Egyptian workshop, global enterprise: Visions of economy and urban life in Cairo, 1900-1996

Through an ethnography of a Cairo neighborhood that was constructed by the Egyptian state, funded by international organizations (IOs), and is home to numerous small workshops and enterprises, this dissertation problematizes the following issues. Why have "informal economy" and "microenterprise" become such popular development strategies around the world since the 1980s? What is the nature of relations among "the state," IOs and NGOs, and the social field of "informality" in Egypt? What distinguishes the workshop from its seeming synonym, the microenterprise, a category constructed by IOs and other development agencies? Why did the workshop disappear in modernist, and then reappear in postmodern discussions about "the economy" in Egypt? What happens at the intersection of a global project to support microenterprise, the Egyptian state which that project tries to circumvent, and the complex social fields of life in Cairo? Sites of ethnographic research to answer these questions included workshops, homes, and the offices of NGOs, IOs, banks, and state bureaucracies. Comparison is made with another attempt at model town building in Cairo at the start of the 20th century.;Rooted in the historical experience of crafts and guilds throughout the Middle East and deeply marked by the practices and values of Egyptian Islam, workshops have provided the backbone for life in Cairo for centuries. And yet, as an economic structure embedded in "backward" cultural practice, workshops were erased from view in visions of economy and urban life put forward by European colonialists and Egyptian nationalists alike. When waves of migration to the Gulf states in the 1970s and 1980s transformed the nature of property and power relations in Egypt, however, workshops re-emerged as an object of public discourse. Neither the workshop nor the state regulating them were untouched by these transformations. Through it all, complex networks of exchange have continued to link together workshops, through the nexus of the "master," in a social world of rich symbolic content. While impacts of the new money and ideologies entering Egypt have been many, transforming workshops into microenterprises has not been one of them.