Mass Culture and Modernism in Egypt

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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 and thin ethnography were made for each other. Armbrust's ethnography, conducted in middle-class Cairo, as rich as any work based in Egypt's Bedouin camps and peasant villages. Moreover, this richness 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 effective. It makes sense of Egyptian popular culture in much the way a good grammar makes sense of a language. Armbrust 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 rendered authentically Egyptian, Armbrust argues, by linking it to the classical Islamic heritage and the Arabic language. Unlike the forms of modernity (once) prevalent in the metropolitan West, those prevalent in Egypt do not insist on a clean break with the past. In Armbrust's view, they cannot. For most of this century Egypt's popular (and largely state-controlled) media have cultivated a modern Egyptian identity by churning out films, music, and literature in which elements defined as traditional and authentic are placed in a with elements portrayed as modern and Occidental. For this representational maneuver to succeed, the links between the modem and the authentic must be drawn with obvious care. Armbrust discusses how this done in soap operas such as The White Flag, in the musical innovations of Abd al-Wahhab, and even in the work habits of the editorial staff of al-Ahram Weekly. Yet this synthetic formula no longer as convincing as it used to be. Since the 1970s works described as have become increasingly popular in Egypt. Armbrust files the oeuvre of pop singer Adawiya and the films of comedian Adil Imam under the heading of art. They belong in this niche because they make no attempt to strike a happy balance between heritage and modernity. In vulgar art the traditional protagonist not ennobled by his encounter with enlightened progress. Modernity cast as an illusion, and modern institutions-public schools, the state, and professional associations-are portrayed as failures. Armbrust suggests that the proliferation of vulgar art one facet of Egyptian postmodernity, a mass culture phenomenon which, like Egyptian modernity, cannot be understood by simple analogy to what these (very loaded) terms mean in the metropole. …