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The Great Social Laboratory: Subjects of Knowledge in Colonial and Postcolonial Egypt

Online ISBN:
9780804781923
Print ISBN:
9780804755672
Publisher:
Stanford University Press
Book

The Great Social Laboratory: Subjects of Knowledge in Colonial and Postcolonial Egypt

Published online:
20 June 2013
Published in print:
29 October 2007
Online ISBN:
9780804781923
Print ISBN:
9780804755672
Publisher:
Stanford University Press

Abstract

This book charts the development of the human sciences—anthropology, human geography, and demography—in late nineteenth-and twentieth-century Egypt. Tracing both intellectual and institutional genealogies of knowledge production, it examines social science through a broad range of texts and cultural artifacts, ranging from the ethnographic museum, to architectural designs, to that pinnacle of social scientific research—“the article.” The book explores the interface between European and Egyptian social scientific discourses, and interrogates the boundaries of knowledge production in a colonial and post-colonial setting. It examines the complex imperatives of race, class, and gender in the Egyptian colonial context, uncovering the new modes of governance, expertise, and social knowledge that defined a distinctive era of nationalist politics in the inter-and post-war periods. Finally, the book looks at the discursive field mapped out by colonial and nationalist discourses on the racial identity of the modern Egyptians.

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