Full Description
For members of Cairo's upper classes, cosmopolitanism is a form of social capital, deployed whenever they acquire or consume transnational commodities, or goods that are linked in the popular imagination to other, more "modern" places. In a series of thickly described and carefully contextualized case studies—of Arabic children's magazines, Pokémon, private schools and popular films, coffee shops and fast-food restaurants—Mark Allen Peterson describes the social practices that create class identities. He traces these processes from childhood into adulthood, examining how taste and style intersect with a changing educational system and economic liberalization. Peterson reveals how uneasy many cosmopolitan Cairenes are with their new global identities, and describes their efforts to root themselves in the local through religious, nationalist, or linguistic practices.
Contents
Acknowledgments
Note on Transliteration
1. Toward an Anthropology of Connections
2. Making Kids Modern: Agency and Identity in Arabic Children's Magazines
3. Pokémon Panics: Class Play in the Private Schools
4. Talk Like an Egyptian: Negotiating Identity at the American University in Cairo
5. Coffee Shops and Gender in Translocal Spaces
6. The Global and the Multilocal: Development, Enterprise, and Culture Brokers
Epilogue
Dramatis Personae
Notes
References
Index
