Imagine two Egypts. The first is a mystical, antique land. A vast shimmering desert is bisected by a narrow strip of lush green running from south to north. Along the fringes of the fertile Nile Valley lie the ruins of ancient civilizations, more than five millennia old, whose pyramids and temples and tombs have been preserved through the centuries by the sand and the dry desert climate. Secret passages have been found in the pyramids, low crawling passageways that open out onto hidden inner chambers with empty sarcophagi. Ancient avenues are guarded by sphinxes and obelisks, sunbeams frozen in stone. Towering granite statues of long-dead kings and queens preside over vast, echoing halls of temples in the south. You can walk through these ruins, dwarfed by huge columns carved with lotus flowers, your heels echoing on the stone floor, and imagine that they were the palaces of a long-extinct race of magician-giants. These ancients had sophisticated astronomical knowledge and built their monuments to align with the sun and the stars on solstices and equinoxes.
The land of Egypt today is peopled by the descendents of these pharaohs. The ruins are best toured in the winter, but if you have to come in the summer, you go to bed early and rise with the sun so you can visit the monuments in the morning, before the blinding sun reflected off the glassy desert sand makes your eyes ache from squinting and you wilt in the intense afternoon heat. The evening is reserved for trips to the Khan el-Khalili, the maze-like bazaar where you can buy gold and silver pendants with your name worked in hieroglyphs, or you can haggle with shopkeepers over souvenirs made by local artisans such as mother-of-pearl inlaid boxes, alabaster vases, or delicate hand-blown glass bottles containing fragrant oils that the shopkeepers will tell you are the same scents that perfumed the bodies of Nefertiti and Cleopatra.
The other Egypt is vividly alive, and its pharaonic ruins are mere background for more modern dramas. The pyramids, on the outskirts of Cairo, are the set for romantic trysts in numerous Egyptian films where lovers steal kisses on the tumble of lower blocks. In this Egypt, Cairo is the center of the Arab world, and it's like Hollywood and New York all rolled into one big, dusty, overcrowded city of more than fifteen million. In the more elegant neighborhoods of Mohandiseen and Zamalek, people keep their eyes peeled for a glimpse of a famous movie star or singer. Omar Sharif has retired to an apartment in Mohandiseen, and many fondly remember how forty years ago he was so smitten by actress Faten Hamama that he converted to Islam to marry her, only to be divorced by her a few years later because of his gambling addiction. When the beloved classical singer Umm Kalthoum died in 1975, millions thronged the streets to walk in a funeral procession more than a mile long, and the entire Arab world mourned "the Lady." This Egypt is a political powerhouse, with an outspoken foreign minister (now head of the Arab League) who mediates regional conflicts, and a popular singer who achieved instant stardom all over the Arab world with his hit single, "I Hate Israel." This Egypt brings to mind visions of glamorous belly dancers who whirl in sequined costumes that glitter like the surface of the Nile at night as it reflects the colored lights of the city. The beautiful dancer Dina performs wearing a four-carat diamond on her dainty foot; it is rumored that a wealthy admirer gave it to her and she had it set in a toe ring to show her disdain for him.
In this Egypt, the only time to visit is the summer, when throngs from all over the Arab world come to Cairo for vacation. The days are hot and dull, so you sleep through them, waking up in the late afternoon and going down to the garden cafés of the hotels for a breakfast of stewed fava beans, and you sit and watch young women promenading along the length of tables while you leisurely smoke an apple-scented shisha (water pipe). This Egypt comes alive after sunset, when the uniform brown of the dusty city dissolves into a cool night of velvet indigo, speckled with pinpricks of light from streetlamps and towering office buildings and neon shop signs. You stay up all night, going to restaurants and theaters and discotheques. You go to see the latest Alaa Wali Eddin summer blockbuster hit, and when you go back home you will gloat about seeing it long before it came out on videotape. You might go with your family to see a belly dancer perform on a boat that cruises down the Nile, or you might take in a "Russian show" where five or six Eastern Bloc beauties wearing thong leotards over fishnet stockings and feather headdresses execute a perfectly synchronized dance routine to a medley of Western and Arab tunes. You don't visit the pyramids, but you see them from a distance when you make a pilgrimage to Pyramids Road, the long street leading from Cairo to the pyramids which is famously lined with nightclubs and cabarets that are open from late evening until six or seven o'clock in the morning. There, patrons show their appreciation for a favorite dancer by literally showering her with money, handing a wad of ten-pound bills to the stage manager, who fans the notes and lets them spill over the dancer's body as she shimmies, scattering onto the stage where they are quickly retrieved by a waiter while the dancer steps over to her admirer's table to thank him with a smile and a nod. You leave the nightclub as the sun is starting to rise, and you stumble back into your hotel just as the Western tourists are filing onto tour buses destined for the Giza pyramids or Saqqara or the Egyptian Museum.
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For most Westerners, Egypt evokes mummies and pyramids. Westerners have been touring Egypt since the ancient Greeks, following a well-traveled tourist route up the Nile River. The Nile has been the central axis of civilization in Egypt, from ancient to modern times, and, except for the development of beach resorts in the Sinai and on the Red Sea and Mediterranean coasts, the Nile cruise remains the basic tourist route even today.
So entwined is the West's image of Egypt with its ancient monuments that it seems self-evident to Europeans and Americans that the pyramids are Egypt's number one tourist attraction. But the pyramids are low on the list of destinations for Gulf Arabs visiting Egypt. Arabs engage with a more contemporary imagining of Egyptian culture, one that is grounded in the regional circulation of singers, dancers, and movie stars. Tourists from Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and the United Arab Emirates are famous for spending their time not at the pyramids but rather in the nightclubs of Pyramids Road. The difference between Arab and Western tourism is literally night and day: the pyramid tours start early in the morning to beat the midday heat, while nightclub evenings don't come to an end until the early-morning light.
Arabs and Westerners don't see the same Egypt. What they see is influenced by their own culture, language, religion, history, and politics. These different imaginations of Egypt have in turn shaped Egypt's own view of itself, creating overlapping layers of identity: Egypt as the land of the pharaohs, pyramids, and mummies, but also Egypt as the center of Arab cinema, Arab music, and belly dancing. Centuries of transnational exchanges have produced layers of imaginations of Egypt.
Ultimately these different views of Egypt reveal as much about Westerners and Gulf Arabs as they reveal about Egypt. The Western fascination with pharaonic Egypt cannot be understood without seeing how Egyptology was intertwined with the history of European imperialism. And the Egyptian stereotype of Gulf Arabs as spending long nights salivating over belly dancers is symptomatic of a Middle Eastern migrant labor economy marked by cultural differences and resentment over the uneven distribution of oil wealth. This book explores parallel Western and Arab experiences with Egypt as a way of reflecting back their differences and similarities.
Herodotus as Their Travel Guide
For millennia it was tradition for Western travelers—from Greeks to Romans to nineteenth-century Europeans—to read Herodotus as a kind of travel guide to Egypt. The "Father of History" traveled to Egypt around 460-455 BCE, and his travels generated a peculiar mix of history, observed fact, hearsay, and myth. He described the most ancient of the Seven Wonders of the World, the Great Pyramid of Giza, and claimed that the pharaoh's daughter funded its construction by prostituting herself:
Now the priests told me that Cheops enjoined all the Egyptians to work for him. ... Cheops, they continued, descended so low, that for want of money he placed his own daughter in a chamber, and charged her to get a certain sum of money. ... She not only obtained the sum appointed by her father, but on her own account was minded to leave a memorial behind her, and asked each of her visitors to give her one stone for the work. Of these stones, they said, the Pyramid was built which stands in the middle of the three before the Great Pyramid.
Herodotus's combined fascination with the pharaohs' monumental buildings and his erotic fantasies of the exotic were echoed more than two millennia later by Gustave Flaubert, whose letters gave an account of his travels up the Nile, where descriptions of climbing pyramids are interspersed with graphic accounts of his visits to dancing girls and prostitutes. Having read in Herodotus that the Pyramid of Menkaure (Mykineros, as the Greeks called it) was built by order of a Greek courtesan named Rhodopis, in his notes, Flaubert insisted on calling it the Pyramid of Rhodopis. The European Orientalist imagination of the mythically decadent sexuality of the East that Rana Kabbani, Edward Said, and others have written about has a very long pedigree indeed.
From Herodotus to Flaubert to modern-day tourists, travelers have followed a well-traveled route that starts in Alexandria, proceeds on to the monuments of Giza and Memphis (Saqqara), and then up the Nile to Karnak, Thebes, and Aswan. The West's ancient fascination with pharaonic monuments received new impetus in the modern period with Napoleon's invasion of the country in 1798. The French imperial spirit was self-consciously represented as a scientific expedition, concerned, among other things, with investigating ancient monuments. As historian Robert Tignor has observed, this gave it the noble pedigree of Enlightenment progress (Tignor 1993:1-15). A legacy of empire, the tourism industry in Egypt today directs Western tourists to see an ancient Egypt littered with the excavated monuments of a pharaonic past.
The touristic appeal of ancient Egypt seems obvious to a Westerner. But Gulf Arab tourists in Egypt rarely spend much time visiting pharaonic sites, nor do they constitute any substantial percentage of the tourists taking Nile cruises to Luxor. Instead, Gulf tourists bypass the pyramids and engage with a more contemporary imagining of Egyptian culture.
Within a Middle Eastern context, Egypt is more a contemporary cultural and media giant than it is the "antique land" of Shelley, broadcasting its movies, television serials, and popular music to the entire Arab world (Armbrust 1996, Abu-Lughod 2004). For Arabs, Egypt evokes images not just of pyramids but also of famous politicians, such as Gamal Abdel Nasser of Arab nationalism fame, Nobel Prize-winning author Naguib Mahfouz, revered singers such as Umm Kalthoum, pop culture heartthrobs like Amrou Diyab, comedians such as Adel Imam and Alaa Waly Eddin, dramatic actresses and actors such as Nadia el-Guindi and Ahmed Zaki, and famous belly dancers Fifi Abdou, Lucy, and Dina. Arabs are all aware of the Egyptian pyramids, but in the Arab world the more immediate picture that Egypt brings to mind is an exotic accent that everyone has heard in songs, movies, and television serials since childhood.
Even though I am American and was myself raised on images of pyramids and mummies, I first became interested in the topic of tourism in Egypt while living in Saudi Arabia and hearing accounts of my Saudi friends' vacations in Cairo. A monarchy ruled by the al-Saud family, Saudi Arabia is the site of Islam's two holiest cities. Its vast oil wealth also makes it a magnet for migrant workers from all over the world. I went to Saudi Arabia when I was twenty years old. My father, a geophysicist, had gone to work there, so I decided to leave school and go live for a while in Saudi Arabia with my family. It was just after the Gulf War had brought images of the Arabian peninsula to Americans, and my friends in New York thought that it sounded like a miserable place to live, but I didn't care. It sounded terribly exotic to me, and I was excited to go.
Saudi Arabia is indeed exotic for an American. Men (and it is almost exclusively men) sign contracts to work there, and if they are sufficiently high ranking in their company, they get to bring their families. Western expatriates live in compounds behind high walls. In recent years, with increasing violent opposition to Western occupation of Middle Eastern countries, the walls have a security function, but when I lived there in the early 1990s, the walls seemed to be primarily designed to separate cultures. Within them, women could dress as they pleased and not offend with their immodesty or worry about intrusive stares.
When I lived there, it was difficult for expatriate wives to find work in Saudi Arabia. Many just worked on their tennis games, or swam a lot in the compound pool. Families would often make the decision to go there when they had young children and the mother had decided to take some time off from her career to raise them. Expatriate men work with Saudi counterparts, so they have a measure of intercultural exchange with their colleagues. My father's company would sometimes host traditional Saudi meals of roast lamb and rice (kabsa) for its Saudi and expatriate employees. The Saudis would teach the foreign men the art of tearing off a piece of meat and rolling a ball of rice with the right hand without using silverware. The expatriates were informed that the eyeballs of the lamb were a delicacy, and the brave ones would give it a try. I often heard expatriate men talking about the different lamb roasts (popularly referred to as "goat grabs") they had been to and comparing notes on who had eaten the eyeballs.
Life in Saudi Arabia is marked by strict gender segregation, so while expatriate men work and even socialize with their Saudi coworkers, they almost never meet a Saudi woman. Expatriate men are warned that it is rude to even politely inquire after the health of a Saudi colleague's wife. Saudi boys and girls go to separate schools from age six, and Saudi men and women do not work together except in rare cases (and then it is usually kept a secret to avoid getting the mutawwa'in, enforcers of religion and tradition, involved). Saudi men also politely avoid interacting with their expatriate colleagues' wives and daughters. As a result, even expatriate women rarely have the opportunity to know Saudi women, since they can't even hope to be introduced to the wives of their husbands' coworkers. Saudi women are a mystery for most foreigners working in the Kingdom, as is expressed by two phrases I heard Americans use to refer to Saudi women: "UBOs," or "Unidentified Black Objects," and "walking black trash bags," a derogatory reference to the silky black 'abaya (cloak) and tarha (headscarf used to cover their heads and veil their faces) that they would see Saudi women wearing in the supermarkets and shops. Few Westerners speak Arabic, which further entrenches the cultural barriers that keep Saudi and expatriate women from interacting.
One day not long after arriving in Saudi Arabia, I got a call from an American woman whose husband worked with my father. She knew a Saudi woman who had lived for years in Colorado, and this Saudi woman was looking for a photography and English teacher for the girls' school where she was headmistress. I applied for both jobs, and for a year I taught English classes to the fourth, fifth, and sixth grades, and three photography classes for the seventh through twelfth grades.
Over the course of that year, I got to know other teachers at the school and I became close to several of my photography students, who, after all, were only a few years younger than I. I also got to know Susan, a Saudi woman who was the school's official photographer. She photographed school events and many of the engagement parties of the students, and I worked for her, too, photographing weddings and engagement parties when she was already booked for another event on a given night. After a year of teaching, I returned to college, but I spent two more summers in Saudi Arabia before I started graduate school. I would meet up with my Saudi friends then and work during the summers for Susan.
I was close to the family of Meriam, a former student of mine, and many summer evenings, once the heat of the day had cooled, her father and mother would take us out. They would take us to a mall and buy ice cream for Meriam's younger brothers while we went to different shops, and her father, a laughing, crinkly-eyed man, advised me on the best Arabic music to buy. Rashed al-Majed was a good Saudi singer, he told me, but the best music as far as he was concerned was that of Egyptians Mohammed Abdelwahab and Abdelhalim Hafez. Once Meriam's father drove us to a place on the Corniche where we could park the car and walk, with a sea breeze to keep us cool. Meriam and I were wearing 'abayas and tarhas. Her father, wearing a white thob (the long white dress worn by Saudi men) and the red and white checked ghutra on his head, walked ahead, holding the hand of Meriam's youngest brother, who was wearing trousers and a T-shirt. We passed a group of young men all wearing white thobs who were having a picnic in the grass between the road and the sidewalk. As we passed by, they let out a cheer and started chanting something. Meriam took the edge of her headscarf and shyly drew it across her face, but she was smiling as she told me that they were reciting a verse in our honor. Her father genially ignored the flirting going on behind him. Thus did we entertain ourselves in the summer.
The last summer I was in Jeddah, I met Omar, who introduced me to several of his friends who were both male and female, including an unmarried couple who were dating—secretly, of course. All this Saudi male-female mixing was a little risqué, but it was not entirely new to me: I knew that a few of my high-school-aged former students had boyfriends they had met through friends, or in shopping malls in Jeddah, or at the beaches at 'Obhur, a lagoon resort area north of Jeddah where all the land was privately owned so the mutawwa'in (the so-called "religious police") could not patrol and enforce strict sex segregation as they did elsewhere.
Another place that young Saudi men and women met and dated was on summer vacation in Cairo. Saudi friends often planned their vacations to coincide and would meet up while abroad. The place people mostly went to at that time was Egypt: Cairo, Alexandria, and sometimes the beaches of Hurghada. Meriam had spent part of the summer with her fiancé in Egypt, and she had met other Saudi men and women there with whom she would keep in touch back in Jeddah. One of Meriam's friends had met her boyfriend—later her fiancé—while on vacation in Cairo.
I was fascinated, and I asked my Saudi friends what they did in Egypt, how they dressed (did they wear cloaks and veils?), how they met people of the opposite sex, and how it was that they got away from their parents to hang out with a mixed group of friends. I still have a picture Omar gave me that had been taken the last time he was on vacation in Cairo with his Saudi friends: the picture shows Omar and his best friend Abdullah in a hotel room in Egypt. Omar, just back from the pool, is wearing shorts and a T-shirt, orange or yellow, and he has longish, wavy hair that he now complained made him look like a hick from Jizan (a district in the southwest of Saudi Arabia). He is leaning back against the hotel room's dresser, his legs casually crossed at the ankle, and smiling broadly. Abdullah, a serious, almost haughty expression on his face, is standing next to him. He has short hair and a thin moustache, and he is already dressed to go out that evening, wearing a Versace silk shirt with a colorful, intricate print of red and yellow and green. I was struck by how different this vacation photo was from the vacation photos of Westerners I knew who had visited Egypt. Those generally featured pyramids, sphinxes, and pharaonic temples. None of Omar's Cairo vacation pictures showed any of these monuments in the background; instead they usually featured hotels or pools.
Omar told me surprising stories about vacation in Egypt. He had lost his virginity in Egypt, he told me, to a Saudi girl. She was young, not even twenty, and he claimed that she had seduced him. After they had sex, he saw there was blood and he was suddenly terrified that it meant she was a virgin. But she just laughed and told him that it must be her period starting. When I acted shocked, he brushed it off: it was perhaps surprising, he conceded, that such a young Saudi girl wasn't a virgin, but not unheard of; he told me that he had later had sex with other Saudi women he dated, in Egypt and in Saudi Arabia.
I don't know how unusual his story was. I heard more surprising stories than that while I was in Saudi Arabia, but they came from liberal middle- and upper-class elites. (At the other extreme was my friend Nejwa, a strictly conservative Saudi woman who would not even show so much as her eyes to a strange man, wearing sunglasses to cover the space between her head covering and the veil she drew across the bridge of her nose.) Still, such stories unsettled my assumptions about strict Saudi conservatism and alerted me to ways that the younger generation, especially unmarried men and women, challenged the prevailing state-enforced cultural norms of sex segregation. Not only did they date to amuse themselves, they also managed to avoid arranged marriages this way and select their own partners (Wynn 1997).
When I came to graduate school to study anthropology, I doubted that I would ever get a research visa to do fieldwork in Saudi Arabia. But it occurred to me that I could still do an ethnography of Saudi Arabia—only the fieldwork site would be Egypt. I would explore the Saudi summer vacation as a window onto generational changes in Saudi culture and investigate the extent to which Saudi tourists upheld or deviated from Saudi cultural norms while they were on vacation in a more liberal Arab country.
But when I tried to find Western academic literature on Arab tourism in Egypt, I drew a blank. There was very little on the topic. At first I thought this was just because there was relatively little social science writing about Saudi Arabia in general. While there are plenty of Egypt "specialists," there are not nearly as many social scientists who write about Saudi Arabia, and even fewer of them have done research in the country; even for Western speakers of Arabic, Saudi dialects are little known.
But as I pored through the tourism literature, I realized that the near-absence of any discussion of Gulf tourism in Egypt was not just attributable to the scant English-language scholarship on the Gulf states. It also had something to do with the implicit assumptions of the literature, which generally portrayed tourism as a Western phenomenon. To understand why, it helps to quickly review social science writing about tourism.
"Phony Folk"
In the 1960s, social scientists first started to write and theorize about tourism as a unique category of travel. One of the earliest was John Forster, who argued that the tourist industry created "a 'phony folk' with a 'phony folk culture'" (Forster 1964:217-227). Forster was interested in the ensuing cultural problems or paradoxes that emerge as a result of the "commercialization of courtesies," whereby a "moral nexus" (i.e., courtesies such as giving directions) becomes converted into a "cash nexus" (when someone takes money for that courtesy, which otherwise would be given willingly), or when ceremonies are turned into spectacles of tourist consumption, or when people dressed in traditional costume insist on a fee to be photographed by tourists.
With his use of the term moral in connection with a social exchange, Forster proposed that there were certain arenas within a culture that were overtly held separate from the realm of economic exchange and where commodification of such an exchange was morally reprehensible. For Forster, it was the way tourism turned common social interactions into commodities to be bought and sold that threatened to destroy cultural authenticity.
Over the next two decades, Forster's argument about the cultural inauthenticity engendered by tourism was echoed by many theorists. These sociologists and anthropologists bemoaned the way tourism was transforming cultures (e.g., V. Smith 1989, Greenwood 1989). For these commentators, it was the commodification of cultural forms (and not merely courtesies) that rendered traditional culture inauthentic and therefore meaningless. This perspective, a common theme in the tourism literature, seemed to derive from a fundamental pessimism about capitalism and modernization. In this view, culture is seen as the last refuge of meaning, and through tourism, even culture is being assaulted by the onslaught of capitalism and its tendency to commodify and consume everything in sight (MacCannell 1976, Graburn 1989, K. Adams 1997).
In these writings, modernity was portrayed as an alienating state, and the meaninglessness of work in industrial society led people to seek meaning and authenticity in culture. This quest took the form of tourism, since viewing one's historical past (as in historical tourism sites such as those which attempt to re-create colonial times or a Viking village) or another contemporary, less industrialized way of life serves up the cultural authenticity of other people as substitute for the loss of one's own. In this perspective, the tourist and the touristed are locked in a dialectic: authenticity lost and sought, authenticity voyeuristically consumed and thereby eroded. Unsurprisingly, this literature portrayed tourism as a devourer of culture that was destroying the very thing it consumed.
MacCannell, a sociologist, proposed that there was a direct relationship between the alienation of modernity and mass tourism. Grounding his argument in anthropologist Edward Sapir's formula for "genuine" and "spurious" culture, MacCannell argued that the work experience under capitalism was inherently devoid of cultural meaning and satisfaction. For Sapir (1985), whenever there was insufficient integration between economic and other cultural spheres (religion, art, kinship, ritual) in a society, that culture was "spurious" and life in such a culture was spiritually unfulfilling. Similarly, for MacCannell it was the splitting off of cultural meaning from the economic part of life that produced the alienation of modern man. This alienation, in turn, propelled the modern quest for authenticity through other people's lives and cultures. Modern men and women traveled to see other cultures, as if to prove to themselves that cultural authenticity still existed and to find a brief respite from their own culturally and spiritually barren lives.
The assumption that tourism is a kind of travel that is a paradigmatic practice of modernity has pervaded much of the literature since MacCannell's influential argument in The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class (1976). MacCannell saw in tourism not just a harmless fetishization of other peoples, cultures, and places, but a deliberate desire to categorize, demarcate, and exclude. In this view, the difference between tourist and touristed is not just their positioning in a global economy but a concomitant worldview.
The link drawn by these theorists between tourism and modernity is a critical one, because it led to a set of assumptions about tourists that colored anthropological research on tourism: with tourists as paradigmatic moderns, and modernity generally regarded as a Western phenomenon, the tourism literature has been heavily biased toward describing tourism as an almost exclusively Western category. There is often an implicit assumption that not only is authentic culture only to be found in the lifestyles of non-Western peoples, the only authentic tourist is the Westerner. For example, John Urry assumes that non-Westerners have better things to do than to waste their time and money on tourism, and he lumps non-Western travelers together under a friendly view of the eager, industrious, practical immigrant, claiming that "[m]any recent immigrants at least would consider that travel should have a more serious purpose than this: to look for work, to join the rest of one's family, or to visit relatives" (Urry 1990:142-143).
These theorists' assumption that the tourist is a Westerner is partly reasoned on the idea that it is only Western society that possesses the economic base to generate mass tourism, but it also derives from the association of tourism with modernity and a distinct attitude toward travel as leisure. However, in Egypt, Arabs from the Middle East and North Africa constitute approximately one-third of the foreign visitors each year, with Gulf tourists comprising roughly half of that group. Further, Gulf tourists stay longer and spend more money than their Western counterparts, making Arab tourism a significant component of the tourist economy. Arab tourists are not only prominent in Egypt, they also flock to Beirut, Morocco, and other European and American cities in the summer months. Recognizing the category of Arab tourists is important not only because it challenges an outdated image of the tourist, but also because it unsettles assumptions about the relationship between modernity and Western culture.
Authenticity: Elusive or Illusive?
For tourism theorists such as Kathleen Adams, Valene Smith, and Dean MacCannell, cultural authenticity was eroded not only by the commodification of culture, but also in the way tourism demarcates appropriate matter for tourist spectating. The tourist wants to see authentic cultural rituals, so those rituals must be performed for the tourist. But once these rituals are performed for the tourist, they cease to be authentic. The tourist's quest for authenticity leads to a search for the backstage—every ritual performance geared to a tourist audience generates a search for the social reality behind the performance. But the backstage is elusive, always slipping away from the tourist's grasp. The backstage can never really be found, because once the tourist sets eyes on it, it is no longer the genuine backstage. Tourism produces performances that mimic a backstage scene. Yet the voyeuristic gaze of the tourist contaminates the relationship between tourist and "native," preventing the tourist from ever really getting backstage, since once the ceremony or cultural process is performed for tourists, it is no longer an authentic cultural ritual.
Many theorists writing about tourism have drawn on sociologist Erving Goffman's idea of frontstage and backstage to describe the touristic encounter. But whereas early tourism writers have seen the performative aspects of the tourism industry as resulting in inauthentic cultural forms, Goffman himself did not equate performance with inauthenticity. For Goffman, all social interaction in everyday life, whether touristic or otherwise, is to some extent staged. For Goffman, performance is not an aberration resulting from mass tourism and integration of small communities into a market economy; performance is what social life everywhere is all about. Moreover, Goffman suggests that this quest for the backstage is not something unique to the touristic encounter, but a quality of "everyday life," and he too describes multiple layers of performance and revelation which characterize the "information game—a potentially infinite cycle of concealment, discovery, false revelation, and rediscovery" (Goffman 1959:8). Finally, Goffman argues that acting is not "just" a front, nor does it engender inauthentic identities. On the contrary, Goffman argues that, "[i]n a sense, and in so far as this mask represents the conception we have formed of ourselves—the role we are striving to live up to—this mask is our truer self, the self we would like to be" (ibid.:19). The social persona is constituted in and through performance, and social events are marked by both ritual and creativity, which are the basic stuff of human encounters, and meaningful precisely in their ritualistic, performative, and creative dimensions.
(Yet MacCannell is right to point out that there is a particular kind of tourism that revolves around a quest for authenticity that is perpetually—indeed, definitionally—elusive. This modern yearning for an experience that embodies authenticity, tradition, and culture produces a paradoxical situation in which authenticity can never be achieved, because once it is marked off as such, it is no longer authentic. There is a dialectical process of production and erosion of authenticity that frames the prototypical tourist experience. This is a persuasive argument, since whether or not authenticity is a valid category for academic analysis, it is doubtless true that authenticity is one of the most powerful semiotic operators within a certain kind of cultural tourism [Culler 1981].)
Anthropology and the social sciences have come around to a different perspective on tourism than that which characterized the early theorizing. Many of the early theorists have become skeptical of their earlier concern that tourism eroded cultural authenticity. Cultural performance, this new perspective argues, is created through a dialogue and a dialectic. And just as Goffman showed how we can understand how individuals' self-identities are constructed through performance, so too does anthropology need to examine how cultural and national identities are constructed through performance, tourism, travel, and encounters with cultural and national others.
But as Judith Butler (1993, 1989) has demonstrated in her feminist application of the concept of "performativity," the relationship between performance and identity is also a process implicated with power (see also Mitchell 2002). This point is critical to my examination of Western and Arab tourists in Egypt. Both groups are in a position of power vis-à-vis most Egyptians: Western tourists have economic power vis-à-vis the majority of the Egyptians working in the tourism economy, and Western interest in pharaonic antiquities has its roots in centuries—even millennia, if we include the ancient Greeks and Romans—of imperialism in Egypt. Gulf Arabs, too, are in a position of power, through the oil wealth that enables them to both employ Egyptians in their home countries and make Egypt their summer playground. Egyptian critiques accuse Arab tourists of using that wealth to spread moral corruption, from the sexual exploitation of Egyptian women to their patronage of lowbrow, ribald theatrical productions that are put on in the summer for a mostly Gulf Arab audience.
An unequal power differential between tourist and touristed compels people to submit to external definitions of cultural authenticity to fulfill tourist expectations and fantasies. But though "collaborative" projects of defining Egyptian culture may be shaped by the fantasies of Western and Arab tourists, we have to be cautious against seeing such efforts as inauthentic or meaningless for the touristed. In Nepal, for example, anthropologist Vincanne Adams has shown how Sherpa identity is constituted through mimesis with a Western image of Sherpas as hardy, hospitable, spiritually enlightened mountain climbers. Since cultural representations "are the crux of ongoing development aid and tourism, both of which are desired by Sherpas and Westerners," such self-definition is an important political project for Sherpas (V. Adams 1996:22). However, it is not merely a political project in which Sherpas cynically engage for economic gain. This image is also a source of meaning and pride for most Sherpas, who actively seek to fulfill this cultural identity.
A similar point could be made for Egypt, where Western and Arab tourism in Egypt have both contributed to the development of an Egyptian national identity. This book examines how the history of Western travel, colonialism, and tourism are intertwined and how they have contributed to the contemporary national self-image of Egypt as an ancient, pharaonic state. Three centuries ago, Egyptians showed minimal interest in the pyramids, even while Europe was going through a phase of "Egyptomania." Today, Egyptians regard the pyramids as part of their national heritage and many feel pride in the pharaonic past. The West's historical fascination with ancient Egypt has certainly contributed to the elaboration of Egyptian identity as an ancient and pharaonic land, but the colonial origins of Egyptology do not render the image of Egypt's pharaonic past any less meaningful or authentic for those Egyptians who identify with the mystical grandeur of the pharaohs and see the monuments as an essential component of their national heritage.
But the pharaonic past is only one component of Egyptian national identity; for most Egyptians, Egypt is as much the home of Umm Kalthoum as it is the land of pyramids. The point is not to find one or two sources of Egyptian identity, or to figure out which is the most authentic identity, but rather to see how multiple, sometimes conflicting identities are created and defined through points of transnational contact with outsiders.
Ethnographies of Travel and Tourism
By the mid-1990s, when I entered graduate school, a number of theorists were calling for ethnography to expand beyond the traditional localized village study and instead examine the movement of peoples and things, rejecting bounded, spatiotemporally fixed ideas of culture and of dwelling. Anna Tsing's In the Realm of the Diamond Queen (1993) exemplified this approach, abandoning the fixed locale of the village to follow her Meratus informants, whose communities, she argued, could be understood only when their constant mobility was taken into account. Another approach I was smitten with was the creative ethnography of Amitav Ghosh, who described a village in Egypt's Nile Delta as having "all the busy restlessness of airline passengers in a transit lounge" (Ghosh 1992, cited in Clifford 1997:1).
To me, the idea of doing an ethnography of travel seemed rather cutting edge at the time, even postmodern. Anthropologists have always been travelers, and they have often written about travel, but usually by portraying themselves as travelers in juxtaposition to fixed native cultures found in a set place, a stable village, a localized community. Writing about Arab and Western tourists in Egypt, I thought, was a really new project. (This hopeless question must be the stuff of late-night contemplation for many an anthropology graduate student trying to formulate a fieldwork project and a career trajectory: what can I study and write about that will be really new?)
But one of my professors, James Boon, had a better historical grasp of anthropological writing, and he gently pointed out to me that my generation of anthropologists was not the first to write about hybrid identities and peoples on the move, nor even was his. As far back as 1955, Claude Lévi-Strauss's Tristes Tropiques was one of the first great ethnographies of travel that portrayed the ethnographic subject as equally displaced and hybrid as the anthropologist. Lévi-Strauss describes how, when he first arrived in Sao Paulo and started looking for a people to study, "the nearest anthropological curiosity was a primitive village about fifteen kilometers away, whose ragged inhabitants had fair hair and blue eyes which betrayed their recent Germanic origin" (Lévi-Strauss 1981 [1955]:139).
In Tristes Tropiques, Lévi-Strauss tracked histories of immigrants, colonists, missionaries, and Indians who were always on the move. The natives he encountered deep in the Amazon jungle were wise to anthropological customs even before he could introduce those customs to them:
Young anthropologists are taught that natives are afraid of having their image caught in a photograph, and that it is proper to overcome this fear and compensate them for the risk they think they are taking by making them a present in money or in kind. The Caduveo had perfected the system: not only did they insist on being paid before allowing themselves to be photographed; they forced me to photograph them so that I should have to pay. (Ibid.:176)
Writing about travel was still an appealing trend, whether or not Lévi-Strauss had scooped us half a century ago. Just before I left for the field, I devoured James Clifford's 1997 book Routes, which argued persuasively that contemporary anthropology's subjects were transnational and transcultural, revealed through travel and through contact with others. By the time I returned to Princeton after years in the field, I realized, somewhat belatedly, that the tradition of anthropologists writing about travel was not only well established, it had become de rigueur, and anyone who didn't take into account travel and transnational points of contact between peoples was setting herself up for a "culture garden" critique.
But even as anthropologists have turned to examine travel and movement as critical elements of the cultural and social milieux that they describe, anthropological and social science writing about tourism has remained more ambivalent. While travel and traveler seem to be neutral terms, tourism has been a much more lowbrow subject for anthropological inquiry, and the anthropological literature has often portrayed tourists laughingly, as butts for scorn, objects of parody, and foils for contrasting to deep anthropological knowledge about exotic cultures that the tourists inelegantly consume and disrupt. Ironically, such disciplinary hierarchies of knowledge and authority mimic the practices of tourism itself, which, as Graburn notes, is "rife with snobbery" (Graburn 1989:35).
While tourism can be read both as a discourse on modernity and as a practice of modernity, at the same time it subverts the confident, secure categories of modernity—jumbling anthropologist, tourist and native, modern and traditional, high and low. This kind of subversion of categories is particularly evident in recent essays on anthropology and tourism that describe the anthropologist as "tourist"—or vice versa—to unseat or at least unsettle the authoritative category of traveler which we call anthropologist (Crick 1985, V. Adams 1996, Boon 1992, Bruner 2004). Crick wrote an early and definitive essay pushing this comparison. He begins his essay by asking rhetorically, "What is the difference between being an anthropologist, being a tourist, and being an anthropologist studying tourism?" (1985:74). He suggests that there is an intimate historical connection between anthropologists and travelers/tourists, and the former have sought to distance themselves from the latter precisely because of the frightening similarities between both. This, he suggests, may explain the reluctance of anthropologists to undertake research on tourism.
It is my suggestion that one of the reasons tourism has not become a matter for greater attention in anthropology is precisely because tourists are relatives of a kind; they act like a cracked mirror in which we can see something of the social system which produces anthropologists as well as tourists. More than that, tourists remind us of some of the contexts, motives, experiential ambiguities and rhetoric involved in being an anthropologist. (Ibid.:78)
Crick itemizes some of the areas where we might look for similarities between tourists and anthropologists. Both are temporary and marginal residents in another culture, often existing in an "environmental bubble" which the anthropological myth of "immersion" belies. Both involve stereotyping and the use of rhetorical conventions in writing about other cultures; "the rigid distinction between monographs and tales is not sustainable" (ibid.:79). Both use the other to create the self; "instrumentalism and distance" characterize both the world of the tourist and the scientific method. And both are parasitic on cultural brokers, be they tour guides or informants. Crick asks whether we need to maintain the distinction between anthropology and tourism, and gives important reasons why it is useful to break it down. He suggests that anthropologists must consider the comparison if only because the tourist role is one that anthropologists can strategically adopt at any time (as when the politically sensitive query of the anthropologist quickly transforms into the mere tactless curiosity of the tourist to defuse a tense situation).
Yet while Crick uses the concept of tourism, where authenticity is always in doubt, as a way of challenging the authenticity and authority of the anthropologist as cultural interpreter and spokesperson, James Boon (1992) uses the comparison "to explore the ludic possibilities of inauthentic cross-cultural encounters taking on fuller authority." He suggests that, by accepting tourist encounters as valid objects of ethnographic study, anthropologists might manage to give up some of our conventional ideas about what constitutes an authentic informant, a proper fieldwork encounter, and genuine fieldnotes material, recognizing the richness of ethnographic insights gleaned through encounters with hybrid identities and disconcerting "cosmopolitan moments." In this study, that means a wide range of hybrids/informants, including: an Australian belly dancer who challenged in Egyptian court a new law that prohibited non-Egyptians from working as belly dancers in Egypt; a villager from Nazlet el-Semman, next to the pyramids, who had lived for decades in the West as a satellite engineer and now had returned to open a tourist "bazaar" on a spot of land coveted by Egyptologists who wanted to dig there for pharaonic remains; an American geologist who contested the Egyptological dating of the Giza monuments and who was in Cairo for both research and a lecture tour with a New Age author on ancient Egypt; and a young Saudi woman who spent her summers in Egypt where her father lived while her mother shuttled back and forth between her job in Jeddah and her family in Cairo. And it means seeing all these characters not as exceptionally cosmopolitan people and juxtaposing them against some more stable, culturally authentic characters, but rather seeing their peregrinations and hybrid identities as authentic aspects of human societies and cultures at the turn of the millennium.
So studying tourism raises two key theoretical issues for anthropology. One is the location of identity—and perhaps "culture"—itself. The comparison of Arab and Western experiences in Egypt reveals how national identities are created partly through encounters with cultural others. This research links up the cross-cultural projects of tourism, archaeology, and cultural performance as components in the production of multiple, contested, and often competing imaginations of nation and people. Describing a nation as "imagined" does not mean that nations and people are imagined ex nihilo; there is always something prior to the encounter. However, this prior something is given form and force as "imagination" is incarnated in institutions: from archeological sites, museums, and monuments to hotels, media, and cultural productions.
The second theoretical issue raised by tourism studies is that of cultural "authenticity" and the location of anthropology itself: what should anthropologists study, and what should they encapsulate in their description of a "culture" or people? A number of recent theoretical works have highlighted how travel and cross-cultural encounters have contributed to the production of subjectivities in the nation-building project. When one group encounters another, they each define both self and other, drawing boundaries and making sense of difference. As Chris Prentice observes, "the very constitution of 'self' and 'other' is inseparable from their mutual contamination by each other" (1994:50). The tourist economy in Egypt illuminates the creative projects of cultural production that occur in such boundary-zones and "borderlands." This book builds on cross-disciplinary work that examines how public identities are constructed through processes at once mimetic and oppositional in encounters with others. In short, the tourist economy in Egypt illustrates how, through encounters with Others, the Self is defined.
But while both colonialism and postcolonial identities may be described using metaphors of travel and itineraries, or what Ha (1997:159) calls "the trope of nomadic space," the concepts of travel and cross-cultural contact are insufficient for explaining the processes by which one group comes to define itself for another. We have to also examine: what brought these groups into contact? What incentive or forms of violence compel one to define itself for the other? What expectations or fantasies on the part of one group does the other group seek to fulfill or defy, mimetically reproduce or defiantly deconstruct?
In studying tourism, it is useful to combine a trope of consumption with the tropes of travel and cross-cultural contact for understanding the processes of identity construction that ensue. Though Western tourism in Egypt has its roots in colonial encounters which were coercive, sometimes violently so, tourism today has a different basis of power: the economic power wielded by an international class of consumers operating in a poor country where tourism revenue is consistently one of the top earners of international currency. That does not mean talking about consumption in the sense that some earlier tourism theorists proposed, where economic exchange with tourists somehow sullied authentic indigenous culture, but seeing instead how the consuming tourists provide incentives for those working in tourism, in service industries, in cultural production (from belly dancers to "whirling dervishes" who perform for Western tourists in the Khan el-Khalili to theatrical productions in the summer Arab tourism season)—and even in archaeology—to engage with a certain imagination of Egypt. At the same time we need to be cautious when using terms such as incentive, which connotes a voluntary exchange, that we not neglect two things. The first is the link(s) between contemporary tourist consumption of Egypt and imperialisms past and present. The second is the fact that for a poor country like Egypt, financial "incentives" have high stakes for people whose livelihoods depend on tourist dollars and riyals, and the structures of the ostensibly liberal international market actively exclude certain groups and classes from benefiting from the tourist economy, in coercive and sometimes violent ways (Mitchell 1995, 2002; Tsing 2005).
***
Near the start of this chapter, I described the roundabout way that I got interested in my research topic, after living with my family in Saudi Arabia (during which time I was also a tourist in Yemen and Jordan). The almost painful description of the expatriate community in Jeddah of which I was a part, with our enthusiasm for "goat grabs" and ethnic Saudi dolls and sneering descriptions of Saudi women, is no mere whimsical detour into an embarrassing moment from my past before I "became an anthropologist" and supposedly acquired a more sophisticated perspective on cultural difference. It is a deliberate effort to ground my own narrative here in a particular history of transnational imaginations. It is also a reminder that anthropology of the Middle East goes hand in hand with other forms of knowledge-acquisition, political and economic exchanges in the region, and even Western military occupation. Expatriates and tourists are relatives of anthropologists; they act like a "cracked mirror" in which we can see something of the social system which produces anthropologists as well as tourists (Crick 1985:78). Just as the discipline grapples with the ways that anthropologists of the colonial era worked from particular positionings that were a mixture of cooperation with, dependence on, and opposition to colonial authority, so must contemporary anthropologists of the Middle East take into account the ways that our entry into the Arab world is conditioned, enabled, and hindered by the reach of American and European military incursions into and cultural hegemony in the region (Asad 1991). My early introduction to the Arab world as the dependent of an American scientist in Saudi Arabia is a part of that.
If arrival scenes are an iconic staple of ethnographic writing that typically portray the first contact that the ethnographer has with her planned fieldwork-situation (Pratt 1986), contemporary anthropologists often have a few arrival scenes, even before the official start of fieldwork, since the acquisition of anthropological knowledge is frequently predated by other modern (and postmodern) forms of cultural encounter, such as those anthropologists who first visit their fieldwork site as a tourist, or as the employee of an international development agency or other nongovernmental organization, or as an English teacher, or as a belly dancer, or ... (the list of possible "first encounters" could go on and on). And for "native" (Limon 1991) and "halfie" (Abu-Lughod 1991) anthropologists, fieldwork is a return, rather than a first, second, or later encounter. In line with this contemporary state of ethnographic inquiry, therefore, the arrival scene I describe at the beginning of Chapter 2, Buried Treasure, is one of a series of arrivals that date back to the moment that I decided to accompany my parents to Saudi Arabia. That fact and other aspects of the circumstances of my research in Egypt deserve more explication, and so, prior to launching into ethnographic description, the next chapter, Chapter 1, picks up this thread again with a discussion of the "Ethics and Methodology of a Transnational Anthropology." It discusses the terms of my stay and research in Egypt and the ethical issues of doing ethnographic research among small, highly visible and well educated groups of informants, whose careers and personal lives might be affected by the publication of this ethnography. It also addresses some of the methodological problems that inhere in doing a transnational, multi-site ethnography in an urban environment.
Methodological issues are also addressed in Chapter 2, where I relate some of the problems I encountered trying to find informants who would take the time to talk to an anthropologist who seemed strikingly ignorant about some of her subject matter, and in Chapter 4, where I discuss the difficulty of studying tourists, especially for an American anthropologist who wants to know what Gulf Arab tourists are up to in Egypt.
Chapter 2, "Buried Treasure," reviews the history of Egyptology, starting in the days when it was less archaeology than a mad, free-for-all European treasure hunt. There are colorful stories to tell, such as the Indiana Jones-style race between a German and a French archaeologist to acquire the spectacular Zodiac of Dendera. Medieval Muslims were interested in the pharaonic past, seeing it as evidence of an ancient race of giant-magicians. But for centuries Egyptology has been dominated by Westerners, and even today Egyptian Egyptologists are still forced to publish in English, French, and German, while few Western Egyptologists even speak—much less write—Arabic. The explanation lies not in Arab disinterest in pharaonic Egypt, but rather in the history of Western colonialism in Egypt and colonial control over local institutions regulating Egypt's antiquities.
Pharaonism, the identification with ancient Egypt, is one key strain of modern Egyptian nationalism. Egyptologist Zahi Hawass's discovery of the tombs of the pyramid builders in the 1990s was hailed in the Egyptian press for proving that the pyramids were built by Egyptian laborers and not Israelite slaves, a point of pride vis-à-vis Israeli claims that it was their ancestors who built the pyramids. But for other Egyptians, "pharaoh" does not evoke a proud cultural past but rather idolatrous despotism. Sadat's assassins proudly shouted, "Pharaoh is dead!" and some Muslim tourists refuse to crawl through the narrow inner passages of the pyramids, lest they appear to "bow to pharaoh." This chapter and the next examine these conflicting attitudes toward national pride in Egypt's pharaonic past.
Chapter 3, "Atlantis and Red Mercury," tackles the politics of archaeology from a different angle, examining New Age rewritings of pharaonic history. Both Arabs and Westerners have mystical imaginations about ancient Egypt, and this chapter reviews a wide range of myths and legends about ancient Egypt, from Plato's Atlantis to the psychic Edgar Cayce, who believed he was the reincarnation of an ancient Egyptian high priest and predicted that a chamber with the secrets of a lost civilization would be discovered under the paw of the Sphinx. This chapter shows why New Age theories offend patriotic Egyptians, which in turn explains some of the conspiracy theories that New Agers develop about the mire of bureaucracy that swamps those who wish to excavate Egypt's past. But it also shows that Egyptologists and New Age theorists have a lot in common, no matter how hard the former try to dissociate themselves from the latter: from the shared colonial history that influences both popular and academic narratives of ancient Egypt, to their shared audience of Western tourists who consume their theories.
Both Chapters 2 and 3 show that the aspects of Egypt and Egyptian identity that Westerners take for granted, as though they were natural things, are in fact historically constituted. Westerners visit the pyramids not because they are intrinsically monumental, but because they have been constructed as monumental through processes of European colonialism, the discipline of Egyptology, and the way both construct civilizational history. Both of these chapters also explore how the science of archaeology is tied to social, cultural, and political projects like nationalism.
Chapter 4, "Sex Orgies, a Marauding Prince, and Other Rumors about Gulf Tourism in Egypt," turns to encounters between Egyptians and Gulf Arabs and their representations. Among Egyptians, the stereotype about Gulf Arabs is that they come to Egypt to do things that are forbidden in their own country: visit prostitutes and have sex parties, drink alcohol and gamble. Hence they are popularly associated with the morally suspect nightclubs of Pyramids Road. Stories circulate about Gulf sex orgies in hotels, and a favorite topic of conversation in 1999 was the exploits of a Saudi prince living in Cairo with a large entourage of servants and bodyguards who were famous for roughing up anyone who got in their way. These urban myths about sex, power, wealth, and exploitation turned this prince into the mythical prototype for the stereotypical wealthy Gulf Arab who thinks that he can buy everything. These negative images of Gulf Arabs can be understood only in the context of Arab identity politics, labor migration, and the regional political economy. I explore these stereotypes of Arab tourism within the context of anthropological investigations of urban myths, rumor, and gossip.
In Chapter 5, "Transnational Dating," Gulf tourism is seen from a very different perspective, that of two young Saudi women. The popular Egyptian stereotype about Gulf tourists holds that they come to Egypt to indulge in scandalous activities and exploit poor Egyptians. But a look at Saudi youth vacationing in Cairo shows that, for these Arab tourists, summer vacation in Egypt is as much about meeting other Saudis as it is about taking advantage of Egyptian freedoms. Saudi girls love coming to Egypt so that they can date young men in an atmosphere which is more liberal than back in Saudi Arabia, yet still basically defined by Saudi social and cultural parameters. As a fundamentally Saudi cultural phenomenon that takes place outside the borders of Saudi Arabia, the Saudi summer vacation in Egypt is an extraordinary example of transnational culture.
Chapters 4 and 5 portray encounters between Egyptians and Gulf Arabs to compare the imaginations that each group constructs of the other. Moments of cultural contact become opportunities for defining self and other: Egyptians nurture stereotypes whereby Gulf Arabs embody the transgression of social proprieties, while Saudis see Egyptians as obsequious economic mercenaries. Both groups portray the other as sexual predators. Linguistic and cultural differences between the groups get mapped out on a regional economy marked by labor migration and extreme differences of wealth.
In both these chapters, identity—of self and other—appears as central. Yet the discussion of identity is not an end in itself but a strategy for examining "culture," the traditional domain of anthropological research. I am interested in describing the moments of cross-cultural contact that suddenly shake people into an awareness of their own, otherwise unremarked cultural traditions by way of their contrast with those of others, and then exploring what people make of those differences. For example, in relating stories about how Egyptians describe the way that Gulf Arabs eat, dress, and behave in public, or the ways that Gulf Arabs criticize Egyptian terms of polite address when speaking to one another, I show how being confronted with these small markers of cultural difference throws into relief each group's own cultural norms. Then, I show how these differences provoke discussions about what such markers of cultural difference mean—both sides take these differences as evidence of civilization and political histories, among other things. In short, I examine how culture gets tied to civilizational narratives—or how "culture" is tied to "Culture."
The concluding chapter, "Palimpsest, Excavation, Graffiti, Simulacra," examines the phenomenon of foreign (non-Egyptian, non-Arab) belly dancers in Egypt. Belly dancing has become popular outside the Arab world, and American, European, and Japanese women who have become professional belly dancers dance all over Europe and the Middle East, but their ultimate goal is to make it in Cairo—for belly dancers, if you can make it there, you can make it anywhere. This phenomenon uniquely brings together elements of both the Western and the Eastern imaginations of Egypt. Foreign belly dancers perform for tourist audiences, both Arab and Western, in Cairo's hotels, nightclubs, and Nile cruises. But many of these dancers first came to Cairo as tourists themselves, and that trip marked their first exposure to Oriental dance. Examining the roots of Oriental dance in Egypt reveals that this "traditional" cultural phenomenon was shaped by a history of cross-cultural encounters between Egypt and the West as well as Egypt and the Arab world, encounters which have substantially modified the art form as it is performed today.
Though the research topic centers on Cairo, this book tracks characters through locations across the globe, from Saudi youth who come to Egypt in the summer to play out elaborate dating and courtship rituals, to archaeologists and New Age groups producing conflicting histories of the Giza pyramids for television, to European belly dancers trying to make a name for themselves in Cairo. These chapters map out but a few points on the paths of the various transnational networks crisscrossing through Cairo; for all of them, tourism is a common denominator. But there is more than just the theoretical category of tourism and an anthropologist bringing these apparently disparate subjects together. This book is a study of different imaginations of Egypt as a people, culture, and history. It links up political history, regional and international economies, and cultural production with an ongoing process of national identity construction. It is a tentative mapping of transnational networks and cross-cultural encounters between different peoples, nationalities, languages, classes, religions, and ideologies that all intersect in the country—and imagination—of Egypt.
The history of anthropology is a history of travels and cross-cultural encounters. Tourism is a variation on the kinds of travel and cross-cultural transactions—imperialism, colonialism, religious and intellectual pilgrimages, the Grand Tour, archaeology, anthropology, and more—which have for centuries been critical elements in the building of nations and subjectivities. It is only by taking into account these processes that constitute a history of transnational encounters that we can begin to understand how the idea of Egypt as a place, a culture, a history, a people, a country, and a nation is actively constructed and enacted.
