In the Shadow of the Colonizer: Studying Up in the Postcolonial Middle East

Abstract

The article discusses challenges related to studying mobile elites in a postcolonial country, Egypt. It draws on the author’s ethnographic fieldwork with privileged members of Egyptian society during a politically turbulent period between 2011 and 2014. It illustrates how both the positionality of the researcher and the research subject are shaped by various geographic, social, and temporal locations. By delving into the complexities of elite research in a context that is informed and shaped by colonial legacies, the article questions the analytical value of binaries such as ‘Western’ and ‘non-Western,’ the ‘Global South’ and the ‘Global North,’ and ‘colonized’ and ‘colonizer’. These binaries, embedded in various research agendas, are often too shallow to grasp the existing social hierarchies and power asymmetries. Instead, they can be co-opted by the elite in pursuit of power and influence. The article proceeds by first tracing the (colonial) histories of contemporary taxonomies of difference in the Egyptian context. It then examines how subjectivities and agendas shift along political constellations and calls for political reflexivity.

Keywords

• elite mobility
• postcolonial
• ethnography
• the middle east
• positionality
• political reflexivity