Upending Infrastructure: Tamarod, Resistance, and Agency after the January 25th Revolution in Egypt

Abstract

In this paper, I review recent contributions to theories of resistance and agency in the context of anthropology of Egypt. Drawing on ethnography conducted in Egypt after the January 25th Revolution and then after the election of Mohamed Morsi as President, I analyse the mass mobilization movement in Egypt called Tamarod. Tamarod led the effort to have twenty-two million Egyptians sign a call for President Mohamed Morsi of the Muslim Brotherhood to step down, and mobilized an estimated twelve million to come on the street for a mass demonstration on 30 June, after which Morsi was removed from power. Rather than critique the notion of Tamarod as resistance, as a dupe of the Military, or as the legitimate voice of the Egyptian people and their agency, I argue that Tamarod made visible, and rendered available for political goals, a social infrastructure of communicative channels in Egypt. More generally, the paper shows concretely, and as concomitant processes, how agency is embedded in infrastructure and how infrastructure is upended in uprisings.

Keywords:

• Egypt
• Resistance
• Infrastructure
• Revolution
• Social Theory

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Corrigendum

Acknowledgements

Partial funding for the research on which this article is based was provided by the Institute for Money, Technology, and Financial Inclusion, University of California, Irvine. Thanks to audiences at Harvard University and the “Retreat on Foundations of Social Agency,” Max Planck Institute, as well as to Lila Abu-Lughod, Nathan Coben, Essam Fawzi, Paul Kockelman, Sean Mallin, Tomaz Mastnak, Bill Maurer, Ajantha Subramanian, and two anonymous reviewers for their help and comments on earlier drafts. All remaining errors are my own.

Notes

1 My thanks to Ajantha Subramanian for this formulation.

2 As I show below, these numbers are the object of intense debate.

3 I have conducted fieldwork in Cairo since 1993, for four years in the 1990s, and then on regular shorter visits since, and keeping up with friends and informants by phone and Internet.

4 For one account, see http://english.ahram.org.eg/NewsContent/1/0/43995/Egypt/0/Khaled-Said-The-face-that-launched-a-revolution.aspx.

5 For one account of these battles and attacks on heads and eyes by the police, see http://www.egyptindependent.com/news/police-reportedly-shoot-out-activists-right-eye-mansour-street-clashes.

6 This section is adopted from “Writing the Revolution”, online “Hotspot” on Egypt, edited by Jessica Winegar and myself, which in turn built on a panel about Egypt we co-organized at the AAA in 2012, as part of a double panel together with Farha Ghannam on the Arab Spring.

7 SCAF, or the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces, is made up of senior officers in the Egyptian Army. SCAF assumed power in Egypt after President Hosni Mubarak's resignation on 11 February 2011, and again on 3 July 2013, when Morsy was deposed. SCAF did not formally rule Egypt after 3 July: the military leadership used a civil government with a formal head of the state as a legal front. I am grateful to an anonymous reviewer for reminding me of this important fact.

8 I am indebted to Lila Abu-Lughod for the line of thought and formulation in this paragraph.

9 In the wake of the rebellion, the Crown assumes direct responsibility over the Company's former Indian territories and, in its first official act, “explicitly put forth a doctrine of non-intervention as the direct principle of British rule” (Mantena 2010, 40).

10 I am indebted to an anonymous reviewer for this insight, and for pointing me to Laidlaw's work on agency, ontology, and efficacy (Laidlaw 2010).