The "Inequality Puzzle": Reflections from the Anthropology of Elites

Roushdy, Noha (1 November 2023). The "Inequality Puzzle": Reflections from the Anthropology of Elites (Submitted) Beirut, Lebanon: Arab Council for the Social Sciences

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This paper is an attempt to highlight the ways in which anthropological studies of privilege can contribute to research and knowledge gaps about inequality in twenty-first century Egypt. The paper is divided into three parts: In the first part, I examine recent debates about an “inequality puzzle” in twenty-first century Egypt and its relationship to efforts at understanding the 2011 uprisings. This debate, which has generated heated scholarly debates in recent years, pertains to a discrepancy between data showing decreasing rates of inequality in the year preceding the 2011 uprisings and rising perceptions and aversion towards inequality among Egyptians during the same period. One approach in the analysis of these findings emphasizes opportunity inequalities as a more fruitful lens with which to account for and understand the mismatch in the data. This approach has taken the educational field as a primary site through which to assess the determining role of family and educational level in the distribution of academic and career opportunities in Egypt. In the second part of this paper, I explore the extent to which anthropological knowledge about constructions of privilege and eliteness may help fill in some of the enduring gaps in scholarly understanding of inequality and class reproduction in the Egypt. Drawing on recent debates in elite studies, I discuss the importance of attending to the subtle, moral and symbolic ways in which privilege is misrecognized and reproduced in social relations. In the final section, I draw on my extended ethnographic research of international education in Egypt in order to address the ways in which shifts in elite educational practices in the context of neoliberal globalization indicate shifting practices of class belonging and exclusion among and across educated urban youth in Cairo. Drawing on the vernacular idiom Egypt/Masr, I discuss the intensification of cultural and symbolic boundaries around college students who attended international schools. I propose that the salience of a culturalist understanding of class differences may help obscure the material underpinning of these symbolic class boundaries among youth, and thereby helping restorative role in their reproduction.

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