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Tarik Sabry, Cultural Encounters in the Arab World. On Media, the Modern and the Everyday. London: I.B.

Tauris, 2010, pp. 228 (ISBN 978-1-84885-359-1) Reviewed by Georgiana Nicoarea An ethnographic and phenomenological approach of what it means to be modern in the Arab World, Tarik Sabrys book is an attempt to connect conceptualizations of modernity in Arab thought with modernity as experienced in the everyday life of Arab societies. This pioneering work makes a strong plea in favor of considering the everyday as the main focus of an emerging academic research field, that of Arab Cultural Studies, to the crystallization of which this book contributes. The book advocates for the studying of daily life, culture and media in the Arab World, outlining the need for an anthropological perspective on culture that the author considers an amalgamation of different encounters and the dynamics they produce (p. 10). Furthermore, he places the study of popular culture, in its forms characteristic to the Arab World, at the intersection of social, political, economic, existential and anthropological dynamics resulting from the encounter between global and local (p. 14). In the first chapter, Sabry sketches a history of encounters of the Arab World with the West, encounters that supposed, among others, the confrontation of Arab societies and its intellectuals with modernity and affected the perspectives on culture which he discusses in the following chapter. The author poses the question whether the encounters with the modern can be studied as a cultural phenomenon and argues for the examination of modernness as a phenomenological category, in an attempt to deal with the modern from an ontologically point of view. Sabry thus distinguishes between modernness and modernity, modernization and modernism and he depicts modernness as being about thinking through and reflecting on the very kind of being, that thing we call modern it describes a state of mind and being in the world (p. 16). The second chapter contains the central theoretical elements sustaining the claim of the book as the author challenges topics around which revolves the discourses about culture in the Arab World. He is mainly concerned with the ala (tradition) / hadta (modernity) duality that dictates also how the category culture in articulated. In presenting the central discourses on Arab culture, Sabry reveals the tension between those that advocate in favor of heritage (turt) and their counterpart that favor modernity (hadta). In the light of this tension, Sabry proposes the use of the deleuzian concepts of deterritorialization and reterritorialization in order to analyze phenomena of culture in the Arab World, phenomena that he deems influenced by cultural contacts with the Western world. He calls for the application of Abdel Kebir Khatibis principle of double critique, a concept influenced by Derrida's deconstructionism that involves a critical analysis of both the local as well as the global elements of contemporary cultural production. Tarik Sabry identifies four directions for the analysis of the relationship between tradition and modernity that are centered on the concept of culture. The first one represented in the works of Abdullah Laroui is the historicist / Marxist direction that aims at a break with the past and with tradition. A second position is that of Mohammed Abed Al-Jabiri, a realistic / structuralist direction that defends a modernization from within and reconciliation with the present. The Salafist / traditionalist

direction that claims that the Arab-Islamic heritage is the only coherent civilizational model is the third one identified, and what he calls the anti-essentialist position which uses deterritorialization as double critique is the forth. Tarik Sabry describes this forth stand as a philosophy of transcendence which promises to overcome the problem of duality between tradition and modernity through the critique of both concepts. In the third chapter, Arab Popular Culture and Everyday Life are bridged around the notion of present tense as a powerful temporality, making claims for the establishing of the two as object of research and study. Tarik Sabry further criticizes the elitist view on culture that hinders anthropological readings of the Everyday Life in the Arab World and sets out to identify the meaning of popular culture in the area. One of the characteristics of the popular being its position outside ruling mechanism, he points that many voices that constitute Arab popular culture remain unheard as what is publicly identified as popular culture is in fact a pseudo-popular culture that speaks not with its own voice but with the voice of the center (p. 57) and the cause resides in the control the ruling elites exercise not only over the means of production in general but also over cultural production in particular. He encourages the study of the anthropological spaces of the daily life and privacy, to which Arab subcultures are confined to by the authoritarian structures of the Arab World, in order to examine the regions working class structure and social stratification. Following the somewhat theoretical framework proposed in the first three chapters, in chapter four the author analyzes ethnographic data from Egypt and Morocco with the purpose of sustaining the claim for the study of moderness. Sabry reads the Qassr Nile Bridge in Cairo and the queues outside the Italian and French embassies in Casablanca as anthropological texts, approaching them as spaces of encountering with the modern. The Qassr Nile Bridge is perceived as a place that allows for an acting out of the self and of desires that contradict conventional and fixed ideas about gender and love in the Arab society (p. 93) while the queue outside the Italian and French embassies in Casablanca, in its being a colonial imposition (p. 89) is a place of encounter with the local and the Western other in which we can read the story of the Arab working class, their hopes and aspirations (p. 93). In his second empirical chapter, chapter five, Tarik Sabry additionally explores the theme of encountering by taking into scrutiny the role television in Morocco plays in generating self-reflexive narratives of modernness in young viewers, on the basis of fieldwork conducted in Morocco between 2001 and 2007. The author consequently demonstrates how difference in socio-economic and cultural strata (...) produce different readings of and reactions to modernity which he classifies in categories ranging from incoherent acceptance to coherent rejection (p. 99). The duality and ambivalence resulting from the mechanisms of encountering originate in another duality, that of Arabs position towards the modernity that Sabry considers a handicap (p. 155) that has to be adjusted. The author finds the answer to this problematic in Khatibis double-critique that supposes the questioning and subversion of both the modern and the traditional. Tarik Sabrys book encourages the reconceptualization of the dominant paradigms about Arabic culture, emphasizing the need for an analysis of contemporary cultural

particularities that challenges the stationary frameworks within which the Middle East has been approached. In the light of a new Arab Cultural Studies project the regions encounters with modernity and its take on peoples everyday experiences encourage sociologic, ethnographic and anthropologic dimensions of research conducted within the scope of clarifying an Arab cultural panorama of the present. Mohammed Abed Al-Jabiri, the supporter of a modernization from within and a reconciliation with the present, affirms, in the same note that Arab thought suffers from a confusion in the cultural temporality leading to its unconscious time (Al-Jabir, apud Sabry, 2011:10). Thus time stops as Arab thought deals with cultural products of the past that co-exist in the same temporality as the new, accusing the fact that the present is only a replay of the past through the prism of which it is analyzed. In order to surpass this impasse, Sabry argues for an interdisciplinary approach to the cultures of the contemporary Arab World thus outlining the need for the establishing of Arab Cultural Studies as a field of research and study.

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