[Hum_Calendar_Events] CNES 2/3: Secrets of the Trade: Tacit Knowledge, the Public Sector, and the Remaking of Neoliberalism in Egypt

[CDH Service Desk]

[cid:3378992419_343742138]

Co-sponsored by Culture, Power, Social Change group, UCLA Anthropology Dept.

Secrets of the Trade:
Tacit Knowledge, the Public Sector,
and the Remaking of Neoliberalism in Egypt

A lecture by Julia Elyachar, UC Irvine

Thursday, February 3, 2011
12:30 PM - 2:30 PM
352 Haines Hall
UCLA

Secrets of the Trade" (asrar al-mihna) are rarely discussed outside the subfield of Ottoman History. And yet, secrets of the trade were a great concern of Adam Smith's in The Wealth of Nations. A related concept of "tacit knowledge" gave F. von Hayek the key for his polemics against the idea of a Public Sector and Economic Planning in the 1930s. In this paper, I draw on economic history to interpret ethnographic research I conducted with  bankers in Cairo employed in the public and the private sectors. I explore the relationship of "tacit knowledge" in the market in Cairo to sha'abi culture and reasons for the erasure of tacit knowledge in efforts to remake the Egyptian economy in the image of neoliberalism-even as the dreaded public  sector turns out to be a font of tacit knowledge of the kind extolled by Hayek and by management consultants in the 1980s. Through all this, I try to reframe  our understandings of "neoliberalism," the public sector, and properties of economic value in Egypt.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER:

Julia Elyachar works and publishes in the fields of economic anthropology, political anthropology, anthropology of the state, NGOs, and international organizations, the anthropology of value, anthropology of the Middle East, political economy, management studies and knowledge practices, and social theory.

She was trained in the fields of women's studies, political economy, and finance (Barnard College, BA), and in anthropology and Middle Eastern Studies (Harvard University, MA, Ph.D.). She also trained as a dancer and worked professionally in dance, mime, and children's theatre. Her main site of ethnographic research is Cairo, Egypt. She has also lived and worked in Israel/Palestine and Slovenia, former Yugoslavia.

_
For more information, contact:
Johanna Romero, CNES Program Manager
Bunche Hall 10286
Tel #: 310-825-1455
E-mail: romero at international.ucla.edu
http://www.international.ucla.edu/cnes


-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.ucla.edu/pipermail/hum_events/attachments/20110128/8eceec82/attachment.htm>
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: image.jpg
Type: image/jpeg
Size: 5126 bytes
Desc: image.jpg
URL: <http://lists.ucla.edu/pipermail/hum_events/attachments/20110128/8eceec82/attachment.jpg>