When the lights go down in Cairo: Cinema as secular ritual

Abstract

Can habits of spectatorship contribute to social transformation? This essay looks at moviegoing in downtown Cairo as a secular ritual that can potentially enable kinds of social change not necessarily envisioned by the state, approved by normative society, or engineered through films themselves. Although filmwatching in Cairene cinemas does, in some cases, verge on the carnivalesque, spectatorship in this context is important primarily as a zone of ambiguity in which middle‐class identity is defined by a tension between establishment visions of order and youthful experimentation.