Phatic labor, infrastructure, and the question of empowerment in Cairo

Abstract

In this article, I draw on ethnographic research in Cairo to analyze outcomes of Egyptian women's practices of sociality. In Cairo, “phatic labor” creates a social infrastructure of communicative channels that are as essential to economy as roads, bridges, or telephone lines. Projects to empower Egyptian women via finance made these communicative channels visible as an economic infrastructure for projects oriented around the pursuit of profit. A social infrastructure that had functioned as a kind of semiotic commons became visible as a resource that could be privatized or formatted as a public good.

Mobile Money: Communication, Consumption and Change in the Payments Space

“…Each of these strategies could easily serve as an example of Prahalad's Bottom of the Pyramid approach: leveraging poor people's networks to generate new revenue streams while at the same time alleviating poverty by expanding access to financial services (Elyachar, 2010;Roy, 2010). However, mobile money complicates this perspective, since here the poor are neither producers nor consumers.…”

“…Once they do so, that payments space can then function as 'infrastructure' for various other projects -here, for providing access to banking and financial services to the world's poor. And that imagined infrastructure can be commoditised, or made into a free good; it can be privatised, or made into a global commons (Elyachar, 2010).…”

Contabilidad en los márgenes: ecologías financieras entre big y small data

“…Simultáneamente, desde la industria financiera y la discusión global sobre políticas de desarrollo, una creciente atención se ha comenzado a dedicar a asuntos como educación financiera, infraestructuras de pago y nuevos productos bancarios dirigidos a aquellos que están en la base de la pirámide (Collins et al, 2009). El presente artículo contribuye a la creciente literatura situada en la intersección de estas dos trayectorias, en donde la atención se orienta al estudio de la creciente industria de servicios y políticas financieras orientadas a usuarios previamente excluidos de las finanzas formales (Elyachar, 2010;Guérin et al, 2013;Langley, 2014;Maurer, 2012;Ossandón, 2012). Los estudios sociales existentes sobre las "low finance" o finanzas domésticas pueden clasificarse en dos tipos.…”

Introduction: (De)materializing Kinship—Holding Together Mutuality and Difference

“…These analyses share a common concernand provocative insight-about the forms of hierarchical affiliation that organize kinship relatedness, as well as certain forms of economic sociality that have been influenced by the modern corporation (Marcus 2005;Marcus and Hall 1992;Yanagisako 2002) and present-day market participation (McKinnon 2001;Schuster 2015;Shever 2012). Anthropologists working across questions of value and relatedness have documented novel sites of kinship production that are emerging alongside new economic arrangements, from family-oriented entrepreneurial subjects (Elyachar 2010;Freeman 2014) to the 'brotherhood of Freemason sisters' (Mahmud 2014) in Italian masonic lodges. Our focus on materiality sets these forms of social organization in motion, showing how they are constructed and fall apart in everyday practice.…”