EGYPT AND THE EXPERTS - annales.org · malaria drug. The situation was ripe for the mosquito and...

GÉRER ET COMPRENDRE • JUNE 2010 • ISSUE 10082

« Capitalism has no singular logic, no essence. It survivesparasitically … taking up residence in human bodiesand minds, or in sugar cane or private property, drawingits energies from the chemistry of others, its forces fromother fields, its momentum from other’s desires » (p. 303)

According to Tocqueville, the best way tounderstand a country is to visit its colonies.Timothy MITCHELL’s Rule of experts: Egypt,

techno-politics, modernity(1) convinces us that the beststrategy for studying globalization is to concentrateon countries like Egypt, where the forces organizingthe world economy are facing off. This interestingbook is deeply original owing to its unusual way ofwending through the social sciences. It never boresthe reader senseless with abstract, theoretical rumina-tions. Nor does it ever lapse into anecdotes or a posi-tivistic empiricism. Given its structure, the sites cho-sen for investigation and its attention to the creden-tials of the parties whose analyses of their own actionsare presented, this book makes a unique history com-

prehensible and endows it with far-reaching signifi-cance.To preserve this originality, I have chosen to reviewRule of experts so as to describe as faithfully as possibleits argumentation. Though sticking to the order ofthe chapters, my review(2) will not be linear as it fol-lows the author’s itinerary zigzagging through timeand space. Not the least of the merits of this book isits focus on the role and impact of the social sciences.The first part leads us to discover Egypt’s recent his-tory by following three unusual guides: mosquitoes,land reform and the mapping of the country’s surfacearea. These guides let us glimpse the forces that enterinto the building of a society and economy.

THE MOSQUITO CALAMITY

“Can the mosquito speak?”, the first chapter, thrustsus in the midst of a strange war in 1942. Foes abound.

EGYPT AND THE EXPERTSReading Timothy MITCHELL’s abrasive Rule of experts: Egypt, techno-politics, modernity forces us to change our way of looking at develop-ment policies, experts from international organizations, the socialsciences, Egypt’s history following independence… Everything isinterrelated; nothing is neutral. Mosquitos are more dangerous thantanks; the system of land tenure is a war machine; cartography under-lies the economy; the CIA manipulates anthropology; “Egyptian pea-sants” have been invented simply to justify the West's “mission” in theMid-East. To obtain a clearer view, we must decompartmentalize thesocial sciences and draw the natural sphere closer to the social one,and technology closer to politics

By Michel CALLON, Professor at ENSMP

Article translated from French by Noal Mellott (CNRS, Paris, France)

Article published in French in Gérer et Comprendre [December 2006] http://www.annales.org/

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(1) Timothy MITCHELL, Rule of experts: Egypt, techno-politics, modernity,Berkeley and Los Angeles, University of California Press, 2002.

(2) Published in French in the December 2006 issue of Gérer &Comprendre, an earlier version having been printed in Libellio d’AEGIS,n° 2, February 2006.

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Rommel’s tanks have swept into Egypt but are soonvanquished thanks to the incredible mobilization ofallied forces. However the tanks, which are definitetargets that can be destroyed once and for all, are notthe most dangerous. The real foes are weaving ties andsetting off chain reactions that sap the country’s vita-lity.Take the example of the dikes and dams that Egyptwas busily building during the years before WW II.By opening new areas for farming and attenuating thefertilization of the soil by the Nile, these projectsmade the country dependant on chemical fertilizers.By boosting cotton and sugar cane, which partlyreplaced food crops and necessitated chemical fertili-zers, they intensified this dependence. This is thewar’s point of incidence, one unrelated to the easy tar-get of tanks to be blown up. The ammonium nitrate used for fertilizer was themain raw material for making explosives. Mobilizedby the war effort, the chemical industry, especially inthe United States, no longer supplied fertilizer.Famine set in. Since trouble never travels alone,Anopheles gambiae, a mosquito transmitting the mal-aria pathogen (Treponema Plasmodium falciparum),chose to attack the country at that very momentowing to an unexpected combination of circum-stances. The entry of Japanese troops into Java inter-rupted exports of quinine and caused a shortage of themalaria drug. The situation was ripe for the mosquitoand its larvae to colonize Egypt by setting up head-quarters in the south and menacing the north. Byitself, the mosquito would not have pushed the coun-try over the cliff, but Egypt was already weak and sick.The mosquito fed on this weakness, thus setting offchain reactions that would further weaken the coun-try and spark a political crisis. The larvae started pro-liferating in sugarcane fields, a breeding ground for itthroughout the south – this being a distant outcomeof the big hydraulic programs. The sap from the cane,consumed by those who harvested the sugar, madetheir bodies more hospitable to the malaria parasite.Thanks to recent improvements in transportation,things and people were moving faster. Egypt, afterescaping the tanks, was losing its strength bite bymosquito bite.This sociotechnical complexity no longer surprisessocial scientists. We now know that humans and non-humans weave relations with each other and that wecannot, therefore, a priori separate social forces orcauses from natural ones. The combination of the twoexplains Egypt’s unwitting plunge over the cliff.Politicians and experts isolated the foe (the mosquitoand its larvae) and fought it as if it were independentof the other forces with which it was allied or onwhich it played. The modern machinery of “exper-tise” was set in motion. For it, problems are technicalin nature and are to be solved technically, from a dis-tance. This deepened the crisis.

However, many voices were raised contending thatpublic health problems were, in the main, politicalproblems and that the key question was land reform.Some even claimed that Egypt was caught betweenrich mosquitoes in the north and plain mosquitoes inthe south. Experts, however, cannot be stopped onceset in motion, especially not while US aid policy wasmoving in the same direction. Since there was a farmcrisis, farming was to be improved; and fertilizers,spread by helicopter and through other state-of-the-art techniques. Since there was a health crisis, a build-ing program was to be launched that used efficientbrick-making techniques. Since there was an epi-demic, campaigns for spraying DDT were to be car-ried out. Underlying these big, modernistic programswere the assumptions that the forces assailing Egyptwere independent and that techniques were separatefrom politics. All these programs failed. Enemy forcesformed alliances and interacted in unexpected ways,whence unpredictable problems. One from among ahundred other examples: the DDT used to eradicatemosquitoes was made from the ethyl alcohol pro-duced by the very industry that was also using thesugarcane with the sap that helped the mosquitoes tobreed!By refusing to recognize these interrelations, by seeingthe fight against mosquitoes like the battle againsttanks, decision-makers and experts reinforced the inter-relations between multiple factors, thus making it harder to manage them. Whoever wants to write thishistory must take into account not only the interven-tions by experts and policymakers but also the interre-lations between the forces to be fought. The expertsoverlooked these interrelations, since they consideredthese forces to be independent. The social scienceswould err in darkness if they remained blind to thesesociotechnical patterns and separated, like the expertsand decision-makers, the social from the naturalsphere. Mosquitoes are as important as the war foranyone who wants to understand the Egyptian crisis. Inother words, it is the coincidence between the two thataccounts for this crisis. We must bring the work doneby experts into the picture in order to understand thisweird situation. As full-fledged players in the crisis – onpar with the mosquitoes – their work lent force to thevery foe against which they were fighting, because theytook the mosquito to be a natural force outside thesocial sphere and incapable of interfering with it.

LAND REFORM

As this mosquito attack shows us, the configuration offorces explaining why certain events happen and whya certain momentum prevails is always unique.Although history never repeats itself, an article offaith in modernism states the very opposite, namely:

MICHEL CALLON

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problems resemble each other and are to be handledin the same or nearly same way in all places at alltimes. This serves as the starting point for the secondchapter, “Principles true in every country”.The issue of private property, which the West hasembodied in a universal principle or law, perfectlyillustrates this conviction. For Westerners, privateproperty is the cornerstone of civilization, a shieldagainst the arbitrariness of powers-that-be (in particu-lar the power of the government). A person is whathe/she owns. We see why development policies havealways, by and large, been associated with programsfor imposing private property. Colonization can beinterpreted as the often violent history of the settingup of a legal framework that recognized private prop-erty and provided for its defense and the possibility oftransferring ownership rights.This rhetoric is grounded on the postulate that prop-erty did not exist before the West invented and…imposed it. This postulate, we know, usually turns outto be false, and is false in the Egyptian case! As areview of history shows, the law on property, espe-cially under the Ottoman Empire, had complicatedrefinements of the sort that Anglo-Saxon law hadintroduced into Roman law, which was a shiningexample due to its brutality and reductionistic simpli-city. The ownership of, for instance, a piece of landdid not generally entail an absolute right to the landand its produce. Mitchell has shown how complex,subtle and, we might say, modern this field of law wasthat created the conditions for more efficiency andjustice. We might think we are reading the well-known definition given by Sir Henry Maine in themid-19th century about property being a “bundle ofrights”. The property rights imposed by colonialauthorities did not exist in a vacuum; they destroyedand replaced institutions that were filled with intelli-gence.Under these conditions, the recourse to force andviolence comes as no surprise. The reason thatWestern property rights in their most brutal andstupid form (one thing = one owner) was such animportant issue in Egypt is that sugar cane and cot-ton were the first experiments worldwide in indus-trial farming. Since the farmers did not consumethese crops, force was to be exerted on them. In thisrespect, slavery was a key innovation. Populationshad to be deported; and a nearly military discipline,brought to bear to keep rural-dwellers in place. Inshort, the situation called for what Foucault hasdescribed as a “government of populations”. Thewhole legislative, legal and police system was de-vised and used to prevent rebellions and desertions.Property rights came to carry weight. Mitchell hasprovided a luxury of details about these episodes,for example, how the revolts of Indian peasantsagainst the British spread to Egypt, where prisonswere soon overflowing.

“Desertion of the land and armed rebellion were notthe only problems the new agriculture faced. Theextensive irrigation works required by industrial cropsbrought two additional forces into play: disease anddebt” (p. 65). Debt “was to provide a mechanism thatwould lever into place the new law of property, andwith it the colonial occupation” (p. 66), a pointrecently confirmed by Julia ELYACHAR’s work onmicrocredit. A system where peasants keep working topay off their debts has unequaled efficiency. It turnspolitical protest into a list of individual grievances,while the insolvency of smallholders who have re-ceived loans serves as the grounds for distraints andexpropriations. The advantage of large landholdings –and of owners to whom the government delegates thepower to collect taxes – has nothing to do with higherproductivity but, instead, with their effectiveness as ameans for “fixing” the rural population. Before“fixing” the economy – turning it into a stable, manip-ulable, controllable object – the population has to bestabilized. This establishes the distribution characte-ristic of modern Western societies: for the state, theimperium of power over people; and for private land-lords and proprietors, the dominium of absolutepower over things. Like any major form of distribu-tion, this one also feeds on interrelations of all sorts.Big landlords are literally private despots who designand build model villages, and supervise farmers’ eve-ryday activities. Something resembling a labor marketgradually emerges. Labor becomes mobile and can bemobilized since it has already been stabilized.This metamorphosis, as Mitchell has emphasized,cannot be described as the state taking over ruralsociety, since these two players are created at the sametime. It is, therefore, hopeless to interpret the originsof private property rights as the painful but necessaryapplication of a general principle imported fromabroad – from “civilized countries”. As in any perfor-mative procedure, the declaration of these origins isitself part of the process: “Presenting the law of prop-erty as a conceptual structure whose origins lie outsideactuality is part of a process that establishes the law interms of this dualism” (p. 77). The new legal orderdoes not free people from arbitrariness. Instead, itconsolidates and, at the same time, modifies an arbi-trary distribution of power. “The new legal order,rather than ending exceptional forms of control, created a thousand arbitrary powers” (p. 77). The ideaof landed property played a key role in this dynamicconcentration of powers. Modern Egypt thus tookshape as a territorial and political unit, and a governa-ble object. If our objective is to destabilize these dualisms, “then a critique that rests on a dialecticallogic, however powerful, cannot serve” (p. 79). Thelaw tells space apart from property, and then propertyapart from owner. Any dialectical analysis that adoptsthese categories is a part in the continuance of thisperformativity.


measurements from these maps instead of surveyingthe land. Finally, owing to both their accuracy andfocalization on certain problems and pieces of infor-mation, these new maps provided a substratum wherethe economy could take shape.The economy-as-a-thing thus came into being. Itfinally had the solid foundation necessary for its es-tablishment: “The map helped to constitute andconsolidate the new institution of private propertyand the form of debt, title, dispossession and violenceon which it depended” (p. 93). Other changes, madepossible or easier thanks to the land surveys and maps,helped consolidate the economy-as-a-thing: privateownership of the land, the development of incorpora-ted companies and the calculations having to do withcotton (Egypt’s main “economic” product). To thislist should be added: the semi-public institutions setup for major projects; the sudden, rapid growth ofmetropolitan areas, which, according to GeorgSimmel,(3) provided a space and framework for themonetary economy; and of course, the introductionof a single national currency. This movement ofobjectivation was amplified by Egypt’s status as acolony, designed as a self-contained reality. Separatefrom the rest of the world, it could be manipulatedfrom afar and handled like a “case” with problems tobe measured, analyzed and treated by applying know-ledge and knowhow from the outside. The circulationof statistics increased the rift between the subject ofthese statistics and the ideas formed about it.This making of a calculable subject of study ran upagainst enormous difficulties: inexact figures, thecreation of a category of the population that couldnot be brought into the statistical picture because itdid not own land, the impossibility of monitoring themovements of people and merchandise, etc. Theseimperfections and shortcomings sparked heatedcontroversies about the mathematical procedures andstatistical methods used to count the population,gauge demographic changes or calculate the nationalincome. The Western techniques that used the farm asa statistical unit were inapplicable. These controver-sies arose in the context of colonialism: how to tell theEgyptian and the British economies apart?The making of the economy-as-a-thing led to: shif-ting calculations and controls from the field toward abureaucracy; creating a bifurcation between the cen-ter of calculability and the object being calculated;and setting off processes of organization, exclusionand reformulation that established the economy-as-a-thing, as a calculable object. At this point, Mitchellhas resuscitated the well-known idea about theembeddedness of markets: “The economy came intobeing, not by disembedding market relations from a

larger social ground that previously contained them,but by embedding certain 20th-century practices ofcalculation, description and enumeration in newforms of intellectual, calculative, regulatory andgovernmental practice” (p. 118). The making of this“calculable space” did not prevent “overflowing”; nordid it eliminate the need for ongoing studies of thepractices that, though mapped by the surveys, eludedsurveyors and statisticians.

THE UNCERTAIN EXISTENCE OF THE EGYPTIANPEASANT

“Peasant studies”, the second part of this book,focuses on a major figure in Egyptian history, orrather on all those whose studies have turned it into astereotyped but quite real player: the Egyptian pea-sant. To paraphrase Yves LACOSTE’s well-known state-ment, “Geography is mainly useful for wagingwar”(4), we might say that anthropology is mainly(and till quite recently) useful for promoting the ideaof the absolute originality of Western culture. Thisprobably true formulation is, however, too vague andgeneral. In the fourth chapter, “The invention andreinvention of the peasant”, Mitchell has turnedtoward the Egyptian peasant and anthropologists’ rolein constructing this subject for study.Mitchell’s inquiry brings him straight to RichardCritchfield, an unusual journalist with a passionate in-terest in the plight of peasants in Asia and the Near East.He wrote books that not only the general public butalso specialists soon accepted as authoritative. HisShahhat: An Egyptian, published in 1978, was extolledin an impressive number of reviews and commentaries.American Anthropologist praised it for its outstandingportrayal of peasant life. Critchfield had a place on thesyllabus in good anthropology departments inAmerican universities. The book is simple and effective:it presents Shahhat as leading the life of a peasant who,uprooted from his traditional culture, lives through thetragedy of modernization, since peasants whose livingconditions and ways of life have, supposedly, not chan-ged for six thousand years were forced to adapt tomodernity in less than a decade. This presentation ofthe clash between cultures and of the traumatic, forcedmarch toward modernization is not at all original.When peasant revolts broke out against occupants inVietnam and Palestine, anthropologists were,Mitchell reminds us, requisitioned to explain thisunexpected resistance. Who are these peasants? Whatare their traditions? What do they really want? Twoother classics, by French-speaking authors, were

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(3) Georg SIMMEL, “The metropolis and mental life”, translated by KurtWOLFF in The sociology of Georg Simmel, Glencoe, IL, Free Press, 1950,pp. 409-442.

(4) Yves LACOSTE, La Géographie, ça sert, d'abord, à faire la guerre, Paris,Maspero, 1976.


MICHEL CALLON


written when colonial empires were discovering theirweaknesses between the two World wars: Les Paysansdu delta tonkinois by Pierre GOUROU (1936) andMoeurs et coutumes des fellahs by Habib AYROUT

(1938). The latter by an Egyptian, who was enrolledas a doctoral student in France, became an indispen-sable reference work in the English-speaking world.Mitchell’s meticulous analysis of Shahhat has no trou-ble proving that Critchfield often repeated phrasesfrom Ayrout word by word, thus endorsing anapproach permeated with an elementary exoticismand racism. In line with Ayrout, he did not avoid writing in 1978 (!) that Egyptian peasants were akinto animals because of their sexual violence. WhatCritchfield did not know was that, by plagiarizing, hewas repeating the theories of Gustave LE BON whohad influenced AYROUT. According to Le Bon, whosebook La Civilisation des Arabes had come out in 1884,a society always opposes its elites who, unlike themasses, are capable of leading an individual existenceand thinking for themselves. Ayrout applied Le Bon’sastounding paradigm to Egyptian peasants: theycould not exist as genuine individuals, since they were bogged down among their fellow creatures and amassed in villages – these “immoral assemblages” inneed of reform. Critchfield did more than adopt thistalented analysis. As a good amateur scientist, he over-did it owing to the supposed objectivity of his diagno-sis. He constantly used the third person and saidnothing about the interpreter without whom he couldnot have done fieldwork. After all, Critchfield wasdoing fieldwork in an Egyptian village without beingable to speak a word of Arabic! He forgot to state that,during all the time spent there, he stayed in a luxu-rious hotel in a Western enclave, where he receivedShahhat for interviews! Critchfield did not even men-tion the tourists who were everywhere, with whom hesipped cocktails to recover from the fatigue of hisfieldwork.Mitchell has investigated this unusual fieldworker. Hecontacted Ayrout’s sister, who had outlived her broth-er. To his astonishment, he learned that Ayrout, anauthentic Egyptian, had not spent a single day in thefield while writing his dissertation on fellahs. An eth-nologist who observed reality from his air-condi-tioned bubble had plagiarized an anthropologist whobasked in the charms of Provence while drawing aportrait of the Egyptian fellah modeled on the aristo-cratic ideas elaborated by a French doctor who pridedhimself on his knowledge of the social sciences…Mitchell does not put an end to his inquiry at thispoint. It mattered little to him that Critchfield mighthave been a vulgar plagiarist. What did matter was thequestion: who benefitted from the crime?By chance, Mitchell had worked for several years in avillage near the one “studied” by Critchfield. Whileverifying locally what Critchfield said about “his” vil-lage, Mitchell was unsurprised to discover not only

that the book was a clever assemblage of excerpts fromother sources but also that it was riddled with false-hoods. Mitchell has dipped his quill into the finestink to describe the thorns on the rose. Critchfield,faced with so much proof, did not try denying thecharges; he confessed. Pursuing his inquiry, Mitchelldiscovered strong family contacts between Critchfieldand top officials in the CIA. By reconstituting the itinerary of Critchfield’s anthropological fieldwork, hehas easily shown that the choice of a place for a stintin the field was closely correlated with US militaryand diplomatic interventions. For instance,Critchfield studied Mauritius when the Americangovernment decided to set up a base on Diego Garcia– which led to a massive displacement of islanders for-ced to emigrate to… Mauritius. From these observa-tions, Mitchell has been delicate enough not todeduce that Critchfield was a CIA informant oragent. As he well knows, what the social sciences hadto say did not matter to the CIA. What the CIA didneed was for the social sciences to “perform” theirobjective, for anthropology to invent traditional peas-ants and then reinvent them so that they come to lifeon American campuses and in the rest of the world,so that the environment where they survive can bedescribed as a mere extension of museums, wherecurious tourists discover the peasant’s way of life.Social scientists who presented Africa and Asia as mis-sionary fields for the West were infinitely more valua-ble and useful than anthropologists whose informa-tion about people and their actions were of littleworth. Colonization is, above all, the making, frompieces of interviews, of cleverly sewn narratives formaking a plausible, inevitable, morally and politicallyjust reality, namely Western domination of the planetfor the sake of reason and progress.Establish new property rights, create new economicinstitutions, launch the construction of hydraulic projects, roads and railroads, remodel villages, concen-trate the ownership of land, change crops and farmingtechniques… all these actions come under the samecategory of thought: modernization. They entail creat-ing an enemy to be fought, hostile forces to overcome(superstition, tradition, culture, ignorance…). They allinevitably resort to violence. However violence, when itoccurs day after day with the poor as victim, is hard todetect and analyze, not just because of the difficulty ofobtaining evidence. In the fifth chapter, “Nobody lis-tens to a poor man”, Mitchell has turned the usualarguments back on themselves. The problem is not toobtain testimonies, nor to verify the many accounts circulating about crime scenes. The crucial factor is theculture of fear; these accounts and testimonies aresymptoms of this culture, which feeds on them. Asmuch can be said about inquiries for verifying whetherrumors are true. What is at stake is not the truth ofwhat is said, but the part this saying has in constructingthis culture of fear.


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How to analyze this culture of fear? How to untangleits ties with violence? Mitchell has reviewed a fewusual explanations. The first one is psychosociologi-cal: peasants expect and demand authority. They needand accept this authority, but this is merely an outeracceptance. Deep inside, they reject it. Violence iscommitted twice: first to make this split (outer sub-mission but inner rebellion) and secondly to containany resentment that happens to be expressed out-wardly. For Mitchell, two other explanations are poli-tical. The one presents violence as the consequence ofchanges imposed from the outside. For example, sincea reform of property rights affects their interests andway of life, the peasants revolt. The other explanationfocuses on the local dimension of outbursts. It has todo with the coercive nature of the relations createdbetween individuals belonging to the same villagecommunity or work group: “To be an individual insuch a village economy means to be already situatedin a set of coercive relations” (p. 172). For example,the difficulties of the labor movement might lead tosporadic, violent uprisings. These explanations seeviolence as part of a causal chain that, under certainconditions, leads to “violent” outbursts.These explanations do not satisfy Mitchell. By focus-ing on attitudes and behaviors, they are unable tounderstand the culture of fear, which he deems essen-tial for explaining the place of violence. The problemto be solved is mainly methodological. Associatedwith the culture of fear, violence entails silence,denial, the absence of tangible evidence. The notionof symbolic violence is useful for exposing this invisi-ble part of the iceberg; but since it makes all explana-tions possible, it seems to amount to a form of intel-lectual laziness. Mitchell does not have the answer tothis enigma, since whatever happens occurs in asilence where it is impossible to speak up. Whilerereading a study, based on interviews, of the politicalmobilization of peasants, Mitchell came to a standstillat the response of one interviewee who was asked totalk about the village’s problems: “There are no prob-lems,” he said. “We just need a bakery”, he added,“Not much grain these days in the village, and peoplebaking at home are causing fires.” “You think you cando something about it?” “No, I am a poor man andnobody listens to a poor man” (p. 177). Mitchell seesthis impossible articulation as a possible origin of vio-lence.The culture of fear is expressed through silence, therefusal to respond or the ingrained inability to talk. Tomake people talk and, if they do not do so on theirown, to free their tongues and release them fromsilence is a moral imperative shared by both well-intentioned policies and the social sciences when theyare attentive to the humanity of their subject of study.Mitchell seems to think that we have moved beyondthis point. What is important is not so much to freespeech as to work on the mechanisms that force peo-

ple to remain silent. Expressing feelings is not neces-sarily talking. Obstinate silence turns out to be a posi-tive form of expression and articulation instead of theantithesis of speech. Given this enigma, Mitchell hasformulated a sentence that sounds more like anadmission of powerlessness than a genuine program:“Those who live intolerable lives, coping withpoverty, unemployment, hunger and other moredirect forms of coercion, must somehow express theircondition and yet may be unable to find the opportu-nity, the courage, or the language to do so” (p. 177). This peasant – presented as someone battling againstmodernity and forced to live in a climate of fear – isto fit into the imaginary community called a nation,to remain loyal to what the experts call the nationalheritage. This is the theme of the sixth chapter,“Heritage and violence”. The building of nation-states is a classical subject of study for historians andpolitical scientists. The nation, to adopt ANDERSON’swell-known formula(5), relies on techniques formaking people imagine that they form a single com-munity with others whom they do not know.Mitchell has envisioned nation-building from twoangles. The nation as an educational experiencecomes down to the idea of making people increas-ingly aware of the existence and reality of a collectiveactor. The latter emerges independently of any re-ference to, or encounter with, Otherness (i.e., withothers with whom one knows one’s distance). Thenation as a byproduct of nationalism implies a strongdose of autism. However the nation cannot existwithout generating and regenerating meetings,encounters, shocks, that lead to the forming of anidentity, a self, that sets it apart from others, fromother nations. The nation takes form through opposi-tion. Mitchell has chosen to study this twofoldmechanism by following up on the attempts toreconstruct and rehabilitate a village caught up in theturmoil of the tourist tradeIn 1945, the decision was made to move Gurna, a vil-lage near Luxor, so as to avoid interference withnearby archeological sites and their visitors. The peas-ants were accused of plundering the sites and ha-rassing tourists. Hassan Fathy, the architect in chargeof this project, seized an opportunity for restoringwhat he felt was the “vernacular” architectural tradi-tion, which, in his opinion, had gradually been lost.This appeal to tradition was not at all backward-loo-king; it was made for the sake of progress. It sought torestore sanitary conditions, rational forms of energyconsumption and a relatively autonomous food sup-ply. Fathy encountered difficulties while trying torevive architectural techniques from bygone days. Forinstance, the beams needed to build the traditionalvaulted granaries were hard to find nowadays. While

(5) Benedict ANDERSON, Imagined communities: Reflections on the orginand spread of natationalisms, London, Verso Editions 1983.


months per year. “Enframing” a situation always leadsto “overflowing”.The Egyptian nation defined by the sharing of com-mon values and traditions (imaginary nationalism)and the one constructed through the organization ofrelations with others (the tourist trade) are comple-mentary and closely interrelated. Gurna has been des-igned both as a reactivation of an imaginary past andas a sort of frontier post between Egyptian society andits presentation of itself to “others”. This perfor-mance, for internal and external use, is not withoutviolence. The story told by Mitchell is proof.Paradoxically, the building of the Egyptian nation jus-tifies excluding and disciplining the peasants. Theresults do not, in these conditions, come as a surprise.A petition signed in 1996 by the inhabitants of Gurnaends with this desperate remark: “We have begun towonder whether we are Egyptians” (p. 207). Contraryto what those tempted by Manichaeism (whetherArthur D. Little or the opponents of globalization)might think, these peasants well knew that their in-terest was to live with the tourist trade: “We are mar-ried to the tourists” (p. 205), a statement that might,as I have just pointed out, sometimes be literally true!Mitchell has lucidly noted that no studies have beenmade on the water supply whereas several have beencommissioned on the tourist trade.

HOW EGYPT BECAME AN ECONOMY

The third part of the book, “Fixing the economy”,focuses on the mechanisms and arrangements thatbring into being the economy as a thing that is hardto control and constantly risks coming undone. TheEgyptian economy is a recent invention. The seventhchapter, “The object of development”, shows howinternational organizations finally managed to inventthis improbable reality and impose measures for itsdevelopment.We hold a stereotype of Egypt, one repeated by spe-cialists, as a narrow stretch of inhabitable land ferti-lized by the Nile overflowing its banks and depositingalluvium, where soaring population growth is makingthe situation worse. The following question states theequation defining the situation: how to see to it thata growing population survives on necessarily scarceresources? Since natural conditions restrict the availa-ble policy options, the decisions are to be made tosolve as effectively as possible fully identified techni-cal problems. This vision of Egypt underpins thepower exercised by experts – by the three agenciesbased in Washington (the IMF, World Bank andUnited States Agency for International Development,USAID) that have monopolized “expertise”. Chapterseven presents the reforms advocated by these organi-zations during the 1970s and 1980s.

To expose the mechanisms whereby this expertiseexercises a stranglehold over politics, Mitchell hasfocused on the formulation of problems, in particularthe one raised, or rather imposed, by the World Bank:“Egypt has the largest population in the Middle East[…] Its 52 million people are crowded in the Niledelta and valley with a density higher than that ofBangladesh or Indonesia” (p. 212). Mitchell has de-livered a brilliant critique of this text. After examiningthe idea of overpopulation and the comparisons withBangladesh and Indonesia (and why not Belgium!),he has shown, by reviewing farming statistics, thatagricultural output is increasing at the same pace aspopulation growth. The actual problem has to dowith distribution, since the policies adopted haveworsened inequality. USAID has admitted this in theadvice and criticism that experts voice among them-selves: “Under these politics, losers necessarily out-number winners” (p. 214).Egypt is unable to ensure its basic food supply becausethe agricultural system has been so deeply transfor-med. The country started importing cereals, not tofeed human beings but to fatten animals in order tosatisfy the demand for meat from the wealthy classesin society. Peasants are to purchase their food, sincethey no longer produce it. All this has cultivated anastronomical national debt, which the United Statescanceled at the time of the war with Iraq in exchangefor the government’s support.The argument based on a lack of farmlands is no lon-ger credible. Once again, the statistics are cruel. Atissue are the distribution and redistribution of land,and the recognition of smallholders’ property rights.All things considered, the image of Egypt over-whelmed by nature – a narrow strip of overpopulatedland – is a screen for masking the issues of inequalityand of people deprived of power. It turns political ques-tions into technical problems, thus preparing the soil forexperts, who fill their role by prescribing treatments.The first therapy was to modernize the so-called “backward” agricultural sector. Excessive mecha-nization obviously worsened inequality, given the une-qual solvency of peasants. The second treatment calledfor a free market and decentralization. The Egyptiangovernment, deemed to be too interventionistic (sinceNasser’s coup d État in 1952), was urged to play a lesserrole in the economy. This is a well-known program: thecampaign to free farm prices and the privatization ofhealth, social services and education. The effects aremechanical: the deepen-ing indebtedness of the poorestand the economy’s growing dependence on the UnitedStates (especially for pharmaceutics). Once again, theprivilege of drawing the lessons from this deregulation ishanded to USAID: “The better off, the more educatedand expert officials benefit more than ordinary villages”(p. 228).This depoliticization of the economy coincides withthe transformation of Egypt into an object of deve-

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MICHEL CALLON


lopment. Egypt, as a country, economy, nation andcommunity has become an autonomous object of“thought” about its development. The nation-state isone outcome of the factors and methods that organizesocial practices and turn them into mental representa-tions: language, highways, television, cadastral maps,the literature on tourism, the studies devoted to coun-tries in the South, the statistics produced by interna-tional organizations, and so forth. This objectivationof Egypt as a nation and an economy to be developedhas two consequences. First of all, it makes it easy tosimplify by focusing on, for example, trade policy in-stead of the complicated, differentiated networks ofinterdependence. Secondly, national and interna-tional centers of “expertise” analyze, advise and eva-luate while placing themselves outside the object theydescribe even though they intervene and performactions on it: “An organization like USAID, whichmust imagine itself as a rational consciousness stan-ding outside the country, is in fact a central elementin configurations of power within the country” (p. 233). The USAID program’s main objective was toreinforce and develop the private sector. Its interven-tions strengthened the state’s hold, quite simplybecause its contacts – the levers that USAID proposedusing – were within the state: “USAID could notdiagnose itself as an integral aspect of the problem” (p. 234). For Mitchell, the problem is not so muchthe accuracy of the reports and advice coming frominternational organizations as the latter’s inability toimagine their role as well as the effects and limits oftheir interventions. In the language of the socialsciences, we might call this a deficit of reflexivity.This interpretation is still too kind; for Mitchell hasgone on to show that international organizationsare, in fact, helping to increase the economic andpolitical hold of the United States. The appeal tofree enterprise conceals the system of financial aidand its effects. The analysis of financial circuitsleads to impressive conclusions. By asking theEgyptian state to reduce its interventionism, inter-national organizations are used as the secular arm ofthe American government, which is thus reinforced.Aid serves to create a solvable demand for the prod-ucts and services proposed by American firms,orders for military equipment being of crucialimportance. As Mitchell points out, Egypt is part ofthe American government’s farm policy. By forbid-ding subsidies for Egyptian farmers, transnationalorganizations open the market for American multi-nationals, which, as we know, enjoy considerablesubsidies in the United States. In fact, 58% of USeconomic assistance is spent in the United States onsomething other than development projects, whilethe remainder goes to the American firms involvedin these projects. Of course, the population benefitsfrom these purchased goods and from these proj-ects, but the effects are a cause of concern since the

Egyptian economy’s dependence augments alongwith its debt.This analysis opens perspectives for looking beyondEgypt. The function of the neoliberal doctrine mightwell be to weaken nation-states, save the United Statesof America. Expertise, especially in the social sciences,and the “technicization” of the problems of develop-ment are cornerstones in this overbearing arrange-ment.The development policies advocated by international(in fact, US) organizations call for a free market. Theeighth chapter, “The market’s place”, starts by askingwhat it means to establish a free market. Answering thisquestion necessitates studies conducted in the field.Before turning to fieldwork, Mitchell examines thehypotheses entailed by the question. When a speakertalks about “the” market (in the singular), he believes inthe existence of a perfectly defined reality that, called amarket (or capitalism), has its own logic for ensuring itsreproduction and even its growth. Many definitionshave been proposed: self-interest, profit-seeking, the lawof supply and demand for setting prices, the circulationof information, the accumulation and reinvestment ofcapital, the division of capital and labor, and the histo-ric process of worldwide expansion. Those who defendand who oppose capitalism both share the hypothesis ofa self-contained market.The hypothesis of a borderline separating the marketfrom the nonmarket sphere (a hypothesis that tendsto present the state as the warranty of the free market)is, as Mitchell has emphasized, the point where animmense work of compartmentalization is underta-ken – work performed by, in particular, the varioussocial sciences when they turn toward the economy.Furthermore, institutions are set up to oversee thiscompartmentalization. As Mitchell’s subsequent stud-ies have shown, colonization and especially decoloni-zation (with nation-states in place of the former colo-nies) have played a key role in concretizing nationaleconomies and the economy-as-a-thing, in makingthem into manipulable, governable objects with theirown logic. These objects are contemporary creations.Keynes, often said to be the father of the welfare state,contributed powerfully to the objectivation of theeconomy-as-a-thing – through the long controversyabout India’s financial autonomy and then throughhis macroeconomic models backed up with nationalstatistics. The market and welfare state are two sidesof the same coin.After having helped formed the economy-as-a-thing,the social sciences hastened to qualify their handling ofthe “noneconomy”. This is where the history of eco-nomic sociology, heterodox economics and economicanthropology begins. Mitchell is content with pointingout two strategies for analyzing the relations betweenthe market and nonmarket spheres and for imposingthe idea of a separation between the two. The first oneis well known: embeddedness, whereby calculations do


MICHEL CALLON


not stop at the bounds of the market. For example, peasants, when involved in practices outside the market,are described as, in fact, constantly interacting with themarket. The second strategy hinges on alternative eco-nomies. Here, the point of contention is not the exis-tence of markets but their universality. The Westernmarket organization cannot be applied as a solution eve-rywhere, since contact with other realities alters it,whence the emergence of other forms of economy, ofother economies. In both these cases, as Mitchell hasindicated, the idea remains intact that a model of themarket (or of a reality taken to be the market) exists.Embeddedness merely complicates relations betweenthe market and what lies outside it. The thesis of theexistence of alternative economies only discusses theconditions for its own extension.Mitchell has used case studies to show that we mustabandon the idea of the existence of the market (or ofcapitalism) if we want to describe what is happeningin the Egyptian countryside. The example of tractorssheds light on the interrelations between various prac-tices that we cannot analyze as the juncture of dif-ferent forms of production – what used to be calledthe articulation of modes of production. In particular,the subsistence sector does not underlie the marketeconomy. The exact opposite is true: “Market crops,protected and promoted by the state, survived in sup-port of self-provisioning” (p. 255). For a lesser, amightier parasite! The study of price-fixing lends sup-port to this thesis: there is no price that is not regula-ted, that is not tied to a monopolistic position.Likewise, there is no sector of the economy that is notsubsidized. Reforms in favor of the free market merelyincrease these interrelations and reinforce the subsis-tence sector. Even officials recognize the collateraldamage, but this does not keep them from staying thecourse or using force, if need be. As a peasant toldMitchell, “They put us in the mill and turn it andturn it” (p. 265). Being ground in the mill does notincrease the autonomy of the market but, on thecontrary, does multiply the interrelations between thevarious forms of activities now said to be economic.Interested in the role played by experts, especially bysocial scientists, Mitchell has noticed that this campaignof reforms did not rely on case studies of conducted invillages. Ultimately, experts are convinced, like their cri-tics, that we know everything about the market andnonmarket spheres and, therefore, know what measuresto take: “The power of what we call capitalism restsincreasingly on its ability to portray itself as a uniqueand universal form […] The displacements and refor-mulations of the capitalist project show its dependenceon arrangements and forces that this logic needs to por-tray as noncapitalist” (p. 271). Everyone who talksabout capitalism or the market, whether by extolling orstigmatizing them, is helping them exist as an objectiva-ted reality. How to understand this market, which eve-ryone believes they know so well?

In the ninth chapter, “Dreamland”, Mitchell citespractical examples to analyze not the Egyptian eco-nomy but the set of mechanisms and arrangementsthat bring into existence what is called the (formal)market economy, a dreamland and enclave of moder-nity. It is created by following IMF recommendations:devaluation of the national currency, the demarcationof two separate spaces for the circulation of money(one for the dollar, the other for the Egyptian pound),the reduction of the money supply and the abolitionof subsidies for the public sector. This policy is recom-mended for all national economies. The IMF is satis-fied with its pupil. It does not matter to it that theeffects on the population were unmistakably negative:you have to suffer at first to gain the right to be happylater on. Mitchell has described these effects by drawing on scarce, incomplete sources of informa-tion, which he has tracked down in the notes ofreports. Economics as a discipline, and economists asexperts are important in this story.What the IMF describes as the privatization of thepublic sector leads to the formation of networks that,both public and private, bring government and busi-ness into a close relationship. A few solidly establishedfamilies control these networks(6). Mitchell hasshown, in particular, how a banking sector that specu-lates against the Egyptian currency eliminated, withmassive support from the state, the active and effi-cient “Islamic investment companies”: “The reformprogram did not remove the state from the market oreliminate profligate public subsidies. Its main impactwas to concentrate public funds into different hands,and many fewer” (p. 282). These family groups,whose history Mitchell has recounted, share the fol-lowing characteristics. They are nurtured by publiccontracts and receive support from USAID. Sincethey include private banks, which fund their opera-tions, they very seldom resort to financial markets.They have very few employees. They specialize in sup-plying goods and services to a tiny fraction of thepopulation: 3% consume 50% of the wealth.Reforms, a substitute for an economic policy, helpcreate a space that exists as such and can be describedas economic. Statistics objectify this space and onlyconcern it, since all else lies outside the statistician’sgrasp. This “all else” is what we call the “informal”sector. Although it cannot be measured, it is far fromnegligible. For example, the importation of cannabisresin during the 1980s amounted to between two andfour billion US dollars, an attractive figure far abovethe value of all other Egyptian imports (not countingpetroleum). Furthermore, a fifth of governmentexpenditures goes to the military; they are not de-

(6) They are identical to what David STARK (“Recombinant property inEast European capitalism”, American journal of sociology, 101, 1996, pp.993-1027) has so clearly described in the countries of eastern Europeduring the transition toward the market economy.


scribed, and no figures are given, in reports or statis-tics. “The problems of informal, clandestine andunreported economic activities are so great that thesealone would provide sufficient reason to question theidea that the economy is an object that can be map-ped and measured” (p. 289). The pair of concepts“enframing” and “overflowing” serve to describe andanalyze the relations between the market and so-called nonmarket sectors.Mitchell has tried to identify and analyze the en-framing of the Egyptian “market economy”. He hasconcentrated on three arrangements: property rights(the second chapter having presented their originsand effects), the family institution and multinationalcorporations. As shown by an analysis of the indus-trial groups busiest in the formation of this “eco-nomic” enclave, the family and household are factorsthat shape economic activities and limit “over-flowing” but without ever fully stopping it. After all,families are divided and pitted against each other, asbonds of matrimony and ties of affection suddenlycome apart. Big multinational corporations play apowerful part in this “enframing” process. Bymaking nonmarket arrangements, they make it pos-sible for the market to exist. We are familiar withSimon’s striking metaphor for this anomaly: were weto color market relations in green and hierarchies inred, the Earth, seen from Mars, would be bright red.Mitchell’s original analysis of the part played by bigfirms in this reframing process emphasizes that eco-nomic theory has always (and not just since RonaldCoase) shown an interest in this usual existence oforganizations and hierarchies at the very core ofmarkets. Mitchell recalls that Marx in Volume III ofCapital already raised this problem.Noting that big corporations evidently preceded theinstallation of capitalism, Michell’s argument runscounter to every supposition made by theorists of themarket economy. Hierarchical organizations are not aconsequence of capitalism, as the theory of transac-tion costs claims in veiled terms. For Mitchell, theopposite is true: capitalism, as Braudel rightly saw, isa consequence of the existence of the big companiesborn in the 17th century. According to Mitchell, themarket, as described by Adam Smith, was conceivedas a countervailing power to these big companies,which, like the Indies companies, had formed eco-nomic and political empires, and even held a mono-poly over the founding of colonies. As Mitchell hasshown elsewhere, these companies, which the marketwas supposed to contain, probably served as a modelfor the United States – we need but recall that theAmerican flag with its stars and stripes is an exactcopy of the East India Company’s flag. The modernstate, which intervenes in the economy to enable it toexist and develop, and the liberal market are machinesoriginally designed to fight against the omnipotenceof big companies.

Since then, we live in a world with a balance of powerbetween three sets of players: the state, the market andmultinationals. The hard task of managing thisbalance explains why the development of economicsas the science of markets is closely related to the for-mation of a body of knowledge about organizations(law, accountancy, marketing, etc.) and about the ins-truments and techniques to be used by the state (eco-nometrics, statistics, macro-economics). From its ori-gins, the (capitalistic) market has been a piece in acomplex puzzle of interdependent and countervailingpowers. Were this balance to come undone, the mar-ket would fall under the hierarchical arrangementsproposed by family networks or powerful corpora-tions, or else become dependent on government.Focusing on but one of these three players – the freemarket – leads not only to bracketing the other ele-ments in this system, without which it would notexist, but also (and especially) to transforming theeffects of this enframing process into substantial reali-ties. By only showing an interest in the planet’sdreamlands, by forgetting the forces that demarcatethese enclaves, economic theory trivializes violence,considering it to be a secondary activity. It obstinatelytries to turn anything that does not enter into the fra-mework into a residual reality. Violence, “over-flo-wing” and nonmarket institutions are not on the peri-phery of the markets but at their center.

DOMINATION

Hopefully, this review has convinced readers of theradical originality of Rule of experts. Mitchell has, withconsummate skill, eluded all the traps awaitinganyone who shows an interest in developing coun-tries. He has dodged the easy solution of pointing ablaming finger, but he has made us feel what has to becalled, for want of a better phrase, relations of domi-nation. His light style – constantly tinged with a senseof humor and a feeling of empathy for those who,though unable to make their voices heard, have some-thing to express – adds force to his argumentation anddemonstration.Postcolonial situations are irreplacable laboratories forwhoever wants to understand the forces at work inglobalization. They are, too, tough subjects to study,imperiling any theoretical analysis by placing it in jeopardy of reductionistic simplifications. Mitchell’sexploit is to have tackled this incipient subjectwithout turning his theoretical and methodologicaltools into an eyesore for readers. The theory is embed-ded in the telling. Thanks to clever shifts in time andspace, the reader is plunged in medias res into thiscomplicated story.Mitchell has shown the value of the multisite studiesnow advocated by anthropologists. He has thus shed

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light on several forces and the changing patterns theyform. A story in a network: a history of shifts, leaps andrapprochements; a history that abolishes borders (bet-ween micro and macro; between economy and politics,or even between nation and globalization) while tryingto show how these borders have been drawn, questio-ned, shifted; a history that, as a consequence, lets us seethe role played by mosquitoes and parasites, by ammo-nium nitrate, by private property and by Americanwomen begging for and then buying the favors of thenatives; a history of hydraulic proj-ects and internatio-nal organizations, of cadastral maps and family ties; ahistory immersed in the deafening silence of a voiceless,concealed violence, which the social sciences normallyhave difficulty bringing to light and analyzing.As its title indicates, this book deals with the role of“expertise”, in particular by the social sciences, in themaking of what is called society, economy, nation,globalization or even tradition. Michel Foucault, inDiscipline and punish and then in his writings on thebirth of biopolitics, was among the first to draw atten-tion to the performative nature of the social sciences.Mitchell has pursued this exploration. His knowledgeof the anthropology of science and techniques and ofthe very new anthropology of markets, along with hiscontrol of theories about state-building, have enabledhim to accurately and convincingly describe thecontribution of the social sciences to postcolonial stu-dies. This book, along with a few others being relea-sed, harbingers a new era for the social sciences. Thelatter can no longer remain outside the subject beingstudied or, worse yet, take sides and become engagé.

But how to proceed so as to produce analyses that arenot locked in the labyrinth of reflexivity? How tocope with the enormous problems of writing thatarise for authors who refuse the stance of a scientist(keeping the subject of study at a distance) but alsorefuse to wave a censorious finger? It is not the least ofthe qualities of Mitchell’s book to have shown thatthis challenge can be taken up in an elegant andconvincing manner without yielding to the obscuri-ties of reflexivity.The author is present everywhere, not as a guide orwitness nor, worse yet, as a character who throws hissubjectivity in the reader’s face. Since the “social-in-construction” (in other words, the very subject of thesocial sciences) is made for the most part by col-leagues, social scientists, engineers and scientists of alldisciplines, we need but follow their work to reachour objective. It is not beyond reach; for we are partof the establishment! By following the social sciencesand, too, the natural and biological sciences, Mitchellhas taken us to the core of the building of theEgyptian nation, to the strategies for bringing a freemarket into being and for relating the modern econ-omy to the ancient glory of the Pharaohs. Who otherthan a political scientist trained in the hard school ofhistory, economics and anthropology, and specializedin Arabic grammar, could have done as much? The“social scientists” are starting to pay their debt by sho-wing us that we are unable to understand the worldsurrounding us if we do not take into account the rolethey have played – and still play – in formulating itand making it intelligible. �

MICHEL CALLON



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