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Making the Nation: The Politics of
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Timothy Mitchell
One of the odd things about the arrival of the era of the modern nation-state was that for a state to prove it was modern, it helped if it could also prove it was ancient. A nation that wanted to show it was up to date and deserved a place among the company of modern states needed, among other things, to produce a past. This past was not just a piece of symbolic equipment, like a flag or an anthem, with which to organize political allegiance and demonstrate a distinct identity. As every recent theorist of nationalism has pointed out, deciding on a common past was critical to the process of making a particular mixture of people into a coherent nation.1
The idea of the nation presents a way of living the locality of social relations by imagining them to extend back over a continuous period of time. The political community can then understand its present historically. This projection into the past may help make the present seem natural, disguising some of the arbitrariness, injustice and coercion upon which it depends. Historical thinking achieves this not just by projecting a past, but by organizing that past as the life of a self-directing object - the 'nation' or 'society'. Contemporary political arrangements then acquire a degree of inevitability by appearing as the genetic destiny of this historical being.
Recent writings on nationalism have also pointed out that to produce a past a state has to produce a place. If the nation depends on extending present social relations back through time, this can only be done by defining their geographical extent. The self-contained coherence of a society developing through history depends upon fixing the geographical domain that gives the particular society its limit. Benedict Anderson has argued that the idea of the nation came about when modern forms of writing enabled the social worlds of individual citizens to expand. For example, innovations such as the modern novel and newspaper enabled people to imagine unknown others as members of the same community.2
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Yet in many parts of the world the idea of the nation required people not onlv tí) expand their sense of community in novel ways, but in equally nove! ways to constrict it. People's sense of religious community or tribal co»nation, their networks of trade and migration, communities of learning •.-i n d literature, and patterns of imperial power and allegiance were in many places much more diverse than the narrow boundaries of modern nation states. Kniest Renan famously remarked that the idea of the nation required that people jearn to forget certain aspects of their past.3 Many people also had to learn to forget, or at least to reconsider, their sense of place. They were supposed to reduce the significance of those interconnections, exchanges, genealogies, hegemonies, moral systems, and migrations that had defined a social landscape whose horizons reached beyond what became the new boundaries of the nation - or even to forget their existence altogether.4
Let me illustrate these questions of how a nation's past is made in the case of modern Egypt. One might suppose that the lower Nile valley, compared to many other parts of the world, offered a well-defined geography within which to imagine a self-contained society. It should have been relatively easy to picture Egypt as a self-sufficient nation, to minimize the wider relations people may have had with other regions, and to give its particular mixture of communities a singular and self-contained past. Moreover, the survival of monuments from more than 5,000 years before -indeed, the powerful image of 'ancient Egypt' as the cradle of civilization -would seem to offer modern Egyptian nationalism a neat and uneontroversiat way to lay together superincumbent images of people, place and past.
Yet constructing the past is never so straightforward. In the first place, ancient monuments do not automatically belong to one's own past. As someone from England, I can admire the imaginative scale and ancient precision of Stonehenge, but I cannot feel those stones as part of my own past. In order to belong to one's history, monuments must connect with some aspect of one's social identity. Something similar seems to be true of the way the monuments of ancient Egypt figure in the politics of Egyptian nationalism. Periodically, efforts have been made to present the Pharaonic past as a source of modern Egyptian national identity. The idea that modern Egypt is a society whose ancestry goes back in a continuous line to a Pharaonic beginning is also the view of the nation's history one finds in Egyptian school textbooks. However, such uses of the past have generally been of limited political use in the country's modern politics.
The most sustained effort to invoke the glories of ancient Egypt as the source of modern Egyptian identity came in the second quarter of the twentieth century following the discovery of Tutankhamun's tomb in the Valley of the Kings, near Luxor, in 1922. When the British archaeologist Howard Carter unearthed the riches of the first royal tomb to be found
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intact in modern times, the event attracted worldwide attention. The discovery also occurred in the same year in which Egypt won partial independence from the British military occupation established in 1882, and provided the new nationalist government with a powerful expression of the nation's identity. The government refused to allow the British archaeologists to take possession of 50 per cent of the discovered treasure, the practice followed with earlier finds.5 Its determination to keep control of the treasure provided a useful demonstration of the country's newly acquired autonomy.
Beyond this incident, however, the Pharaonic past has played only a minor and diminishing role in Egyptian nationalism. For another decade or so after the discovery of King Tut's treasures, a group of conservative writers with cultural ties to Europe continued to insist on the significance of the nation's Pharaonic origins. But they did so as part of an argument against Europeans who insisted on the Oriental and therefore backward character of Egypt, and against local intellectuals who insisted on the exclusively Islamic character of their society. Their concern was to show that Egypt was a modern, Western nation, a view to be proven by the fact that the West's own past lay within Egypt. Yet the significance of the past for these writers was not so much that it gave the nation a distinct and authentic identity, but that it showed that the nation belonged to the larger community of modern civilization. The role of the past was to serve as a sign of the modern.6
In the same period a right-wing populist party, Misr al-fatäh (Young Egypt), also began to emphasize the importance of the Pharaonic past, finding there an expression of its belief in leader worship, militarism, and an Egyptian imperialism stretching from the Mediterranean to the equator. However, this, too, was short lived. By the 1930s most political argument in Egypt had reverted to themes that connected more readily with people's everyday experience and self-conception, principally the themes of Islam, Arabism, and anti-imperialism. These political identifications did not necessarily refer to the confines of the Nile valley, and gave local politics a much wider resonance than a purely Egyptian nationalism.7
The difficulties and ambiguities in the production of a nation's past can be more fully understood if one shifts from the history of nationalism, as it is conventionally written, to a political process I would call 'making the nation'. I find it useful here to think in terms of Homi Bhabha's distinction between the nation as pedagogy and the nation as performance.8 The history of nationalism reconstructs the more or less coherent story of how the nation emerges as a pedagogical object. It pieces together the official nation that is invoked in the ideology of political parties, the propaganda of government programmes, the rhetoric of school textbooks, the memoirs of public figures, and the news reporting and opinion-making of the mass media. These sources constitute the formal archive examined by any
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standard history of the emergence of twentieth-century Egyptian nationalism.9 What such an account generally overlooks is the more mundane and uncertain process of producing the nation. I have in mind the variety of efforts, projects, encounters and struggles in which the nation and its modern identity are staged and performed. The difference between performance and pedagogy is not a question of looking at the practical rather than the ideological, or the local rather than the national. Both involve the making of meaning, and both take place in particular sites among particular parties. What is different about making or performing the nation is that it always involves the question of otherness.
In the nation as pedagogy, the emergence of the national community is understood as the history of a self that comes to awareness, or of a people who begin to imagine their collectivity. History takes the form of the growing self-awareness or imagination of a collective subject. This imagination is thought to develop through a gradual revealing of the subject to itself, shaped by those powers of communication, reason and consciousness that define our understanding of an emergent self. There is no encounter with otherness, except as part of the general discovery of a world beyond the self. In the performative making of the nation, on the other hand, otherness plays a constitutive role. The nation is made not out of a process of self-awareness, but out of encounters in which this self is to be made out of others - or rather, is to be made by making-other. The nation is made out of projects in which the identity of the community as a modern nation can be realized only by distinguishing what belongs to the nation from what does not, and by performing this distinction in particular encounters. Unlike conventional accounts of the emergence of the nation as pedagogy, understanding of such encounters cannot be governed by the consciousness of a collective subject that produces the meaning of the nation; this collective subject - the nation - is not the author of the performance, only its occasional, unstable effect. Moreover, one can bring into view the forms of difficulty, uncertainty, violence and subversion that the making of the nation can involve.
In this chapter I take as examples of this process two episodes from recent Egyptian politics. One is a campaign launched in the 1930s and I 940s to define and preserve an indigenous cultural heritage, pursued through a struggle to create a distinctively Egyptian vernacular architecture. The other is a dispute over the protection and presentation of the heritage of ancient Egypt, in particular the Theban Necropolis where Howard Carter earlier unearthed the treasures of King Tut. In 1945 these two different efforts to produce and defend a national heritage came together in plans to demolish and rebuild a village in southern Egypt. In the 1990s, more than half a century later, the village remained the site of an unresolved struggle over the question of national heritage.
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Making the Maiion in the 1940s
In 1945 the Egyptian government commissioned the Cairo architect Hassan Fathy to design and build a model village to rehouse the inhabitants of the village of Gurna, which lies on the west bank of the river Nile opposite the town of Luxor, 400 miles south of Cairo. The village consists of a string of hamlets stacked along the desert escarpment beyond the sugarcane fields at the valley's edge, amid the ancient rock-cut tombs and
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year or two earlier the Department of Antiquities had been embarrassed by the removal of an entire wall of one of the tombs under its guard. Needing a scapegoat, it blamed the local inhabitants and demanded their removal.
Fathy designed the model village of New Gurna using mud-brick construction and elaborate vaults and domes. His intention was to develop an affordable and aesthetically pleasing popular architecture. The building of the village marked the birth of a new vernacular style, one that was to become internationally famous for announcing the rejection of Western modernism and seeking to re-appropriate the styles and materials of a local heritage. The event also marked, as Kees van der Spek has noted, the moment of this new vernacular's untimely death.10 'The Village', as locals still refer to Fathy's project, was constructed over the following three winters in the corner of a large, irrigated tract of sugarcane fields. In 1948, with only a fraction of the 50-acre village constructed, Fathy was forced to abandon the project, partly because of bickering between government departments, but mostly because one night that winter, men from the old hamlets of Gurna, whose families opposed the planned eviction and resettlement, had cut the dyke and flooded the low-lying village.
Fathy's account of these events, published twenty years later, expressed his disappointment at the failure of his plans 'to revive the peasant's faith in his own culture,' and his bitterness towards the 'suspicious and strict' inhabitants of Gurna who had refused to co-operate and 'were not able to put into words even their material requirements in housing.'" It is easy to criticize Fathy today, whether for his paternalism and arrogance towards villagers who stood in the way of his architectural vision, or for the cosmopolitanism that led him to propagate this vision in books published in English and French and admired around the world, but which cut him off from those who preferred to read in Arabic.12 My concern here is not with Hassan Fathy, however, but with those events in the 1940s in Gurna, where the attempt to define and preserve a national heritage was simultaneously born and destroyed. It is this relationship between producing a national heritage and its subversion that I want to explore. 1 will examine how the manufacture of the modern vernacular, the attempt to preserve a national culture, as well as the protection of a more ancient, archaeological past, seemed to depend upon a relationship of force and a
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strúci uro of antagonism. The aim is to learn something larger from the fact that she birth of a national heritage movement in New Gurna was also the moment of its violent demise.
The history of the model village intersects with a continuing effort to present and preserve another national heritage: the monuments of ancient F"vpr. The road past New Gurna today is filled with tourist buses, which ston beyond the village at the Colossi of Memnon before proceeding to the Vallc," of the Kings and other ancient sites. None of the buses stops at the model \ illage, which is barely visible behind the shops and tourist signs that line the street (figure 8.1). New Gurna is a thriving community, but Fathy's houses have been overbuilt with additions, infills, and extra floors (to the extent that domed roofs allow), or in some cases pulled down. Fathy's village school - the one public building immediately put to use fifty years ago as planned - was demolished in the late 1980s and replaced with a larger school built with a concrete frame and baked red brick. The handmade mud bricks of Fathy's original school provided the rubble to make the iii-w building's driveway.
Figure 8.1. The Model Village of New Gurna, built in the 1950s, as photographed in 1999. (Photo by author)
One thing, however, survives intact after more than fifty years: the unfulfilled desire to evict the inhabitants of Old Gurna. After several intervening failures, in the years 1992 to 1994 new plans were drawn up, as pari of a master plan for Luxor funded by the United States Agency for International Development, to 'depopulate' the seven or eight hamlets on the Guma escarpment, from Sawalim in the north to Gurnat Mar'i in the south, plus the neighbouring hamlet of Medinat Habu.13 Over the following
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four years new villages again were built, this time located in the desert 5 to 10 kilometres north of Old Gurna, and again the households of Gurna largely refused to move and see their village demolished. On January ] 7, 1998, after several earlier skirmishes, a government bulldozer accompanied by two truck-loads of armed police moved into Gurna to carry out demolitions. A group of about three hundred villagers gathered, later swelling to several thousand, and drove the police back with stones, pushing the retreating bulldozer into a canal. The police opened fire on the villagers with automatic rifles, killing four and leaving more than twenty injured.14 This incident set back the relocation plans, but by the end of the same year the head of Luxor City Council, Major General Selmi Selim, confirmed that the plans to depopulate what he referred to as 'nine shanty areas known as Old Gurna' would go ahead as part of a vision to turn the area into 'an open air museum and cultural preserve."5 'You can't afford to have this heritage wasted because of informal houses being built in an uncivilised manner,' he explained to the press.16
The major general's use of the term 'uncivilized' to justify the evictions echoed the earlier language of Hassan Fathy. Fathy's account of the events of the 1940s told the history of New Gurna as a story of the progress of culture and intelligence impeded by the ignorance and lawlessness of the natives. The families of Gurna lived mostly as tomb robbers, Fathy said (an accusation to which I will return), and it was to preserve this lawless way of life that they sabotaged the project. (In the plans for the model village there were to be several public buildings, including a theatre and an exhibition hall, intended to create the kind of public spirit that Fathy felt was missing in ordinary villages and was needed if Egypt's vernacular heritage was to be revived; but there was also to be another public building never previously found in villages - a police station.) This violence and lawlessness provided the pretext for building the new village. It was only by addressing the problems of ignorance and the absence of civilization that an architect interested in a programme to create a modern vernacular could find an opportunity to work. However, hidden within the project was a larger violence, not visible in the plans, but making them possible.
As a way to uncover some of this larger violence, I begin with what may seem a minor event in Fathy's account, what he referred to as the 'malaria epidemic' of 1947. He noted in passing that the epidemic 'killed about a third of Gurna's inhabitants,' but he concentrated more on the restrictions imposed on travel from Cairo and other delays the epidemic caused to his project.17 It seems startling today that Fathy would not discuss any larger objections to uprooting and relocating a community in the midst of such suffering. But in fact there was more to this oversight. Writing twenty years later, Fathy had collapsed together two separate epidemics. And these events were not just an obstacle to his plans but the condition that made them possible.
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The I 947 epidemic was actually an outbreak of cholera, not malaria, ind affected mostly Lower Egypt. However, three years earlier, in 1942-44, qn epidemic of malaria had occurred in the Luxor region, an outbreak of «jqmbiae malaria, the disease's most lethal form, brought from the south by recent irrigation work designed to expand the sugarcane plantations, and by increased wartime traffic with Sudan. It was this earlier epidemic, along with the famine that resulted from wartime food shortages and men too cirk to harvest the wheat crop or earn wages cutting cane, that killed more than a third of the people of Gurna.18 It is estimated that from 100,000 to 200 000 people may have died in Luxor and neighbouring regions, with the heaviest casualties in places like Gurna and other sugarcane plantations, where perennial irrigation enabled the gambiae mosquito to reproduce. In iy[av 1944 the manager of a plantation near Gurna estimated that 80-90 per cent of the local population had contracted the disease, and the doctor in the local town of Armant reported 80-90 deaths a day.19 Even in the 1990s old men in Gurna remembered those times, when there were not enough healthy men even to bury the dead, and corpses were taken to their graves on the back of donkeys.
The gambiae malaria epidemic provoked a political crisis in Cairo in 1944-45. Opposition politicians blamed the enormous death toll on the severe poverty of the Luxor region and the rest of the extreme south (Qena and Aswan Governorates), where a handful of owners controlled most of the land in sugar plantations of tens of thousands of acres each, and the majority of the population was landless and worked for starvation wages. A deputy in Parliament argued that living conditions in the Soviet Union were far better. However, the governing Wafd party, which represented the interests of large landowners, was anxious to defuse this radical threat to the principle of landownership. It argued that the cause of the epidemic was not poverty and inequality but the unsanitary living conditions in the villages. Instead of land reform and the redistribution of wealth, it proposed a plan to demolish the country's traditional villages and replace them with well-ventilated, sanitary and attractive model villages.20 It was in the midst of this political crisis that Fathy negotiated and won government funding for the construction of his model village at Gurna.
The government paid for the purchase of 50 acres of sugarcane land from Bo u los Hanna Pasha, who owned thousands of acres in the Gurna region and was one of the largest landowners in Upper Egypt. The 50 acres were to provide space for the village with its generously proportioned houses and its numerous public buildings, a fresh-water pond for swimming, and a public park for recreation - but not a single acre on which to grow food. Rather than open the question of rights to the land, Fathy helped establish a textile workshop, employing twenty child weavers, to provide some income for the village. Later a visiting government official noticed that the children in the workshop 'looked thin and hungry,' and
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suggested that they be given a bowl of lentil soup every day. 'It was a sensible and practical suggestion,' Fathy admitted. But no money could be found to provide the food.21 Brushing aside such problems, Fathy saw his village as a pilot project launching a 'National Program for Rural Reconstruction' that would lead 'to the complete regeneration of the Egyptian countryside through rebuilding its villages.'"
This approach to social problems, which saw in the recovery of national heritase the recovery of social energy and purpose, reflected the hubris of an architectural politics that was coming to believe in the powers of planning as a means to the construction of new national subjects and an alternative to more popular and effective proposals that threatened the social order of large laiidownership. Fathy felt that the very participation of villagers in the planning process - a revolutionary idea - would provide the means for them to recover their lost individuality. They would develop into subjects of the nation by rediscovering their power to make decisions. 'Ideally,' Fathy wrote, 'if the village were to take three years to build, the designing should go on for two years and eleven months.'23 The limitations of this view - the inability to consider that villagers might prefer to stay in the houses they had already designed and built themselves - reflected the fact that Fathy himself came from the Egyptian landowning class (his father was the absentee owner of several large estates).24 Whatever his own disagreements with this class, all his architectural commissions were connected with such a landowning background. Besides the village of New Gurna, he also built a model farm for the Royal Agricultural Society and rest houses for the Anglo/American-controlled Chilean Nitrate Company -two institutions promoting commercialized, large-scale agribusiness. And most of his earlier architectural designs were country houses for the proprietors of large estates.25
If Fathy saw the villages of Gurna as violent, lawless, and unable 'to put into words even their material requirements in housing,' when one puts his project into a larger social context, it is the project that begins to seem violent, and its author who is perhaps 'not able to put into words' its material context. The sugar plantations of the Gurna region had originally been village land. But from the 1860s, the ruling household in Cairo had begun to seize the land, paying little or no compensation, as new irrigation schemes made it possible to prevent the annual Nile flood and plant the year-long cane crop. Then, after the country's Ottoman Turkish ruling household was declared bankrupt by its British and French bankers in 1 875 and the British army invaded and occupied Egypt, the foreign bankers managed the estates and then auctioned them off, not returning them to the original village cultivators, but selling them intact to barons like Boulos Pasha. Thus, when Fathy and the government neglected to provide New Gurna with land to grow its own food, or even bowls of lentil soup for child workers, this was not an innocent oversight: it was the continuation
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of a process of appropriation carried out over the preceding sixty or eighty years through the depredations of a Turkish-Egyptian elite and their British bickers. And it was to counter the new threats to this political order, ground 1944-45, that men were dreaming up plans for model villages and Fnthv was proclaiming the architect's 'unique' ability 'to revive the peasant's faith in his own culture.'26
fn projects of this sort one can see the difficulties of making the nation. To perform the nation, groups must be included by first declaring them excluded by their lack of civilization, villages destroyed in order to preserve them, pasts declared lost so that they may be recovered. Fathy desired to 'revive' an indigenous culture as a means of developing an Egyptian national heritage. To perform this revival, he needed the people of Gurna -yet he needed them as a community outside the nation, whose elimination would help bring the nation and its past into being. The Gurnawis were to be portrayed as ignorant, uncivilized, and incapable of preserving their own architectural heritage. Only by constructing them in this way would the architect have an opportunity to intervene, presenting himself as the rediscoverer of a local heritage that the locals themselves no longer recognized or understood. As the spokesman bringing this heritage into national politics, the architect would enable the past to speak and play its role in giving the modern nation its character. Thus, the people of Gurna could only enter into national politics by submitting to an act of violence. And to preserve their heritage, the architect had to first destroy it. Old Gurna was to be pulled down and rebuilt - and not just because it was built over antiquities, for if the project succeeded, every other village of Egypt could also be demolished and rebuilt. The preservation of the past required its destruction, so that the past could be rebuilt. Likewise, performing the nation required that every one of its rural inhabitants be declared outside the nation, uncivilized and unhygienic, so that in rendering them civilized and clean, the nation could be made.
One can add an ironic conclusion to the story of New Gurna. The violence ol the plantation system, and the large irrigation schemes that made it possible, were the source of the opportunity to build the model village, as an urgent response to the system's crisis in the mid-1940s, one that sought to draw upon the forms and materials of the vernacular. But the irrigation schemes also meant that the fields were no longer flooded, and there was no longer an annual deposit of Nile silt that allowed renewal of the rich alluvial mud out of which Fathy's mud-brick architecture was built. By the 1980s the government was forced'to ban the use of alluvial muds for brick-making in an attempt to limit the further loss of fertile soil. The celebration of a vernacular based on centuries of local mud was launched at precisely the moment when (and for the same reasons that) the mud became lor the first time in history no longer in renewable supply.
At the same time, the violence and exclusion employed in manufacturing
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heritage and making the nation also provide moments when things do not go according to the official script. Nation-making is a performance that remains open to improvisation and restaging. Such restagings are not the subversive acts of outsiders, but the imaginative response of those in whose lives the nation is performed. After all, it was thanks to the violent history of the irrigation schemes that the villagers had the power to thwart Fathy's plans: the model village was protected by a dyke, and the dyke could be cut. In more ways than one, the vision of preserving and reviving a vernacular peasant culture was haunted by the violence that made it possible.
Making the Nation in the 1990s
Fifty years later, in the mid-1990s, the government was still trying to evict the population of Old Gurna, and still describing them as lawless and uncivilized. To the old arguments about tomb-robbing, official statements added new claims: that waste water from the houses of Gurna was damaging the tombs; that their 'living conditions are poor, unhygienic, and spoil the view';27 that the houses blocked access to Pharaonic tombs and impeded the expansion of the tourist industry; and that the presence of this large population in what was now a UNESCO World Heritage-listed site prevented its archaeological preservation and its development as an open-air museum for tourism. From the Ministry of Culture and American development experts in Cairo, to the Luxor City Council and local contractors and tourism investors, there was now a coalition of forces working to transform Gurna into a site that was clean, well lighted and signposted, with wide roads and ample parking, and people-free: in a word, not just an ancient heritage site but a modern one.
Making the nation in the 1990s occurred in a different context from the 1940s, with new actors and audiences. The staging of national heritage now involved new groups of outsiders, including UNESCO, the World Bank, the United States Agency for International Development, international tour operators and tourists, and new forces claiming to speak in the name of the nation, including local officials and entrepreneurs. The alliances and interactions among these forces shaped the local dynamics of the tourism industry and the local production of the nation. The script still spoke of uncivilized natives, whose ignorance and lawlessness threatened a national and global heritage. But once again, the performance of the nation had a more uncertain outcome.
The new plans to evict the population dated back at least to a UNESCO document of 1980, and were formalized in a planning and relocation study carried out in 1992-94. The new relocation site, first identified and surveyed in the 1950s, lay several kilometres to the north of Gurna, beyond the outlying hamlet of Tarif, and had come to be known as New Tarif
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Hii'iire Ö.2). Repeating themes first articulated by Hassan Fathy, the Terms it" Reference for the relocation study, funded by USAID, emphasized the > .J for 'community participation' in the planning process and for detailed irchitectural, social and cultural surveys of the old village. This now included the making of an ethnographic film about the community that was ro be destroyed. Such surveys were undertaken, and the resulting house designs once again represented Cairo architects' interpretation of local aesthetics. They made few concessions to the actual layout of local houses (bathrooms, for example, were designed to be placed inside the houses, and adjacent to the kitchens, rather than in a rear courtyard - where local residents had always placed them, in part because one often has to go for davs without running water). And 'community participation' largely took the form of constructing different model houses, made of solitex, plywood, and butterfly cloth, which villagers could visit to select their preferred desii,n.?s Some of these houses were later built, but a Cairo consulting firm also discovered that the Luxor City Council had handed over 45 per cent of the relocation area to a private contractor, who threw up minuscule and nondescript concrete-and-red-brick boxes. Several hundred villagers eventually agreed to move to these new settlements, in most cases those living in extreme overcrowding (since 1978 the government had banned further building in Old Gurna). However, since villagers were able to exchange one old house for several new ones, only a few dozen old houses
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Figure 8.2. Unoccupied housing. New Tarif, 1999. (Photo by author)
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were available for demolition. And when the government tried to force other villagers to move, the result more than once was violent resistance, culminating in the riot and shootings of January 1998.
The US Agency for International Development, the World Bank, and the Egyptian government spent hundreds of millions of dollars during the 1990s alone planning and attempting once again the eviction of the people of Gurna/9 Despite this vast employment of architects, planners, ethnographers, bureaucrats and bulldozers, there was little investigation of the actual need for the evictions or their possible impact. The Terms of Reference for the planning and relocation study, drawn up with USAID funds, called for detailed analyses of the aesthetics, topography, population and culture of Old Gurna, as a means of preserving something of the community that was to be destroyed. But there was to be no investigation of the actual problems these people were said to be creating, which might have raised questions about the need for the evictions and for the employment of so much expertise.
The alleged problems can be examined one by one. First, it was said, the people of Gurna were tomb robbers. This accusation has been repeated so often that even many critics of the eviction assumed it to be true. The image of tomb robbers is a standard element in local media representations of Gurna - from Shadi 'Abd al-Salam's famous film of 1969, Al-Mumiya (The Mummy), to a popular television serial aired during the middle of the struggles in 1996-97, Hilm aj-Janubi (The Southerner's Dream), whose plot turned on the conflict between an evil tomb robber in the Luxor area and an educated hero who sought to defend and rediscover Egypt's heritage.30 Occasionally, the authorities reinforced these images by staging a raid on a Gurna house, as in 1996 when Muhammed al-Adhim, 63 years old, came home and found that the authorities had discovered a tomb cut into the rock behind the wall of his great grandmother's bedroom. The tomb was just an empty tunnel, but this did not stop the authorities from arresting the old man, who worked as an assistant in a local dentist's office, and making a public example of him. T am completely stunned. I never knew there was a tunnel . . . ,' he said. T think the tourist authority just made a balloon to attract foreigners. Tomorrow they will say these slippers I am wearing came from Ramses II.' Tomb robbers, he pointed out, are supposed to make lots of money. 'But can you tell me where is my Mercedes, where is my six-storey house?'31
It is no doubt the case that over some two hundred years, until the middle of the twentieth century when international conventions against the trade in antiquities were put in place, the people of Gurna formed a small part of the global networks that moved the treasures of ancient Egypt to the great museums and private collections of Europe and North America. Yet it is curious that those Gurnawis are today considered 'tomb robbers', while it is still difficult to describe the British Museum in London or the
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Metropolitan Museum in New York as collections of stolen goods. It is also true that a small illicit trade in Egyptian antiquities still continues, driven by the demand from private collectors in the West. Occasionally, these trading rings are broken; however, news reports then show that the source of stolen goods is almost invariably places such as the Valley of the Kings, where no Gurnawis live, or storerooms and other sites under the control of the government.32 Anecdotal reports from Gurna suggest the same thing.33 These problems would be best addressed by measures such as better pay and training for local employees of the antiquities authority, and above all by more vigorous international action against Western dealers. In the early 1990s, for example, scholars on the Cultural Property Advisory Commission in the United States tried to persuade the Egyptian government to ask the United States to ban the importation of artefacts illegally exported from Egypt, but no ban was introduced. But it is easier to demand the eviction of villagers from a hillside in southern Egypt than to investigate how the trade in antiquities is actually organized and run and to collaborate on measures against international dealers. Development agencies, architects, planners and academics can then repeat without evidence the claim that Gurnawis are tomb robbers. I have no idea who in particular is involved in the antiquities economy, and I do not want to make accusations without evidence. My point is that the planners and developers have no idea either, which means that it is not clear what impact the evictions would have on the alleged problem of illegal trade.
It is possible that it could make the problem worse. The official image of the people of Gurna - as destitute, uncivilized, and poverty-stricken peddlers and dealers - conceals the complex nature of the local economy. There have been cursory attempts to study this economy, by the World Bank and other agencies. Such studies have, however, been narrowly based on local government records and formal questionnaires, so typically they have uncovered only a small part of people's economic lives - and very little of the complicated relationship between the villagers and the heritage industry.
I will give one example of this complexity. In 1978 the heritage managers imposed a ban on any further building in the antiquities zone. They also required that all buildings be of mud-brick construction. This meant that villagers who extended their houses, or added a concrete frame inside to support a third or fourth storey, or tried to open a tourist shop in the ground floor, were required to make a series of payments, often amounting to tens of thousands of pounds, to a variety of local officials to persuade them to make exceptions to the law. Such 'variances', as they are called in the more regularized practice of the United States, continue to represent an unofficial, yet pervasive element in the local economy. To depopulate the region would cause this system of payments to collapse. Those who campaign against the evictions in support of the villagers often mention
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how the villagers depend upon the local heritage industry for their incomes. But the financial relationship also operates in reverse. If the depopulation of Gurna were to deprive local officialdom of a major source of unreported income, might another source of income, the antiquities trade, have to expand in compensation? I do not know, nor does anyone else. But it is certainly plausible that the depopulation would have the opposite effect to the one intended.
If one turns to the second, and more sophisticated, set of arguments for removing the villagers from the heritage site, one finds that once again things may be closer to the reverse of what is claimed. Whether or not they are robbing its tombs, it is argued, the villagers of Gurna are damaging the Theban Necropolis by their very presence. 'Living conditions are poor, unhygienic, and spoil the view,' the authorities claim, and, more seriously, the waste water from the Gurna houses is damaging the surrounding tombs. Houses built over tombs, moreover, prevent the development of tourism.
Again, it is not clear what the evidence is for these claims. The hamlets of Gurna are not allowed to have running water or to dig wells. They must fetch all the water they need in wheeled oil drums pulled by donkeys. The only running water on the Theban hillside is in the accommodations of the European archaeological missions. While moisture damage is a problem, there has been no comprehensive geological survey of the Gurna site, with its alternating layers of Theban limestone and Esna shale, to assess the impact of habitation (versus, for example, the impact of the general raising of the water table and humidity levels since the building of the Aswan High Dam, or the increasing number of flash floods attributable to global climate change), or to identify which locations can support human occupation without damage to the tombs.34 Once again, despite the hundreds of millions of pounds spent on outside consultants, these basic studies have not been done.
Moreover, while it is true that a handful of ancient tombs of Old Gurna have houses built over their entrances, there are many hundreds of other tombs that are not concealed by houses, yet have not been opened up to tourism. Some of these are used by the authorities for other purposes: for example, as storerooms. The tombs that are concealed by the Old Gurna houses the authorities want to demolish are arguably better off than all the rest. First, while tombs of no archaeological significance may be simply cave-like extensions of the houses built against them, the few of archaeological merit are closed off from houses by interior gates and controlled by the antiquities department. This relationship between household and tomb may represent a more historically interesting aspect of local heritage than many of the empty tombs cleared out and opened up as tourist sites. Indeed, one or two archaeologists working in the area have started to dig not in uncleared tombs but in the piles of debris cleared out
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&
by earlier excavations. Earlier excavators were interested only in Pharaonic treasure, or at most in the art and artefacts of the Pharaonic period. Yet many of the tombs served as human habitations over subsequent centuries, and the debris of earlier excavations contains rich evidence of this long period of Coptic and early Islamic local life. The communities living among the tombs today may date back a mere four of five hundred years, but the relationship they represent between a dead past and a living community is arguably an integral part of the history of the Theban Necropolis (figure H.Ó)."                                               ...............
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Figure 8.3. A hamlet of Old Gurna, 1999. (Photo by author)
It is also important to consider the likely consequences of the larger aim of the depopulation programme, whose goal is an enormous increase in the numbers of tourists visiting the area. While no studies have been done on any actual damage the villagers of Gurna do to the archaeological sites, there is detailed information about the damage that tourists do, and especially the damage done by tourists' waste water. If a typical tomb in the Theban Necropolis is occupied by twelve visitors, in one hour their sweat increases the relative humidity by an average of 5 per cent. At the peak of the tourist season, as many as 4,500 tourists visit the Necropolis every hour. More than one-third of them, between 1,500 and 2,000, visit the three most popular tombs, causing the humidity in them to increase by up
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to 100 per cent, a level at which one-fifth of the wall painting can be lost. While villagers can be denied running water to reduce the problem of waste water, there appears to be no equivalent way to stop tourists from sweating. The master plan for Luxor, of which the depopulation of Gurna is a major part, envisions quadrupling the number of tourists within twenty years, from the rate of one million each year in the 1990s to four million. And just about every one of those three million extra visitors will want to squeeze themselves, dripping with perspiration, into and out of the tombs of Gurna. Far from eliminating the problem of waste water, the plans for Gurna are going to add to it significantly.
Considering these potential impacts, therefore, it may be more appropriate to view planners and officials the way Hassan Fathy wanted people to see the villagers, as unable to put certain things into words. What current official silence seems to hide, and thus gives away, is the destructive and unsustainable plans for the local development of tourism. In the 1940s archaeologists and government officials claimed the depopulation of Gurna was required to preserve the nation's archaeological heritage. In the 1990s depopulation has been linked not just to arguments about archaeological preservation, but to demands to create a proper tourist experience. National heritage is now to be shaped by the forces and demands of a worldwide tourist industry. Yet once again these forces have been open to local forms of subversion.
The tourism developments of the 1990s go back to 1982, when the World Bank hired the US consulting firm Arthur D. Little to draw up a programme for increasing tourism revenue in Luxor. The consultants revived the proposal for the depopulation of Gurna (and also revived another of Fathy's proposals from half a century earlier: the establishment of a co-operative to improve the quality of locally made souvenirs). According to the consultants, the increase in tourism revenue once the local population was removed would come from a number of areas: better visitor management (new roads, bus parks, and other facilities) to increase the flow of tourists; a new airport terminal across the river in Luxor; and increased water and electric supplies and other infrastructure to enable the development of the luxury sector of four- and five-star hotels and Nile cruise ships. Since there was a limit to the number of tourists who could be squeezed each hour in and out of King Tut's tomb, the consultants took the approach that income growth would come partly from a shift toward wealthier tourists.
The funds for the development programme itself have also had little local impact. World Bank documents show that more than half the budget for the 1980s development projects - $32.5 million out of a total of $59 million - was to be spent abroad, to pay for foreign contractors, consultants and equipment.36 The Egyptian government borrowed this
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$32.5 million from the World Bank, following the usual practice with Western development assistance to countries like Egypt according to which the assistance is actually money paid by Egypt to the West.57 The balance of the budget, the local costs, were paid directly by the government. The contractors building the new roads initially agreed to employ some of the villagers. But as Ayman, one of the villagers who did this work, later told me, when they discovered that for more than twelve hours a day of heavy labour thev were tQ.he__paid oniv 5 nnnnds íahniif í 1 .^f)) thpv rpfne^rf tn work, and the contractors brought in cheaper labour from other, more impoverished villages.38 The major local construction contract, building a new river embankment at Luxor, which might also have employed local workers, was awarded (following perhaps the World Bank's new free-market principles) to a military workforce from China.
These investments made possible a phenomenal growth in tourism over the following decade. From 1982 to 1992 the number of visitors to Egypt and their estimated expenditures more than doubled (although attacks by Islamic militants caused numbers to dip again in the 1990s).39 In Luxor most of the growth, as planned, was in luxury hotels and cruise ships. Across the river in Gurna, those who had established small hotels or other tourist enterprises before the development ban was imposed also did well. And they typically put their profits into importing small air-conditioned tour buses from Germany, or buying land and putting up apartment buildings in Luxor.
But for many villagers there was almost no way of breaking into the tourist business, except for those who found unskilled hotel jobs in Luxor at below-subsistence wages. A few dozen young men did better, by finding a foreign tourist to marry - usually a much older woman, who would visit each winter for a few weeks and, with luck, would be wealthy enough to set the husband up in business. One woman, an enterprising Californian divorcee named Happy, began to build a small hotel on the edge of the desert south of the Theban Necropolis. The building was stopped by the authorities, of course, and after six years and many payments the hotel was still not quite finished. Most of the husbands have settled for something less, such as an imported car to run as a tourist taxi. Cruising past those working in the sugarcane fields in their air-conditioned Peugeots, these men seem to underline the separation of the tourist world from the village.
The World Bank's programme for the development of Luxor tourism was designed to increase this separation. The Bank's consultants, Arthur D. Little, conducted a survey of tourists' experience in Luxor and reported that the biggest problem concerned the visitors' contact with the local population. Tourists complained of being bothered continually by people trying to take them somewhere or sell them something. The consultants recommended   that   no   further   peddler's   licenses   be   issued.   More
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significantly, the visitor-management scheme they devised was planned to minimize unregulated contact with the tourists and increase their physical separation from the local community. A separate river ferry and bus facilities were developed to better isolate the movement of tourists from local traffic. An enclosed visitor centre with its own restaurant and shops was to be built, to enclose the tourists waiting for transportation. And in Ayman's village the plans called for an elevated walkway to be erected through the middle of the village, so that tourists could cross from the bus park to the Pharaonic temple without touching the village itself.
Enclave tourism, as this kind of arrangement is called, is now the typical pattern of tourist development in regions outside Europe and North America. It appears to be required by the increasing disparity between the wealth of the tourist and the poverty of those whose countries they visit. Today the Egyptian Ministry of Tourism appeals to foreign capitalists considering putting money into hotels or other tourist enterprises in Egypt with the claim that investors 'are enjoying outstanding profits in the tourism field,' thanks to the easy repatriation of those profits and to 'labor costs that are more than competitive on a world-wide scale.'40 In the late 1980s the Ministry calculated that each tourist spent on average $100 a day in Egypt, which was more than most hotel employees earned in a month. A decade later the disparity was far greater.41 The difference in wealth is so pronounced that the tourists' enjoyment can only be secured by physical separation from the host community.
However, there is a larger reason for the creation of enclave tourism. As the industry becomes concentrated in the hands of luxury hotels, mostly under the management of US- or European-based international chains, as well as half a dozen enormously wealthy Egyptian entrepreneurs, the hotel managers have sought to increase their profit by channelling more and more tourist expenditure within their own establishments.42 The grand Egyptian hotels that used to provide little more than spacious accommodations and an elegant dining room have been replaced by hotel complexes that offer three or four different restaurants and cuisines, several bars, shopping arcades, a swimming pool and fitness club, cruises and excursions, business facilities, and evening lectures and entertainments. The Nile cruise ships and the walled 'tourist villages' popular where space is plentiful, such as along the Red Sea coast, are even more self-contained.
Except for a small elite, the local population is excluded from these enclaves, kept out by the prices charged and the guards posted at the gate. The result is a system of almost total segregation. Most Luxor tourists live, eat and sleep in their enclave hotels, travel in separate air-conditioned taxis and buses, and go to separate entertainments. The few occasions when organized tourists encounter the local street, whether half an hour set aside for shopping in the Luxor bazaar or a five-minute walk from the cruise ship to an archaeological site through a strip of village, become frenzied scenes
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in which local peddlers, merchants and entrepreneurs try to secure some small share of the tourist business.
Driven by the planning of international hotel chains and local entrepreneurs, this process of segregation has been further encouraged by government and World Bank policy. In the 1980s the World Bank directed Egyptian public funds into building the infrastructure for tourist development, with projects like the one in Luxor. In the 1990s the World Bank began pushi.ng_.ior...th.e__.Dr.ofits from this nnhlir investment to be switched into private and, especially, foreign hands. Supported by a former Egyptian banker turned Minister of Tourism, Fuad Sultan, in 1992 the World Bank paid the consultants Coopers and Lybrand Deloitte to draw up plans to sell off the country's luxury hotels - which, although managed by international hotel chains, were still owned by the state. The hotels were highly profitable, providing returns of up to 50 per cent or more of revenue.43 As the consultants acknowledged, the investors enjoyed prospects for windfall profits from the future resale of undervalued properties.
Whatever the windfall, the increased control of Luxor tourism by outside capital will have two likely consequences. First, it will send not just the profits from tourism abroad, but tourist expenditure in general. Increasing international integration of the tourist industry decreases the proportion of tourist expenditure that remains in the host country or region.44 The integration of the hotel industry was accompanied in the 1990s by that of the foreign tour operators. In Britain, for example, by 1998 just four companies controlled over 75 per cent of the overseas tour industry. The largest company, Thomson, with its own retail chain, tour operator, and airline, was itself controlled by the North American conglomerate Thomson Travel Group.45 Second, as those who purchased. Egypt's tourist assets increase the pressure on local managers to build their share of a limited market, the process of segregating the tourists within their luxury enclaves will intensify. For Ayman and the other young men of Gurna and neighbouring villages seeking employment, both developments will likely decrease the proportion of tourism income available to the local community.
Yet even as the process of segregation has developed, the lives of the local community have been increasingly affected by the tourist presence. Because of the kind of industry tourism is, its development involves more than a simple process of segregation. A conventional industry, whether based in manufacturing or agriculture, involves organizing people to produce. Mass production relies upon all the well-known methods of recruiting and disciplining a workforce, organizing their use of time, their movement, and their arrangement in physical space, and developing systems of instruction, supervision and management. Mass tourism, by contrast, involves organizing people to consume. It relies upon similar methods of managing flows and timetables, arranging physical space, and instructing and
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supervising to maximize the process of consumption. Tourism is usually defined from the tourist's point of view as a form of leisure, and therefore in contrast to work. But it is better seen as another form of industry, organized around the maximization not of production but consumption.
Tourism is an industry of consumption, and the consumption not of individual goods but of a more complex commodity, experiences. No object of consumption is ever just a thing. The purchase of food, clothing or cars is always the purchase of a certain taste, lifestyle or experience. One pays not just for the thing but for what it signifies. With tourism, this consumption of what things signify is taken to the extreme. The tourist industry sells not individual objects of signification but entire worlds of experience and meaning.
In Luxor the tourism industry markets the consumption of ancient Egypt. The experience is created out of the archaeological sites, but also by organizing the contemporary society to appear as a reflection and extension of the past. The 1982 World Bank report on visitor management explained that 'the creation of an overall environment is needed on the West Bank in order for Luxor to reach its full market potential.'46 This meant turning Gurna into an 'open-air museum', its population moved out, and its houses to be destroyed - except for a few left standing as examples of local architecture and used to house artisans and craftsmen producing tourist artefacts.
In 1981 half a million tourists visited Luxor, and each stayed for an average of only 2.1 nights. A decade later the number of visitors in a good year was more than double that, but the length of stay had declined, to an average of less than one night.47 The local tourist industry has less than 24 hours within which to maximize the tourist's consumption. This requires a meticulous planning of meals, drinks, sleeping and entertainment, plus the requisite trips to Karnak and Luxor temples, the sound-and-light show, the felucca ride, and Luxor bazaar, followed by King Tut's tomb and other sundry tombs and temples of the Theban Necropolis across the river.
This mass-production of experience produces a curious common interest between tourism's over-organized heritage consumers and some of the local community. In the 1982 World Bank survey, alongside the complaint about the behaviour of peddlers and local merchants, the most frequent tourist request was for more meaningful contact with the local population. Many tourists to Luxor are anxious to escape the routine and meet 'real Egyptians'. Many of the local population, interested in diverting tourist expenditure back toward their own needs, are keen to help. Ayman's aunt, Zaynab, for example, has a house directly in front of a parking area for tour buses. Her children hang around the buses, out of sight of the tour guides, and catch the eye of tourists lagging behind the main group as it heads off toward the temple. They then invite them into the house to watch their mother baking bread at the earthen oven. The kids expect a tip of a pound or so, and some of the tourists even pay their mother.
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The mass consumption of heritage includes countless small encounters of this sort, in which the logics of exclusion, impoverishment and eviction are briefly suspended. Such events operate like a local eco-tourism, almost invisible to the large-scale tourist industry, performing, like Zaynab's kids, behind its back, yet for many individual tourists often representing the highlight of their day, far more memorable than all that sweaty Theban heritage. These encounters very occasionally develop into longer exchanges, including the foreign women who as tourists find a local husband in the village. None of this is necessarily an eco-tourism to celebrate, for it is usually constructed on considerable inequalities and misunderstandings. But it does serve as a reminder that the manufacture and consumption of heritage produces encounters beyond the control of heritage managers, where the act of consumption briefly undermines the place of things in the heritage system.
Making Hidden Violence Visible
Let me conclude by bringing this analysis of tourism and the heritage industry back to the question of producing the nation, and to the people of Gurna. In November 1996 the heads of more than seventy households threatened with eviction and demolition signed a petition to the authorities. 'We the people of Gurna,'48 the petition begins,
. . . have become threatened in our homes, we have become agonized with fear, while our houses are demolished above our heads and we are driven from our homeland. Sirs, you know the feelings suffered by the refugee driven from his home, the exile from his land, who becomes a stranger in his own country. We have begun to wonder whether we are Egyptians.
The petition describes the fear and violence of relocation, connecting it to other, more brutal expulsions of a sort that Egyptians in recent history have not had to face. The villagers then invoke for themselves the question of the nation: 'We have begun to wonder whether we are Egyptians.' This simple question opens up the contradictions of nation-making. Their eviction has been justified as a project of producing the nation. To preserve the national heritage, and to turn a lawless and uneducated population into honest citizens of the state, they must be expelled from their homes. To produce the nation requires a local act of violence, and in revealing this violence, its victims bring to light the forces and instabilities that nation-making brings into play. The petition continues:
The pretext for all this is that we damage and do harm to tourism and that we threaten the safety of the monuments. We do not understand who has fabricated these rumors. We come from the monuments and through the
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monuments we exist. Our livelihood is from tourism. We have no source of sustenance beyond God except for our work with tourism ... We are married to the tourists . . .
Against the popular official portrayal of them as backward, unclean, ignorant, and an obstacle to the development of a modern heritage site, they declare 'we are married to the tourists.' Both a metaphor for their close involvement with the tourist industry and a reference to the fact that foreign women have in tact married local men, this claim gentiy but insistently subverts the official rhetoric.
Given that the authorities have been periodically attempting to evict the people of Gurna for more than five decades, and have on their side today all the resources of bulldozers, armed police forces, tourism investors, and United States and World Bank consultants, it is important to take seriously this power to subvert the violent plans of the heritage industry and the local performances of nation-making. This subversion, I have tried to show, is not the pure resistance of an indigenous community opposed to the plans of the authorities. It is a subversion that operates within, and opens up to view, the contradictions within the projects of heritage and nation-making. The manufacturing of a national heritage attempts to divide the world into consumers of tradition and the dead, depopulated heritage they are to consume. But on numerous levels and in multiple ways, neither the consumers nor those facing eviction agree to this programme. And in their minor acts of disruption, they bring its hidden violence into view.
Notes
An earlier version of this paper was presented at the Sixth Biennial Conference of the International Association for the Study of Traditional Environments, 'Manufacturing Heritage/Consuming Tradition,' Cairo, December 15, 1998. I want to thank Nezar AlSayyad, Caroline Simpson, Kees van der Spek, Muhammed Hamdouni Alami, Rania Fahmy, Kristíne McNeil, Alice Diaz-Bonhomme, Jennifer Bell, Boutros Wadie, Siona Jenkins, Michael Jones, and David Sims. None is responsible for the views presented here.
1.  The standard views on nationalism and the invention of the past now include those of E. Hobsbawm and T. Ranger (eds.), The Invention of Tradition, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1983; E. Gellner, Nations and Nationalism, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1983; and B. Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism, 2nd ed., London, Verso, 1991.
2.  Anderson, Imagined Communities.
3. E. Renan, Qu'est-ce qu'une nation? What is a nation?, introduction by C. Taylor, English version by W.R. Taylor, Toronto, Tapir Press, 1996.
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4.  For a further discussion of some of the problems about conceptions of space raised by Anderson's argument, see my essay, 'The Stage of Modernity,' in T. Mitchell (ed.), Questions of Modernity, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 2000.
5.  Such treasure hunting had provided the main incentive for Western archaeology, and its major means of support. Its ending led to a sharp reduction in Western archaeological excavations in Egypt. They did not expand again until the late 1950s, when funds from UNESCO and other non-profit sources became available in resDonse to the immjnenjLdestmctian. of ancient sites caused bv the huiidinsj of the High Dam at Aswan.
6.  I have borrowed the notion of the past as 'the sign of the modern' from N.B. Dirks, 'History as a Sign of the Modern,' Public Culture, vol. 2, no. 1, Spring 1990, pp. 25-32.
7.  On Egyptian nationalism in this period, see the two books by I. Gershoni and J.P. Jankowski: Egypt, Islam and the Arabs: The Search for Egyptian Nationhood, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1986; and Redefining the Egyptian Nation, 1930-1945, Cambridge and New York, Cambridge University Press, 1995. Also see criticisms of their work in my review of the latter book, American Political Science Review, June, 1996; and in the excellent review essay by CD. Smith, 'Imagined Identities, Imagined Nationalisms: Print Culture and Egyptian Nationalism in the Light of Recent Scholarship,' International Journal of Middle East Studies, vol. 29, 1997, pp. 607-622. For further discussion of the intellectual debates of this period, see, among others, CD. Smith, Islam and the Search for Social Order in Modern Egypt: A Biography of Muhammad Husayn Haykal, Albany, SUNY Press, 1983; and J. Beinin and Z. Lockman, Workers on the Nile: Nationalism, Communism, Islam, and the Egyptian Working Class, 1882-1954, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1987.
8.  H.K. Bhabha, 'DissemiNation: Time, Narrative, and the Margins of the Modern Nation,' in The Location of Culture, London and New York, Routledge, 1994, p. 145.
9.  For a representative example, sec Gershoni and Jankowski, Redefining the Egyptian Nation.
10.   K. van der Spek, 'Dead Mountain vs. Living Community: The Theban Necropolis as Cultural Landscape,' paper presented at the UNESCO Third International Forum, 'University and Heritage,' Deakin University, Melbourne and Geelong, Australia, October 4-9, 1998.
11.  H. Fathy, Gurna: A Tale of Two Villages, Cairo, Ministry of Culture, 1969, reprinted as Architecture for the Poor: An Experiment in Rural Egypt, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1973, pp. 40, 43, 51..
12.  Architecture for the Poor was translated into Arabic only in the 1980s. See N. AlSayyad, 'From Vernacularism to Globalism: The Temporal Reality of Traditional Settlements,' Traditional Dwellings and Settlements Review, vol. 7, no. 1, 1995, pp. 13-24. Cosmopolitanism, however, may have been central to Fathy's achievement. Perhaps it gave him a certain distance from the narrower materialism and less generous paternalism of the landowning class from which he came, and opened him to the influence of other inventions of the modern vernacular, such as French colonial architecture in Morocco. For example, the Habous neighborhood built in
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the late 1930s in Casablanca, and copied some years later in Rabat, was widely discussed in this period as a reaction against the Modernist movement and Le Corbusier (Muhammed Hamdouni Alami, personal communication).
13.  Luxor City Council, 'El Guma Region Resident Relocation Study and New El Tarif Village Planning through Community Participation: Terms of Reference,' Luxor, Egypt, October í 992.
14.  Al-Ahram Weekly, February 12-18, 1998.
15.  Al-Abram Weekly, May 7-13, 1998; and Middle East Times, November 22, 1998.
16.  M. Tadros, 'A House on the Hill,' Al-Abram Weekly, April 1-8, 1998.
17.  Fathy, Architecture for the Poor, p. 60.
18.  For the history of the malaria and cholera epidemics, see N. Gallagher, Egypt's Other Wars: Epidemics and the Politics of Public Health, Syracuse, NY, Syracuse University Press, 1990. Toward the end of his book, Fathy correctly distinguishes the two epidemics. See Architecture for the Poor, p. 166.
19.  Gallagher, Egypt's Other Wars, pp. 32-35.
20.  Ibid., pp. 60-66.
21.  Fathy, Architecture for the Poor, pp. 63-64.
22.  Ibid., pp. 113, 127, 134.
23.  Ibid., p. 39
24.  Ibid., p. 1
25.  Ibid., p. 5.
26.  Ibid., p. 51.
27.  Al-Ahram Weekly, May 7-13, 1998.
28.  Luxor City Council, 'El Guma Region Resident Relocation Study,' p. 21.
29.  S. Jenkins, 'Lifting Roots and Moving Home,' Al-Wakaleh (Cairo), March
1997,  pp. 36-37.
30.  See L. Abu-Lughod, 'Television and the Virtues of Education: Upper Egyptian Encounters with State Culture,' in N. Hopkins and K. Westergaard (eds.), Directions of Change in Rural Egypt, Cairo, American University in Cairo Press,
1998, pp. 147-165.
31.  S. Bhatia, 'Villagers Cursed by Tombs of the Pharaohs,' The Observer, 1996.
32.  See, for example, Bhatia, 'Villagers Cursed by Tombs of the Pharaohs.'
33. A Cairo-based archaeologist tells me that antiquities he has seen offered for sale in Gurna have been engraved with identifiable excavation register numbers, indicating that they come from government storehouses, not undiscovered tombs hidden among the houses of Gurna.
34.  See van der Spek, 'Dead Mountain vs. Living Community.' An archaeologist working for the U.S.-funded Egyptian Antiquities Project has established that there has been a notable increase in the number of flash floods in the Theban Necropolis over the last 200 years, and that the disturbed climate pattern of the last twenty years has produced severe problems, notably a flash flood in 1994 which filled one
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tomb alone (KV13) with 95,000 gallons of water. Presentation at the ARCE annual meeting, Chicago, April 1999.
35.  See van der Spek, 'Dead Mountain vs. Living Community' for a similar argument.
36.  The World Bank, 'Staff Appraisal Report: Arab Republic of Egypt Tourism Project,' typescript, Washington, D.C., April 26, 1979, pp. 19-22.
37.  See T. Mitchell, 'The Object of Development: America's Egypt,' in J. Crush (ed.), Power of Development, New York, Routledge, 1995.
38.  Ayman and other local names used in this chapter are pseudonyms.
39.  Government of F^gypt, Ministry of Tourism, Tourism Development Authority, Information Management Department, '1992 Tourism Data Bulletin,' January 1993. The number of tourist arrivals dropped from 3.21 million in 1992 to 2.51 million in 1993, recovering to 3.31 million in 1995 and 3.90 in 1996, before dropping again in 1997 and 1998. Economist Intelligence Unit, Egypt: Country Profde 1997/98, p. 68.
40.  Government of Egypt, Ministry of Tourism, 'Taba Touristic Development Company,' typescript, Cairo 1991, pp. 54-55.
41.  Business International, 'Egypt: Profile of a Market in Transition,' Geneva, Business International S.A., 1989, p. 75.
42.  See T.G. Freitag, 'Enclave Tourism Development: For Whom the Benefits Roll?' Annals of Tourism Research, 1994, pp. 538-553.
43.  Coopers and Lybrand Deloitte, 'Egyptian Hotels Privatisation Study: Interim Report,' typescript, June 19, 1991. The management companies typically take 15-20 per cent of profit.
44.  J. Urry, The Tourist Gaze: Leisure and Travel in Contemporary Societies, London, Sage, 1990, p. 64. Attempts to measure the exact proportion of tourist expenditure that remains in the host country are inconclusive, in part because circumstances differ so much from one economy to the next. See E.P. English, The Great Escape? An Examination of North-South Tourism, Ottawa, The North-South Institute, 1986, pp. 17-45. The measurements are also inconclusive because the very nature of the industry, organized around the consumption of experience (see below), makes conventional economic measurement impossible.
45.  The Observer, July 16, 1995, Business Section, p. 1; and August 9, 1998, p. 4.
46.  Arthur D. Little, Study on Visitor Management and Associated Investments on the West Bank of the Nile at Luxor, April 1982, p. VII-9, emphasis added.
47.  Arthur D. Little, Study on Visitor Management, p. VlII-2; and Government of Egypt, '1992 Tourism Data Bulletin.' Since 1981 the average visitor length of stay has declined steadily for Egypt at a whole, except for a jump in 1986-88 caused largely by long-stay summer tourists from the Gulf, very few of whom visit Luxor.
48.  Petition from the people of Gurna, signed 'Ahali al-Qurna, 'annum Abd al-Sallam Ahmad Suli, al-Qurna, Naj' Al-Hurübät, Al Uqsur.' Typescript, in the author's possession, November 1996.
237
Consuming Tradition, Manufacturing Heritage
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