Agents of hybridity: Class, culture brokers, and the entrepreneurial imagination in cosmopolitan Cairo

Abstract

Flows of transnational popular culture into Egypt are not so much cases of foreign imperialism imposing itself on helpless Egyptians as they are processes managed by Cairene entrepreneurs whose accomplishments present them as successful agents of modernization, locating the cosmopolitan balance between global brands and goods and local markets and infrastructures. This chapter explores the links between these entrepreneurs, the state's “culture of development,” and class reproduction. Egyptian transnational entrepreneurialism – speculative, profit-oriented enterprises engaged with transnational flows of brands, commodities, and capital – has become yoked to the state's goal of national development through economic liberalization. Upper-class cosmopolitan entrepreneurs are increasingly positioned as agents of hybridity, culture brokers who can creatively forge links between supposedly rational and universal economic practices of market capital, and local cultural beliefs and values. Successful entrepreneurs are construed as possessing an “entrepreneurial imagination” by means of which they can overcome structural and cultural obstacles and contribute to the development of an Egyptian “enterprise culture.”

Citation

Allen Peterson, M. (2010), "Agents of hybridity: Class, culture brokers, and the entrepreneurial imagination in cosmopolitan Cairo", Wood, D.C. (Ed.) Economic Action in Theory and Practice: Anthropological Investigations (Research in Economic Anthropology, Vol. 30), Emerald Group Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 225-256. https://doi.org/10.1108/S0190-1281(2010)0000030013