Journal of Aesthetics & Culture
ISSN: (Print) 2000-4214 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/zjac20
Mish mabsoota: on teaching with a camera in
revolutionary Cairo
Mark R. Westmoreland
To cite this article: Mark R. Westmoreland (2015) Mish mabsoota: on teaching with a camera in
revolutionary Cairo, Journal of Aesthetics & Culture, 7:1, 28253, DOI: 10.3402/jac.v7.28253
To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.3402/jac.v7.28253
© 2015 M. R. Westmoreland
Published online: 08 Dec 2015.
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Journal of AESTHETICS
Vol. 7, 2015
& CULTURE
VISUAL FRICTIONS
Mish mabsoota: on teaching with a camera
in revolutionary Cairo$
Mark R. Westmoreland*
Institute of Cultural Anthropology and Development Sociology, Leiden University, Leiden, The Netherlands
Abstract
Made in the wake of the 2011 Egyptian Revolution, Inti
Mabsoota? is an experimental pedagogical video project
that draws upon the emerging mobile esthetics of cell
phone filmmaking and public encounters with revolutionary spontaneity. Inspired by the landmark cinéma-vérité
film, Chronique d’un été (1960), in which participants ask
people on the streets of Paris if they are happy, several of
my students at the American University in Cairo became
mobile film units, asking people the same innocuous
question, ‘‘Inta mabsoot?/Inti mabsoota?’’*Are you happy?
Are you content? This seemingly benign exercise belies
a variety of conceptual and methodological frictions,
which offered productive pedagogical possibilities. Drawing
upon the emergent revolutionary visual culture, this student
project complicated both the reductive assessments of the
‘‘Arab Spring’’ as a manifestation of digital democracy and
the heavy-handed way that western journalism has tended
to address the ‘‘Arab Street’’ as a volatile mob. Using an
embodied visual approach allowed students to apprehend
modes of lived experience that might not register as political
in more normative models, but which nonetheless form
the basis of how people live and experience political life.
Highlighting the non-representational aspects of the encounter also foregrounds the corporeal and visceral dimensions of the students’ experience. Accordingly, the critical
video methods employed elucidate the kinds of affective
knowledge produced for those on screen, behind the
camera, and viewing from a distance.
Mark R. Westmoreland is an Associate Professor of Visual Anthropology at
Leiden University, where he directs the
MA program in Visual Ethnography.
He also serves as the co-editor of Visual
Anthropology Review. He is an awardwinning filmmaker and has published
widely in both scholarly journals and art catalogs. His
current book project, Catastrophic Images, shows how
experimental documentary practices play a crucial role
in addressing recurrent political violence in Lebanon. As
a co-recipient of a grant from the Swedish Foundation
for Humanities and Social Sciences, his current project
focuses on the cultivation of radical political esthetics and
the generative potential of video activism in the Middle
East.
Keywords: Egypt; enactment; pedagogy; visual culture; political affect; Arab Uprisings; ethnographic encounter;
non-representational theory; visual methodologies; cinéma-vérité
This paper is part of the Special Issue: Visual Frictions. More papers from this issue can be found at www.aestheticsandculture.net
*Correspondence to: Mark R. Westmoreland, Institute of Cultural Anthropology and Development Sociology, Leiden
University, Leiden, The Netherlands. Email: m.r.westmoreland@fsw.leidenuniv.nl
$
Mish Mabsoota means ‘‘I am/you are/she is unhappy’’ in the feminine form, which I default to since most of my students
were women and to acknowledge a recursive gender politics on Cairo’s streets.
#2015 M. R. Westmoreland. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License
(http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), allowing third parties to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format and to remix,
transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially, provided the original work is properly cited and states its license.
Citation: Journal of Aesthetics & Culture, Vol. 7, 2015 http://dx.doi.org/10.3402/jac.v7.28253
1
M. R. Westmoreland
It felt like people were fighting the images
that had betrayed them for so long*with their
own images. The fear of cameras had disappeared completely and they were now the
instrument to learn what was going on . . ..
Even if a lot of this footage will remain unseen,
it was the source of understanding*of our
condition, of our life, of what we want and of
who we are.*Narrator in CROP (2013, 49 m,
1
dirs. Marouan Omara and Johanna Domke)
Such acts of image-making reveal important
generative dimensions of visuality available during
revolutionary flux. Rather than passively documenting the conditions of political upheaval, ordinary citizens armed with perhaps nothing more
than a simple camera-phone harnessed the mobility
and ubiquity of these devices to produce new
forms of political agency. Images of mass protests
that arose in Tunisia in December 2010 and then
Egypt in January 2011 ricocheted across the region
with unexpected scenes of street politics, seemingly
deflating lumbering state behemoths and shocking viewers around the globe with unprecedented
possibilities for political change. In Cairo, the
occupation of urban space not only shook President
Hosni Mubarak from office but also enabled
Cairenes to reclaim the city.2 While the ultimate
political outcome of the uprisings was (and perhaps
still is) uncertain, Samia Mehrez argues that the
‘‘newfound power of ownership of one’s space,
one’s body, and one’s language is, in and of itself, a
revolution.’’3 Perhaps, following the epigraph above,
Egyptians also claimed a new sense of ownership of
their image.
At the outset of these uprisings, thousands, if
not millions, utilized the proliferation of cell phone
cameras to record these political events and then
perhaps upload and share them. The ubiquitous
presence of these mobile cameras also indicated
an emergent vernacular esthetics of cell phone filmmaking, in which the embodiment of the spectator
shifted from the eye to the end of an arm, indicative
of watching a screen or choosing to record without
watching.4 Along with the ubiquity of cell phone
cameras and the emergence of mobile aesthetics,
the mass protests ‘‘triggered a new visual culture.’’5
In this state of revolutionary flux, new understandings of public culture took shape, in which
the street offered new and different kinds of
encounters. Tahrir Square ‘‘became the spot to
film and to be filmed, as well as being a space to
see others and to be seen.’’6
2
These examples also demonstrate how the experiences of this period were profoundly felt on
visceral, physical, and affective levels. These inchoate affective states ‘‘can shake people out of
deeply grooved patterns of thinking and feeling
and allow for new imaginings.’’7 Indeed, revolutionary political processes do not principally take
shape on the discursive level, but become enacted
through the body. The enactment of revolutionary
politics requires bodies assembling in mass, sharing
moments of collective action, and reaching states
of hopeful excitement, not to mention suffering
physical harm and sorrow. Occupying the streets
day in and day out radically shifts one’s spatial and
temporal experience.
As Egyptians (and foreigners) negotiated their
newfound image rights, they had to contend with
the highly charged nature of this new visuality,
which could either enact public ownership of
the city or may provoke suspicion if not hostility.
While these events offered an expanded latitude of
visual agency, the public production of images
requires operating on multiple registers. For instance, graffiti artists, who helped situate visual
practices within an emergent field of urban public
culture during the revolution, had to constantly
negotiate space and confront hostilities to sustain
these possibilities. Indeed, the widespread depiction of an eyepatch became a prominent symbol
against the practice of eye snipers intentionally
blinding protestors, thus enacting a critique of the
brutal measures taken against acts of witnessing.
Under these circumstances, filming on the streets
of Cairo became inherently political.
While the iconography of the region had suddenly (if momentarily) shifted from more entrenched scenes of conflicts between belligerents,
these seemingly supple images of civil politics may
have too quickly become brittle and shattered
under the reassertion of regimental power. After
two and a half years in revolutionary flux, the
military definitively reclaimed political power and
reasserted control over the public visual culture.
So as the ubiquitous mobile figure bearing a
digital camera (phone) opened new possibilities for
enacting public political subjectivity, so too have
the evolving political circumstances presented frictional conditions that necessitate adjusting the
forms and practices that these encounters take.
In this context, I initiated a class project intent on
critically assessing the dominant representational
Mish mabsoota
frameworks used to understand the experience of
political change and thus explore a series of related
questions. How does the fluidity and friction of
this evolving visual culture help us understand the
way people live and experience day-to-day political realities? How might social inquiries utilize
the camera to enact compelling and committed
accounts of political experience? And how might
such public encounters convey this experience on
unconventional and unanticipated registers than
those usually assigned to political discourse? And
yet, when the street is no longer a site of generative
possibilities, how might this emergent visual culture
find alternative sites for creativity? As such, under
the rubric of ‘‘thinking with a camera during
revolutionary times,’’ this pedagogical intervention aimed to position students as active producers of representational knowledge within the still
unfolding Arab Uprisings by engaging in visually
based research practices.
THINKING WITH A CAMERA DURING
REVOLUTIONARY TIMES
As a visual anthropologist based at the American
University in Cairo (AUC) between 2008 and 2013,
my intellectual agenda became tightly enveloped
within the everyday realities of a protracted political
revolution. Wrestling with the generativity and restrictivity of image practices in this moment, I aspired
to teach my students to both critically think about
the flood of images circulating in revolutionary Egypt
and engage with a visual methodology attuned to
these volatile dynamics. Committed to a project on
the production of alternative visualities in the contemporary Middle East and how local image practices
mediate emergent cultural imaginaries, subvert the
geopolitical gaze, and envision the region anew,
I began to prepare an MA seminar around a beguilingly simple question: How to do visual anthropology
at this moment in Egypt?
The answer to this question is far from selfevident and could not be arrived at only conceptually. As the now ubiquitous mobile camera claimed
new potentiality for public modes of witnessing
and political participation, I knew that students
should embody the methodological possibilities
that this historic precedent afforded by publicly
engaging people on the streets with a modest video
camera.8 Due to the perpetually shifting image politics during these tumultuous times, my pedagogical
objectives required an experimental approach to
doing ethnography with a camera. Even under the
most stable circumstances, Sarah Pink warns, ‘‘It is
impossible to predict, and mistaken to prescribe,
precise methods for ethnographic research,’’9 but
uncertain times also demand uncertain methods,
open to discovering unclaimed feelings and sensitive to the affective intensity of instability. This
does not mean proceeding blindly. Indeed, this
required attunement to the shifting tensions that
inform the local visual culture oscillating between
moments of generative exception and the recurrent
reification of entrenched norms. As such, Pink also
heeds deploying appropriate visual methods based
on the conventions of local visual cultural and ‘‘an
ethnographic appreciation of how visual knowledge is interpreted in a cross-cultural context.’’10
As nearly everyone had become enraptured by
the processes of political change, so too had most of
my MA students at AUC begun to do research on
some aspect of the revolution in Egypt. Preparing
them for doing ethnographic research with visual
tools meant pragmatically addressing the particular but shifting set of challenges that this sociopolitical situation included, while also inspiring them
to see the promise of such a venture. While drawing upon the long traditions of ethnographic and
documentary cinema regarding issues of representation, authorship, and reflexivity, I had students
also engage recent critical ideas about the relationship between esthetics and politics in non-fiction
video.11 We critically assessed the recent proliferation of visual (and sensory) techniques in both
social science research and human rights/activists
agendas.12 And thus by questioning the underlying
assumptions about the efficacy of visual methods,
this course aimed to develop a refined epistemological toolkit able to critically traverse the production and consumption of images circulating in
politically volatile times. As such, the course intentionally brought together materials and discourses from a variety of sources that would help
students think through issues of visuality at this
moment in Egypt.
This meant understanding and situating ourselves within an emergent political economy. While
the ‘‘Arab Spring’’ had seemed to become a commercial event sponsored by Google, Facebook,
Twitter, and YouTube, a revolutionary industry
quickly followed in which ‘‘the revolution’’ was being
(re)produced for different markets. It seemed
3
M. R. Westmoreland
that everyone was clambering to get a piece of the
gold rush. Academics, filmmakers, and journalists,
among others, would parachute in for an adventure
tour, while often bypassing the local perspectives
most encumbered by the political events. For a
visual anthropology of contemporary Egypt, this
meant trying to remain true to the more spontaneous acts of self-expression, while also attune
to the renewed investment in political visibility,
the proliferation of new visual approaches, and
the integration of amateur documentarians as key
agents of the mass political spectacle.13
Thinking about how to do visual anthropology
in Egypt also meant addressing a serious prohibitive
dimension of public image-making. In a context
in which filmmakers and photographers commonly
face aggressive challenges from bystanders, if not
authorities, would require preparing students to
negotiate the public policing of images that typically
accused documentarians for showing the ‘‘negative
side of Egypt.’’14 While the enactment of mobile
filming would resonate with the politics of mass
street protests, the revolution was nevertheless
a highly contentious event. Although the role of
cameras during the uprisings had made public
image-making more common, the xenophobic
discourse about infiltrators intending to ‘‘destroy
Egypt’’ ensured that filmmaking on the streets
would remain a highly charged and suspicious act.
In other words, to put these ideas into practice
meant both actively engaging in the emergent potentialities and responding to the recurrent swath of
challenges. Thus, by choosing to enter into this
hyper-mediated fold intent to produce yet more
images required solid methodological and theoretical grounding. This meant negotiating the tension between the important dynamics of ‘‘street
politics’’ for the success of these mass uprisings15
and the heavy-handed way that western journalism
has tended to address the so-called Arab Street as
‘‘the worst kind of barbarous urban mob, threatening local and global orders . . .’’16 While critical of
biased approaches, our aim would not be based on
critiques of mainstream media coverage. And while
inspired by citizen journalism, a visual anthropology of contemporary Egypt would not be satisfied with passively documenting visible evidence.
Furthermore, we had to avoid engaging subjects
with predetermined frameworks, such as interview
questions about social protests, political parties,
national sentiments, and so on. Instead, I aimed
4
to shift attention to more open-ended interactions
that would engage people in more speculative
approaches and ideally reveal an emergent political
subjectivity embedded within mundane personal
experience*that is, the affective registers of the
everyday*which often becomes obscured by more
didactic approaches. By fostering both generative and provocative encounters, I followed David
MacDougall’s ambition to provoke new forms
of knowledge in the act of producing a film by
‘‘creating the circumstances in which new knowledge can take us by surprise.’’17
So, in effect, my course on ‘‘Thinking with a
Camera during Revolutionary Times’’ initiated
an experimental pedagogical video project intent
to reconceptualize a framework supple enough
for doing visual anthropology at that moment in
Egypt.18 In order to both capture the potential of
the political moment and navigate these thorny
issues of political representation an innovative
approach would have to be taken. Drawing upon
the emerging mobile esthetics of cell phone filmmaking and public encounters with revolutionary
spontaneity, the project aimed to show students
that the use of visual ethnography would provide
them with ways to think critically about images
of social unrest, offer them new perspectives on
the experience of political change occurring on
the human scale, and resituate the production of
knowledge in the ethnographic encounter itself.
Drawing upon the canons of documentary studies
and visual anthropology alike, I appropriated the
work of Jean Rouch for inspiration. The landmark
cinéma-vérité film Chronique d’un été/Chronicle of a
Summer (Jean Rouch & Edgar Morin, 1961) provided
a solution to the dilemmas outlined above. In other
words, by responding to both the technological
development of 16-mm sync sound filmmaking and
the political burden of the French colonial wars,
Chronique d’un été similarly suggested an answer
on how to do visual anthropology at that moment
in France. The collaboration between Rouch and
Morin also provided an experimental approach to
doing ethnographic research. By engaging in spontaneous interactions and employing open-ended provocations, they thus distanced themselves from more
didactic approaches. But given the significant difference between the two contexts, I had no intention of doing a remake of Chronique d’un été.
Instead, inspired by the opening scene, in which
participants ask people on the streets of Paris
Mish mabsoota
if they are happy, my students in Cairo similarly
solicited a spontaneous response from people to
a single question, Inta Mabsoot?/Inti Mabsoota?*Are
you happy?
AREN’T YOU HAPPY?
The vox populi interviews conducted by my
students captured spontaneous responses and
gave fresh perspective to the different moods
and opinions among participants in this postrevolutionary moment (fall 2012). The uncertainty
and frustration of political turmoil weighed on
Cairenes in idiosyncratic ways from the lack of work
and money reiterated by street vendors to the
more bourgeois interests in wealth, good food,
and romantic relationships. The emotional intimacy of the question and the public anonymity of
the context produced a generative juxtaposition.
This dialectic quality of the encounter helps to
disrupt assumptions of passively collecting data
about ‘‘happiness.’’ While collecting responses in
Cairo’s different districts revealed distinct differences in people’s concerns, the corporeal and
visceral aspects of these sensibilities also elucidate
the uneven experience of the revolution on an
affective register. As one student commented:
While we were watching other classmates
projects, it was striking to see how different
geographical areas even within greater Cairo
reflected different views on happiness and
misery. People in Zamalek, an upper-class
neighborhood, tended to be happier and more
willing to attribute their emotional status to
personal reasons. On the other hand, street
vendors in local areas were relating their
unhappiness to the country’s shaky economic
and political status. In our project, the presence of the revolution was strong due to the
proximity of Tahrir Square and most people
expressed their feelings toward the revolution’s success or failure.19
This seemingly benign exercise of asking Inti
mabsoota? belies a variety of conceptual and methodological frictions that have rubbed people the
wrong way. On almost every occasion that I have
presented this work, someone takes issue with the
question. Most often this is expressed as a matter of
translational precision, never mind that this is
already a cross-cultural translation from the French
‘‘êtes-vous heureux?’’ Indeed, strictly speaking,
mabsoot is better translated as ‘‘satisfied’’ or
Video 1. Geographies of class. Zamalek: http://www.
aestheticsandculture.net/public/journals/7/multimedia/Video
1-Zamalek.mov.
The videos in this article have been optimized for play
within Adobe Acrobat Reader, however, the videos can also
be played in a browser by clicking directly on the URL.
‘‘content.’’ And while Inti mabsoota? is used idiomatically like, ‘‘how are you?,’’ this phrasing was
developed in collaboration with the native speakers
of Arabic in the project.
The next most common critique suggests that
we have not asked the ‘‘right question.’’ Baring the
assumptions about the inauthenticity of the translated question, there may be other ways to consider
the potential inappropriateness of Inti mabsoota?
For instance, despite the success of ousting President Hosni Mubarak from office, for many the
optimism from those initial days had begun to
wane by the time of our project.20 This meant that
the project had a clearly ironic strategy at its core.
While humor could offer a subversive aspect to
these interviews, for others the absurdity of the
question could be offensive. Consider these two
initial reflections from students:
I am already starting to find an absurdity in
the project. We did not feel as though we
could actually ask someone in earnest if they
Video 2. Geographies of class. Saad Zaghloul: http://www.
aestheticsandculture.net/public/journals/7/multimedia/Video
2-Saad Zaghloul.mov.
5
M. R. Westmoreland
were happy in the middle of what would
become weeks of clashes in the square and
later in front of the Presidential Palace.21
I grew mixed feelings towards the project. It
was paradoxical experience asking people
about happiness and there are injured and
dead people and raped women meters ways.22
These responses not only reflect the initial ambivalence of some of the students but also suggest that a
more politically direct question may be deemed
appropriate for engaging these confused and saddened Cairenes.23 While this project was inspired
by Chronique d’un été, I also showed my students an
important rejoinder to this film made only one year
later. Like Chronique d’un été, Chris Marker and
Pierre Lhomme’s Le Joli Mai is also a ‘‘portrait of
everyday Paris’’ and Marker suggested that he
was also interested in the issue of happiness.24
But, in the hands of Chris Marker, the ‘‘seemingly
innocent ‘Are you happy?’ implies the silent and
subversive accusation, ‘How can you possibly be
happy?’’’ 25
Asking this question*‘‘How can you possibly
be happy?’’*would surely have produced more
confrontational responses, but I would argue in
spite of the prompt that neither Chronique d’un été
nor Inti mabsoota? were necessarily about happiness. Instead, this project, like Chronique d’un été,
envisioned the juxtaposition between the public
anonymity of the street with the superficial intimacy of a presumptuous question as the primary
crux of the experiment. In other words, rather
than assessing happiness on a psychological level,
the project operationalized the concept within
the tenuous but mundane political climate of a
protracted revolution in order to enact affective
responses in the ethnographic encounter by both
interviewees and interviewers as well as others
present at the time. As indicated above, the
affective particularities of these responses often
revealed more about the context than the individual’s emotional state.
With these critiques noted, I argue that it is
precisely within the context of these challenges that
pedagogical possibilities emerge from the affective
intensity of these mediated encounters.26 Indeed,
the ambivalence about the question reflects a
deeper tension between representational and nonrepresentational aspects of the project. If taken as
a representational project, then a viewer privileges
the subjects in front of the camera being inter-
6
viewed and the kinds of things they say in response
to the question. As such, this model literally foregrounds the speech act*both the question asked
and the answers offered*and the particularities
of the responses invariably come to represent a
generalizable Egyptian mood. This reflects a hermeneutic short circuit that privileges language over
other sensory registers as if a transcript of the verbal
exchange would suffice.
Furthermore, while nearly everyone initially
responded to the question with, alhamdullilaah
(‘‘thanks to God’’), the religiosity of this phrase
belies its mundane ubiquity. As with many idiomatic phrases in Egyptian Arabic borrowed from
the Quran, ‘‘[s]o much are these phrases a part
of the language that one need not be a believer nor
even a Muslim necessarily in order to use at least
some of them.’’27 Whereas religion became expressed on different registers from one’s comportment to one’s convictions about President Morsi,
people’s initial perfunctory response to the interview prompt indicates instead how the question
seemed unremarkable. People were unaccustomed
to giving this question much significance, but the
context disrupts this expectation. As reflected in
the following student reflections, its unassuming
qualities meant that the meaning of the question is
something that often times had to be negotiated in
the moment*‘‘What do you mean by mabsoot?’’
In the beginning of the conversation where
both researcher and interviewee are trying
to reach a common understanding for the
question.28
This topic of happiness is something that
we might mention every day and think about
but rarely does one stop and talk about it
and need to really think through what such a
concept means. I felt like the reactions to the
questions were very interesting.29
As such, if we instead consider the nonrepresentational aspects of the project, then ‘‘the
question is really beside the point,’’ as one of
my students exclaimed to me.30 Another student
echoed this sentiment and expanded, ‘‘it was more
a matter of where that question was taking us; what
are the doors that are being opened through it.’’31
Indeed, the encounter presented a generative
opportunity for many participants with an audiovisual amanuensis, in which the camera afforded
them the chance to address an unknown public.32
Mish mabsoota
While invariably bound to a lexical encounter,
a non-representational framework nonetheless
opens itself to the students behind the camera as
well as those off-screen. The visual brings a great
deal of experiential knowledge to the situation,
from facial expressions, gestures, interpersonal
reactions, stirrings in the background, personal
dress, forms of comportment, one’s relationship to
the street, but also one’s relation to the camera and
to the interviewers. By locating the production of
knowledge through corporeal processes of looking
and being rather than discursively communicating
it in thoughts and descriptions,33 students tested an
embodied visual approach in order to apprehend
modes of lived experience that might not register as
political in more normative models, but which
nonetheless form the basis of how people live and
experience political life.
So rather than gathering survey data to be
crunched, the question provoked an encounter
capable of taking us by surprise. The prompt got
students talking to people on the street, who they
may otherwise never meet, about how they relate
to the political situation in the country without
presupposing a political stance. If we thus emphasize the encounter that the question provides, then
the question itself opens up to more dynamic
readings. But this also revealed an unnerving, if
not violent, dimension of being encountered with
this question, as evoked by this student response:
Some of those who refused offered justifications or alternatives. During our second day
of filming, an antique shop owner insisted to
give a reason for his refusal to be interviewed
saying he is an old man with a short nerve
that hardly enables him going through the
day and he cannot be subjected to any
emotional imbalance the interview could
put him through. 34
As students of the AUC, they were invariably
marked as privileged citizens. According to our
informed consent protocol, students had to identify themselves and their research intent before
recording peoples’ replies. Not only did this situate
the students in very particular ways with the
participants, it subverted the spontaneous punch
of the question. And yet, the presence of young,
cosmopolitan, and mostly female university students on the streets of Cairo with camera phones,
if not DSLRs, and audio recorders, would not
immediately be read within a research context.
Given the ubiquity of journalists since the uprisings began, they would more likely be read in this
capacity. While generally considered innocuous,
particularly given the more open status of visual
culture, xenophobic rhetoric meant that the possible threat of public policing of image-making
always lurked in every encounter. While uncommon during our project, this issue did manifest
itself for some students.
The hostility mostly came from upper middle
class individuals who were highly suspicious
of our identity and insistent that we’re
filming the negative aspects of Egypt to cause
more trouble and mutate Egypt’s image
abroad. This reflects significantly the kinds
of concerns that are projected by the national
media . . .. The systematic vilifying of any one
with a camera, who might show us things we
don’t want to see. Having a camera instantly
put us in a political position and attracted
judgmental responses.35
Furthermore, the impact of these encounters also
deeply affected the students. While the students
who initially felt ambivalent changed their perspectives through the project, some students spoke
of profoundly haunting experiences and the violent
dimensions of confronting strangers with personal
questions.
‘‘Turning back the anthropological gaze’’ was
manifested through the fact that many of
them turned back the question to me after I
finish filming them. Each time I was asked
back the question, I was not prepared and it
frightened me. But, this worked as a good
reminder of the violence in asking the question and that made me more attentive to
what people share and appreciating that they
share the same feelings.36
Video 3. The ethnographic encounter: http://www.
aestheticsandculture.net/public/journals/7/multimedia/Video
3-ethnographic encounter.mov.
7
M. R. Westmoreland
And while some students initially felt that this
exercise would not benefit the people interviewed,
several noted the mutually transformative potential. Suggesting that the encounter offered people
an opportunity to break from their daily routine,
one student said, ‘‘the street feels different to me so
maybe it felt different to this man.’’37 Several
others mentioned the way people thrived on the
opportunity, perhaps out of loneliness or more
particularly ‘‘as if we had come down from the
skies and were her therapy.’’38 For one student, the
camera-mediated encounters produced a heightened sensitivity and she has become more hesitant
about filming and photographing people in public.
While the non-representational notion of encounter helps to situate the street as a space of
ethnographic engagement, the role of the camera
and microphone (audio recorder) helps to push
this into the more generative domain of enactment.
Although the project does not aspire to re-enacting
Chronique d’un été in a conventional sense, the
creative appropriation of the opening scene reenacts the film’s provocatory gesture. Despite
the long-standing assumptions about the passive
objectivity of photography, Scott McQuire reminds us that the agency of the camera actually
ruptures realist paradigms.39 As such, the camera
as the mediating agent in these encounters enacts
the emergent visualpolitical paradigms as well
as the recursive image politics. Rather than the flyon-the-wall stance of Direct Cinema, Inti Mabsoota
enacts Jean Rouch’s methodological sensibilities
that harness the camera’s agential abilities to
engender cinematic realizations. Whereas the technological innovations of 16-mm film cameras
with sync sound in the 1960s helped produce the
untethered esthetic qualities of cinéma-vérité in
Chronique d’un été, the emerging mobile esthetics
of cell phone filmmaking accentuate the technological particularities of the historic moment in
this project. While avoiding a technologically deterministic explanation of the Arab Uprisings and
acknowledging the various forms of grassroots
face-to-face politics that foreground these events,
the role of video in these encounters nevertheless
echoes the way politics became enacted in relation
to these communicative technologies.
Following Peter Snowdon’s argument that these
videos advanced an ‘‘aesthetic revolution’’ based
on the kind of politics anticipated by the Arab
Uprisings,40 we could say that the notion of ‘‘thinking
8
with a camera during revolutionary times’’ also
aimed to become attune to both the political possibilities nestled within the emergent image-making
practices of the region and their concomitant
frictions. In the context of mentoring students in
the embodied methodologies of visual anthropology, this meant aligning our understanding of the
way the camera lens radically situates the body of
the filmmaker in relation to the ethnographic
encounter41 alongside the body genre of ‘‘political
mimesis’’ in which acts of filmmaking during street
protests and subsequent viewings evoke feelings
of sensuous politics.42 And yet, despite the playful
enactment of Rouch’s camera gesture, as the
political dynamics shifted in Egypt, so did the
visual possibilities for public provocations.
REVOLUTIONARY ENACTMENT WITH
A CAMERA DURING COUNTERREVOLUTIONARY TIMES
During the following year (2013), discontentment
with President Mohamed Morsi’s heavy-handed
favoritism for Islamist interests, on the one hand,
and a pervasive rhetoric for ‘‘stability’’ in the
country, on the other, led to both his removal
by the military junta and a ruthless criminalization
of his Muslim Brotherhood followers. More significantly, the incredibly violent coup and mass
suppression of dissent radically altered the context
that had enabled the vibrant urban public culture.
With a divided opposition, this renewed authoritarian brutality also allowed the regime to reestablish a prohibition over public image-making.
In November 2013, some of the students and I
discussed heading back out to the streets to ask the
same question one year later and possibly finding
some of the same individuals to reflect on their
earlier responses in relation to the current situation, but with the increasing criminalization of
protestors and journalists the risks seemed too
high and I called off the plan.43
In order to answer the question about how to
do visual anthropology at this moment in Egypt
meant recognizing that the moment had changed.
Despite the instability of the revolutionary period,
the revolutionary flux had afforded a great deal of
creative agency. The generative potentiality made
vibrantly possible from January 25, 2011 ostensibly
ending on June 30, 2013, at least for re-enacting
the mobile esthetics of revolutionary cell phone
Mish mabsoota
filmmaking. In spite of the bloodshed, instability,
and power-grabs of this era, perhaps we had taken
for granted the opportunities that this revolutionary visual culture had provided. Whereas the visual
became part of a collective promise, this oath had
now become criminalized as a lie for some and as lost
hope for others. Instead of repeating this vox populi
exercise that would likely produce predictable
results, the situation called for yet a different tactic.
As the experience behind the camera had proven
just as significant as that in front of it (as evidenced
in the students’ reflections), I opted to interview
students about their experiences with the project in
order to highlight a dialogic or parallax dimension.
I asked them to reflect on their encounters with
random people on the street, the process of negotiating the meaning of mabsoot, and the perpetually
shifting political/social landscape. In order to
accentuate the friction between the claustrophobic
circumstances of the present political moment
and the central significance of the public space of
the street, I created an esthetic device that could
accommodate this tension*I filmed them indoors
in a rooftop studio in front of a blue sheet that
could be digitally replaced with street images in
postproduction. With the sounds of the city in the
background, I had them face the blank sheet and
imagine themselves on the street. Turning toward
the camera, I asked about their experience being a
woman on the street doing this project and then
prompted them with the question, Inti mabsoota?
Here four of the women offer their reflections,
some facing the imagined street and some with
street images in the background.
While we could no longer deploy the camera
publicly to enact an ethnographic encounter, this
created an opportunity to draw upon the street’s
generative energy in radically different ways,
which nevertheless evoked its affective potential
looming just out of reach. Moving beyond notions
of representational realism that characterized the
project’s public encounters with people on the
street, the enactment of the street through this
layered montage foregrounds the way esthetic and
narrative devices transform actuality footage into
compelling and committed accounts of political
experience. While prompted by a series of reflective questions, it is the combination of camera,
screen, and the digital effects that shift this
exercise from producing representational knowledge to the enactment of affective knowledge.
Perhaps, in a feeble way, the effort to do visual
anthropology at that moment in Egypt both on
and off the streets through the conceptual gesture
of ‘‘thinking with a camera during revolutionary
times’’ helped to elucidate the way images of
rebellious actions cultivate new forms of political
agency, subjectivity, and collectivity.44
Notes
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
Video 4. Parallax perspectives from amidst the counterrevolutionary moment http://www.aestheticsandculture.net/
public/journals/7/multimedia/Video 4-Parallax perspectives.
mp4.
9.
As cited in Marouan Omara and Johanna Domke,
‘‘Crop,’’ in Cairo: Images of Transition: Perspectives on
Visuality in Egypt 20112013, ed. Mikala Hyldig Dal
(Bielefeld: Transcript-Verlag, 2013), 113.
Mohamed Elshahed, ‘‘Tahrir Square: Social Media,
Public Space,’’ in Cairo: Images of Transition: Perspectives on Visuality in Egypt 20112013, ed. Mikala
Hyldig Dal (Bielefeld: Transcript-Verlag, 2013), 205.
Samia Mehrez, ‘‘The Language of Tahrir*Working
Together on Translating Egypt’s Revolution,’’ in
Cairo: Images of Transition: Perspectives on Visuality in
Egypt 20112013, ed. Mikala Hyldig Dal (Bielefeld:
Transcript-Verlag, 2013), 39.
Peter Snowdon, ‘‘The Revolution Will Be Uploaded: Vernacular Video and the Arab Spring,’’
Culture Unbound: Journal of Current Cultural Research
6 (April 17, 2014): 40129.
Mona Abaza, ‘‘Post January Revolution Cairo:
Urban Wars and the Reshaping of Public Space,’’
Theory, Culture & Society 31, no. 78 (December 1,
2014): 171.
Ibid., 171.
Deborah Gould, ‘‘On Affect and Protest,’’ in Political
Emotions: New Agendas in Communication, eds. Janet
Staiger et al. (New York: Routledge, 2010), 32.
While I encouraged students to use something like a
cellphone camera or Flip Video camera, some opted
for a DSLR or such.
Sarah Pink, Doing Visual Ethnography: Images, Media
and Representation in Research, 2nd ed. (London:
Sage, 2007), 40.
9
M. R. Westmoreland
10.
11.
12.
13.
14.
15.
16.
17.
18.
10
Ibid., 43.
For instance, Laura U. Marks, The Skin of the Film:
Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and the Senses
(Durham: Duke University Press, 2000); Catherine
Russell, Experimental Ethnography: The Work of Film
in the Age of Video (Durham: Duke University Press,
1999); Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino,
‘‘Towards a Third Cinema,’’ Afterimage 3 (1971):
1635; and Amos Vogel, Film as Subversive Art
(New York: Random House, 1976).
Such as, Sam Gregory et al., eds. Video for Change:
A Guide for Advocacy and Activism (London: Pluto
Press, 2005); Anna Grimshaw and Amanda Ravetz,
Observational Cinema: Anthropology, Film, and the
Exploration of Social Life (Bloomington, IN: Indiana
University Press, 2009); Meg McLagan and Yates
McKee, eds. Sensible Politics: The Visual Culture of
Nongovernmental Activism, 1st ed. (New York: Zone
Books, 2012); and Sarah Pink, Doing Visual Ethnography: Images, Media and Representation in Research,
2nd ed. (London: Sage, 2007).
Lina Khatib, Image Politics in the Middle East: The
Role of the Visual in Political Struggle (London: I. B.
Tauris, 2012).
Reem Saad, ‘‘Shame, Reputation and Egypt’s
Lovers: A Controversy over the Nation’s Image,’’
Visual Anthropology 10, no. 24 (1998): 40112.
Asef Bayat, Life as Politics: How Ordinary People
Change the Middle East, 2nd ed. (Stanford, CA:
Stanford University Press, 2013).
Diane Singerman and Paul Amar, ‘‘Introduction:
Contesting Myths, Critiquing Cosmopolitanism,
and Creating the New Cairo School of Urban
Studies,’’ in Cairo Cosmopolitan: Politics, Culture,
and Urban Space in the New Globalized Middle East,
ed. Diane Singerman and Paul Amar (Cairo: The
American University in Cairo Press, 2006), 212.
David MacDougall, ‘‘Whose Story Is It?,’’ in Visualizing
Theory: Selected Essays from V.A.R., 19901994, ed.
Lucien Taylor (New York: Routledge, 1994), 35.
This endeavor started as a pilot project in Spring
2012 as I began to experiment with ways to engage
the situation in Cairo with the toolkit of a visual
anthropologist. I had approached three of my best
undergraduate students (Mariam Abou Ghazi, Nada
El-Kouny, and Sarah Hawas) about conducting
short interviews with people on the streets of Cairo
in order to ascertain how people would personally
express themselves within the context of a heavy
political backdrop. Based on the initial success of this
pilot, I formalized this project in fall 2012 in an MA
seminar on Visual Anthropology, taught to 15 MA
students (In addition to Mariam and Nada from the
pilot project, Brice Woodcock, Claire Forster, Dalia
Ibrahim, Dana Alawneh, Derek Ludovici, Ewelina
Trzpis, Manar Hazzaa, Mariz Kelada, Marwa Abed
El Fattah, Nadia Dropkin, Noha Khattab, Nouran
El-Hawary, and Omnia Khalil). The students
formed seven groups of *two to three students and
19.
20.
21.
22.
23.
24.
25.
26.
27.
28.
29.
30.
31.
32.
33.
34.
35.
36.
37.
38.
39.
40.
all but one included a native Arabic speaker. Collectively, they recorded over 5 hours of footage. During
our final course meeting, I hosted a screening of
sections of from all of these projects that generated a
lively discussion. After the screening, the students
submitted Reflection Essays about the project, which
I draw heavily upon here.
Dalia, Reflection Paper, December 2012.
When preparing to do this project in my MA
seminar, the mood had significantly shifted from
the spring pilot project. And when we started
filming interviews in late November 2012 at the
time of the anniversary of the Mohamed Mahmoud
Street clashes, political violence again escalated on
the street and this was followed by protests at the
presidential palace opposing President Mohamed
Morsi’s constitutional declarations. These events
heavily impacted the mood of both my students and
most of the interviewees.
Derek, Reflection Paper, December 2012.
Dalia, Reflection Paper, December 2012.
Although not elaborated here, another critique
suggested that modeling the project on Jean Rouch
and Edgar Morin’s experiment imposes a colonial
framework that undermines its credibility. Furthermore, as a course assignment designed by an
American academic, there is an unavoidable dimension of pedagogical imposition. These tensions
notwithstanding, many of the students have offered
unsolicited endorsements of the project, often noting its participatory and collaborative dimensions.
Sam Diiorio, ‘‘The Truth About Paris,’’ Film
Comment 39, no. 3 (May 2003): 46.
Ibid., 40.
Lori A. Allen, ‘‘Martyr Bodies in the Media:
Human Rights, Aesthetics, and the Politics of
Immediation in the Palestinian Intifada,’’ American
Ethnologist 36, no. 1 (February 2009): 16180.
Niloofar Haeri, Sacred Language, Ordinary People
(New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 35.
Dalia, Reflection Paper, December 2012.
Nada dinner discussion, May 2013.
Noha personal communication, November 2013.
Nada dinner discussion, May 2013.
Peter Snowdon, ‘‘‘Film!’: The Arab Spring and the
Filmmaker as Amanuensis’’ (Visible Evidence 15
18 August 2013 Conference, Stockholm, 2013).
David MacDougall, The Corporeal Image: Film,
Ethnography, and the Senses (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 2005).
Dalia, Reflection Paper, December 2012.
Mariz dinner discussion, May 2013.
Dalia, Reflection Paper, December 2012.
Mariz dinner discussion, May 2013.
Noha dinner discussion, May 2013.
Scott McQuire, Visions of Modernity: Representation,
Memory, Time and Space in the Age of the Camera
(London?: Sage, 1997).
Snowdon, ‘‘The Revolution Will Be Uploaded.’’
Mish mabsoota
41.
42.
43.
Anna Grimshaw and Amanda Ravetz, Observational
Cinema: Anthropology, Film, and the Exploration of
Social Life (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University
Press, 2009).
Jane M. Gaines, ‘‘Political Mimesis,’’ in Collecting
Visible Evidence, eds. Jane M. Gaines and Michael
Renov (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota
Press, 1999), 84102; and Maple John Razsa,
‘‘Beyond ‘Riot Porn’: Protest Video and the Production of Unruly Subjects,’’ Ethnos 79 (April 8,
2013): 496524.
At the end of the course, several of the students
expressed interest in continuing the project and
perhaps producing a film from the interviews. While
some students planned to conduct more interviews,
the cumbersome challenges of the political context
and the general demands of personal obligations
disrupted the flow of our project. I did manage to
record a dinner discussion with some of the students
modeled on the discussions in Chronique d’un été, in
May 2013, but then I depart from Egypt in the
summer of 2013 and could not actively facilitate
participation. After revisiting several of the students
in November 2013, I decided a new tactic was
needed. During another visit in April 2014, I
conducted these follow-up, ‘‘blue screen’’ interviews
44.
with six of the students and in August Claire Forster
(one of the students) conducted an interview with
another student. I am presently compiling all this
footage into a stand-alone project.
I’d like to acknowledge a variety of people who
contributed to this project in either large or small
measures. First, Mariam Abou Ghazi, Nada ElKouny, and Sarah Hawas who agreed to pilot this
project and who proved that the idea was viable.
Among the students in the course, Claire Forster
deserves special thanks for remaining dedicated to
the project and working to continue it in my
absence. Dalia Ibrahim, Mariz Kelada, Noha
Khattab, Omnia Khalil, Manar Hazzaa, and Nouran
El-Hawary also supported the project after the
semester ended. Philip Rizk participated in various
aspects of the project, giving both material support
and critical feedback. During the various iterations
of this project in seminars and conferences, I received a great deal of encouragement and feedback.
I would like to particularly recognize Karin Becker,
Malin Wahlberg, Kari Anden-Papadopoulos,
Alisa Lebow, Paula Uimonen, Paul Frosh, Maria
Malmström, Hanan Sabea, Helen Rizzo, Kristina
Riegert, Dan Gilman, and Diana Allan.
11