Content area
Full text
EGYPT Egypt in the Future Tense: Hope, Frustration, and Ambivalence before and after 2011, by Samuli Schielke. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2015. 260 pages. $30 paper.
Reviewed by Nermeen Mouftah
In addition to producing fine-grained empirical knowledge of the region, the anthropology of the Middle East is increasingly at the forefront of contemporary theorizations of the state, modernity, gender, and religion. Samuli Schielke's second monograph, Egypt in the Future Tense, speaks to these theoretical constellations in an ethnography that spans nearly a decade of fieldwork (2006-13) and a diverse cast of interlocutors that circle in and around a village in Egypt's Nile Delta. Schielke is a research fellow at Zentrum Moderner Orient in Berlin, and external lecturer in Visual and Media Anthropology at the Free University of Berlin. He is also a filmmaker and photographer, and the creator of a widely read blog, You'll Be Late for the Revolution!, between 2011 and 2013. In this latest work, Schielke captures his interlocutors' anxieties, hopes, and frustrations with what he calls grand schemes, "persons, ideas, and powers that are understood to be greater than one's ordinary life, located on a higher plane, distinct from everyday life, and yet relevant as models for living" (p. 13). In this way, he builds on his previous writings that explore how a theory of grand schemes, and the inconsistencies and disappointments that they both produce and seek to overcome, is a more accurate approach for capturing...