 The British-Georgian Case: The Baku-Tbilisi-CeyhanPipeline. In Territoires, environnement et nouveaux modesde gestion: La gouvernance en question. B. Latour and C.Gramaglia, eds. Pp. 105118. Paris: Centre National de laRecherche Scientifique.

2006 Technological Zones. European Journal of Social Theory9(2):239253.

Bellow, Adam2004 In Praise of Nepotism: A History of Family Enterprise fromKing David to George W. Bush. New York: Anchor.

Bibars, Iman2001 Victims and Heroines: Women, Welfare, and the EgyptianState. New York: Palgrave.

Bourdieu, Pierre1990 The Logic of Practice. Richard Nice, trans. Stanford:Stanford University Press.

Brodkin, Karen2006 Toward a Unified Theory of Class, Race, and Gender. InFeminist Anthropology: A Reader. Ellen Lewin, ed. Pp. 129146. Malden, MA: Blackwell.

Castells, Manuel1996 Rise of the Network Society. Oxford: Blackwell.

Cheater, Angela, ed.1999 The Anthropology of Power: Empowerment and Disem-powerment in Changing Structures. ASA Monographs, 36.New York: Routledge.

Clough, Patricia Ticineto2007 Introduction. In The Affective Turn: Theorizing the So-cial. Patricia Ticineto Clough and Jean Halley, eds. Pp. 133.Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Delaney, Carol1987 Seeds of Honor, Fields of Shame. In Honor and Shame andthe Unity of the Mediterranean. David D. Gilmore, ed. Pp. 3548. Special Publication, 22.Washington, DC: American Anthro-pological Association.

Dunne, BruceN.d. Power and Sexuality in the Middle East. MERIP 206. http://www.merip.org/mer/mer206/bruce.htm, accessed March 20,2010.

Elyachar, Julia1993 The Impact of Gulf Migration on Egyptian Constructions ofIdentity and Economy as Seen from the Street in Cairo. Paperpresented at the Seventh Annual SSRC-MacArthur FoundationFellows Conference, Istanbul, May.

1995 Networks across Borders, Migration, Informality, and theState: An Ethnography of Three Streets in Cairo. Paper pre-sented at the Ninth Annual SSRC-MacArthur Foundation Fel-lows Conference: Facing the Future: New Challenges forPeace and Security, Washington, DC, May.

2005 Markets of Dispossession: NGOs, Economic Development,and the State in Cairo. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

In press The Political Economy of Movement and Gesture inCairo. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 17.

Escobar, Arturo1994 Encountering Development: The Making and Unmaking ofthe Third World. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Ferguson, James1990 The Anti-Politics Machine: Development, Depoliti-cization, and Bureaucratic Power in Lesotho. Cambridge:Cambridge University Press.

Fine, Ben2000 Economics Imperialism and Intellectual Progress: ThePresent as History of Economic Thought? History of Eco-nomics Review 32:1036.

Franceschetti, Massimo, and Ronald Meester2007 Random Networks for Communication: From StatisticalPhysics to Information Systems. Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-versity Press.

Friedmann, John1992 Empowerment: The Politics of Alternative Development.Malden, MA: Blackwell.

Gibson-Graham, J. K.1996 The End of Capitalism (As We Knew It): A Feminist Critiqueof Political Economy. Oxford: Blackwell.

2005 Surplus Possibilities: Postdevelopment and CommunityEconomics. Journal of Tropical Geography 26(1):426.

Gilmore, David D., ed.1987 Honor and Shame and the Unity of theMediterranean. Spe-cial Publication, 22. Washington, DC: American Anthropologi-cal Association.

Gogol, Nikolai1997[1842] Dead Souls: A Novel. New York: Vintage.

Gupta, Akhil, and Aradhana Sharma2006 Globalization and Postcolonial States. Current Anthropol-ogy 47(2):277307.

Guyer, Jane2004 Marginal Gains: Monetary Transactions in Atlantic Africa.Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Hardt, Michael2007 Foreword: What Affects Are Good For. In The AffectiveTurn: Theorizing the Social. Patricia Ticineto Clough andJean Halley, eds. Pp. ixxiii. Durham, NC: Duke UniversityPress.

Hart, KeithN.d. African Enterprise and the Informal Economy: An Autobi-ographical Note. http://www.thememorybank.co.uk/keith/papers/african-enterprise-and-the-informal-economy/, ac-cessed November 10, 2009.

Heath, Jennifer, ed.2008 The Veil: Women Writers on Its History, Lore, and Politics.Berkeley: University of California Press.

Hemment, Julie2007 Empowering Women in Russia: Activism, Aid, and NGOs.Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Hirschman, Albert O.1997[1977] The Passions and the Interests: Political Argumentsfor Capitalism before Its Triumph. Princeton: Princeton Uni-versity Press.

Hoodfar, Homa1997 Between Marriage and the Market: Intimate Politics andSurvival in Cairo. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Horst, Heather, and Daniel Miller2006 The Cell Phone: An Anthropology of Communication. NewYork: Berg.

Hutchings, Kate, and David Weir2005 Guanxi and Wasta: A Comparison. Thunderbird Interna-tional Business Review 48(1):141156.

Inhorn, Marcia D.2004 Privacy, Privatization, and the Politics of Patronage: Ethno-graphic Challenges to Penetrating the Secret World of Middle

462


Eastern, Hospital-Based In Vitro Fertilization. Social ScienceandMedicine 59(10):20952108.

Jagger, Alison M.1994 Livingwith Contradictions: Controversies in Feminist SocialEthics. Boulder, CO: Westview Press.

Jakobson, Roman1990[1960] The Speech Event and the Function of Language.In On Language. Linda R. Waugh and Monique Monville-Burston, eds. Pp. 6979. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UniversityPress.

Kandiyoti, Deniz1994 The Paradoxes of Masculinity: Some Thoughts on Seg-regated Societies. In Dislocating Masculinity: ComparativeEthnographies. Andrea Cornwall and Nancy Lindisfarne, eds.Pp. 197213. London: Routledge.

Karim, Lamia2008 Demystifying Micro-Credit. Cultural Dynamics 20(1):529.

Keane, Webb2008Market,Materiality, andMoralMetalanguage. Anthropolog-ical Theory 8(1):2742.

Kholy, Heba el-2003 Defiance and Compliance: Negotiating Gender in Low-Income Cairo. New Directions in Anthropology, 15. Oxford:Berghahn Books.

Kipnis, Andrew B.1997 Producing Guanxi: Sentiment, Self, and Subculture in aNorth China Village. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Knight, Will2004 Anthropologists to Beat Gadget Rage. New Scientist,December. http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn6803, ac-cessed March 20, 2010.

Kockelman, Paul2005 The Semiotic Stance. Semiotica 157(14):233304.2006 A Semiotic Ontology of the Commodity. Journal of Linguis-tic Anthropology 16(1):76102.

2007 Enclosure and Disclosure. Public Culture 19(2):303305.

N.d. Enemies, Parasites, and Noise. Unpublished MS, Depart-ment of Anthropology, Barnard College.

Larkin, Brian2008 Signal and Noise: Media, Infrastructure, and Urban Culturein Nigeria. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Leve, Lauren2007 Failed Development and Rural Revolution in Nepal: Re-thinking Subaltern Consciousness and Womens Empower-ment. Anthropological Quarterly 80(1):127172.

Loewe, Markus, Jonas Blume, and Johanna Speer2008 How Favoritism Affects the Business Climate: Empirical Ev-idence from Jordan. Middle East Journal 62(2):259276.

Madrigal, Alexis2008 Intel Anthropologists Find Keys to Tech Adoption. WiredScience. http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2008/06/intel-anthropol/, accessed October 16, 2009.

Malinowski, Bronislaw1936[1923] The Problem of Meaning in Primitive Languages. InThe Meaning of Meaning. C. K. Ogden and A. I. Richards, eds.Pp. 296336. New York: Harcourt, Brace.

1999[1922] Argonauts of the Western Pacific: An Account of Na-tive Enterprise and Adventure in the Archipelagoes of Melane-sian New Guinea. London: Routledge.

Mandeville, Bernard1988[1732] The Fable of the Bees: Or, Private Vices, Publick Ben-efits. With a Commentary Critical, Historical, and Explanatoryby F. B. Kaye. 2 vols. Indianapolis: Liberty Fund.

Marx, Karl1956[1885] Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, vol. 2. Fred-erick Engels, ed. I. Lasker, trans. Moscow: Progress.

Maurer, BillN.d. Retail Electronic Payments Systems for Value Transfers inthe Developing World. Unpublished MS, Department of An-thropology, University of California, Irvine.

Mehta, Vipin, andMagda El Zarki2004 A Bluetooth Based Sensor Network for Civil InfrastructureHealth Monitoring. Wireless Networks 10:401412.

Misra, Kavita2008 Politico-Moral Transactions in Indian AIDS Service: Confi-dentiality, Rights, and New Modalities of Governance. In TheAnthropology of Globalization: A Reader. Jonathan Xavier Indaand Renato Rosaldo, eds. Pp. 433467. Malden, MA: Blackwell.

Mitchell, Timothy2009 Carbon Democracy. Economy and Society 38(3):399432.

Moodie, Megan2008 Enter Microcredit: A New Culture of Womens Em-powerment in Rajasthan? American Ethnologist 35(3):454465.

Munn, Nancy1986 The Fame of Gawa: A Symbolic Study of Value Transforma-tion in a Massim (Papua New Guinea) Society. Durham, NC:Duke University Press.

Narotzky, Susana2008 Reply: Whats Changed (since 1975)? Dialectical Anthropol-ogy 32(12):916.

Otter, Christopher2002 Making Liberalism Durable: Vision and Civility in the LateVictorian City. Social History 27(1):115.

2004 Cleansing and Clarifying: Technology and Perception inNineteenth Century London. Journal of British Studies 43:4064.

Pedersen, David2008 Brief Event: The Value of Getting to Value in the Era ofGlobalization. Anthropological Theory 8(1):5777.

Peirce, Leslie1993 The Imperial Harem: Women and Sovereignty in theOttoman Empire. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Peristiany, J. G., ed.1966 Honour and Shame: The Values of Mediterranean Society.Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Peristiany, J. G., and Julian Pitt-Rivers, eds.2005 Honor and Grace in Anthropology. Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press.

Peters, Pauline1994 Dividing the Commons: Politics, Policy, and Culture inBotswana. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia.

Polanyi, Karl1957[1944] The Great Transformation: The Political and Eco-nomic Origins of Our Time. New York: Beacon Press.

Rahman, Aminur2001 Women and Microcredit in Rural Bangladesh: An An-thropological Study of Grameen Bank Lending. Boulder, CO:Westview Press.

Rankin, Katharine N.2008 Manufacturing Rural Finance in Asia: Institutional Assem-blages, Market Societies, Entrepreneurial Subjects. Geoforum39(6):19651977.

Robbins, Bruce2007 The Smell of Infrastructure: Notes toward an Archive.Boundary 2 34(1):2533.

463


Samuelson, Paul A.1954 The Pure Theory of Public Expenditure. Review of Eco-nomics and Statistics 36(4):387389.

Scott, James C.1987 Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resis-tance. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Shannon, C. E.1948 A Mathematical Theory of Communication. Bell SystemTechnical Journal 27:379423, 623656.

Singerman, Diane1995 Avenues of Participation: Family, Politics, and Networksin Urban Quarters of Cairo. Princeton: Princeton UniversityPress.

Smith, Adam1984[1759] Theory of Moral Sentiments. Indianapolis: LibertyFund.

Stiglitz, Joseph E.1999 Knowledge as aGlobal Public Good. InGlobal Public Goods:International Cooperation in the 21st Century. Inge Kaul, Is-abelle Grunberg, and Marc A. Stern, eds. Pp. 308325. NewYork: Oxford University Press.

Weber, Max1978[1956] Economy and Society, vol. 1. Guenther Rothand Claus Wittich, eds. Berkeley: University of CaliforniaPress.

Weidman, Amanda2003 Beyond Honor and Shame: Performing Gender inthe Mediterranean. Anthropological Quarterly 76(3):519530.

Weiner, Annette1992 Inalienable Possessions: The Paradox of Keeping-While-Giving. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Wikan, Uni1996 Tomorrow, God Willing: Self-Made Destinies in Cairo.Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Willigen, John Van2002 Applied Anthropology: An Introduction. Abingdon, UK:Greenwood.

Wilson, Ara2004 The Intimate Economies of Bangkok: Tomboys, Tycoons,and Avon Ladies in the Global City. Berkeley: University ofCalifornia Press.

Zellerer, Evelyn, and Dmitriy Vyortkin2004 Womens Grassroots Struggles for Empowerment. SocialPolitics: International Studies in Gender, State and Society11(3):439464.

accepted December 25, 2009final version submitted December 9, 2009

Julia ElyacharDepartment of AnthropologySocial Science Plaza BUniversity of California at IrvineIrvine, CA 92697-5100

[email protected]

464

Documents

Julia Elyachar_Phatic Labor, Infrastructure and the Question of Empowerment