Using multisited ethnography, Julia Elyachar has produced a masterful description and sophisticated interpretation of the transformation of the social, cultural, and political economy of urban Egypt since the early 1990s. She anchors the study in one of Cairo’s new desert suburbs, Madinet el-Hirafiyeen (Craftsmen Town), where craftsmen have been relocated in efforts to clean up older parts of Cairo, places they had lived and worked in for generations. Joining the craftsmen are lower middle-class university graduates given loans from international donor agencies to set up microenterprises in the suburb. From this rather bleak and desolate base, Elyachar expands the study into Cairo’s air-conditioned offices, training centers, and conference halls of bankers, state officials, international agencies, and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs).

She shows how workshop owners and workers as well as unemployed university graduates are linked in complex and multilayered ways to donors, social scientists, and officials. Elyachar also highlights the profound misperceptions and lack of knowledge foreign and local upper-class experts have of the local, mainly working-class people targeted for “improvement” through development programs. Especially striking is the cultural bias experts hold in favor of an imaginary free-market economy. The experts remain ignorant or dismissive of the socially constructed, networked, and proven production and exchange system of the craftsmen as well as of the failure of loans to provide a socially viable and economically sustainable alternative for the educated but unemployed youth.

Elyachar begins with a broad-based critique of ideas, concepts, theories, and ideologies of markets and the market. She describes her ethnographic research into the realms of practice and theory, power and value, popular culture and the culture of experts, and the seemingly absurd contradictions of the “centrality of marginality” and “empowerment through indebtedness.” Speaking and reading Arabic, living in the bleak new neighborhood, working and collaborating with an Egyptian male assistant, Elyachar probed politically sensitive issues seemingly with ease among a wide range of relocated working-class men and unemployed, indebted young men. Genderwise, the world she describes and analyzes is a world of men, and she does that with astute perception. Women are present but usually in the background. Although the business of work and making a living occupies center stage, the everyday man’s world of workshop, street, mosque, coffeehouse, marriage, family, drinking, flirting, and so on permeates the book and provides a nuanced view of life and its contradictions in a slice of “real world” Cairo.

Elyachar uses oral histories along with written history to show a century of change and continuity in work, home, and neighborhood in northern areas of Cairo. She deconstructs the notion of an informal sector, elaborates the decline of state power in the economy, and shows people in state institutions in conflict with each other. She documents the rise to prominence of donor agencies and their setting of agendas and discourse to be followed as controlling mechanisms in so-called development. She questions the division bifurcating NGOS from centers of national and international power and control and suggests that links between government and nongovernment are strong. She portrays the power of household and kin, the value of a person’s name, the regulating role of the evil eye, and the importance of empirical knowledge for cases of success in the working world of the craftspeople of urban Egypt. And she documents the failure of monetary loans to change Cairo’s youthful recipients into entrepreneurs with successful enterprises, micro or not.

Elyachar contributes poignant insight into the fields of economic anthropology, political economy, and development studies. She presents a much-needed perspective on society and economy of urban Egypt that accurately reflects the aspirations, achievements, and failures of a generation and more of men and their families from reputable but not wealthy urban backgrounds. She convincingly shows how this bulwark of the society has been promised empowerment through enterprises and new work locations but has been left, dispossessed, with little or nothing to show for their efforts or the money of the donors, much of which leaked to better-off and better-positioned local elites and foreign experts and administrators. Elyachar has written a book that is essential reading for anyone concerned with development, Egypt and the Arab World, and the dangers of ideologically motivated interference by foreign social scientists and other experts in local economies and societies.