Julia Elyachar On the Semicivilized: Coloniality, Finance, and Embodied Sovereignty in Cairo

Dr. Julia Elyachar is an author, anthropologist, and political economist.  She was trained in anthropology, economics, history of political and economic thought, political economy, social theory, Middle Eastern Studies, and Arabic language. At Princeton, she is an associate professor of anthropology, and associate professor at the Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies. She received her BA in Economics from Barnard College, Columbia University and her MA and PhD in Anthropology and Middle East Studies from Harvard University. In today’s conversation, we discuss her latest monograph On the Semicivilized: Coloniality, Finance, and Embodied Sovereignty in Cairo. Drawing on thirty years of ethnographic research in Cairo, family archives from Palestine and Egypt, and research on Ottoman debt and finance to rethink catastrophe and potentiality in Cairo and the world today, Elyachar theorizes a global condition of the “semicivilized” marked by nonsovereign futures, crippling debts, and the constant specter of violence exercised by those who call themselves civilized. Looking at the world from the perspective of the semicivilized, Dr. Elyachar argues, allows us to shift attention to embodied infrastructures, collective lives, and practices of moving and acting in common that bypass lingering assumptions of territorialism and unitary sovereign rule. 

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