Manhood Is Not Easy

Egyptian Masculinities through the Life of Musician Sayyid Henkish

Karin van Nieuwkerk

• Publisher: The American University in Cairo Press
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9789774168895
• eBook ISBN: 9781617979507
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Science Biographies
• Index: Social Sciences

In this in-depth ethnography, Karin van Nieuwkerk takes the autobiographical narrative of Sayyid Henkish, a musician from a long family tradition of wedding performers in Cairo, as a lens through which to explore changing notions of masculinity in an Egyptian community over the course of a single lifetime. Central to Henkish's story is his own conception of manhood, which is closely tied to the notion of ibn al-balad, the 'authentically Egyptian' lower-middle class male, with all its associated values of nobility, integrity, and toughness. How to embody these communal ideals while providing for his family in the face of economic hardship and the perceived moral ambiguities associated with his work in the entertainment trade are key themes in his narrative. Van Nieuwkerk situates his account within a growing body of literature on gender that sees masculinity as a lived experience that is constructed and embodied in specific social and historical contexts. In doing so, she shows that the challenges faced by Henkish are not limited to the world of entertainment and that his story offers profound insights into socioeconomic and political changes taking place in Egypt at large and the ways in which these transformations impact and unsettle received notions of masculinity.

Part 1
THEORETICAL REFLECTIONS

1	On Bio-ethnography

If you want to know me, then you must know my story, for my story defines who I am. And if I want to know myself, to gain insight into the meaning of my own life, then I too must come to know my own story . . . a story I continue to revise, and tell myself (and sometimes to others) as I go on living. We are all tellers of tales. We seek to provide our scattered and often confusing experiences with a sense of coherence by arranging the episodes of our lives into stories (McAdams ١٩٩٣, ١١).

Collecting life stories is one of the oldest research methods in the social sciences. Yet, the last three decades have seen an expansion of biographical methods, a development also captured in the phrase the “biographical turn” (Goodwin 2012). Other scholars characterize the twenty-first century as an “auto/biographical society,” in which life stories are present everywhere, including in the new media (Plummer 2012a, 38). In anthropology and ethnography, life stories have a long history in acting as a method of grasping the life worlds of “others,” although recently the focus has shifted to self-inscription of the ethnographer in the anthropological texts (Reed-Danahay 2012). Life stories offer an important avenue to reflect on “others” and “self,” and their relationships to culture and history.

Life stories enable a rich documentation of personal experience, ideology, and subjectivity. Yet they also make possible the documentation of social structures and institutions of power (Connell 1995, 89). The biographical perspective allows the researcher to grasp the effects of historical events on the course of life and straddles a middle road between accounting for social, cultural, and historical structures on the one hand and, on the other, for the way individual actors make sense of and deal with ensuing opportunities and constraints in daily life (Miller 2012). Or, in the words of Plummer (2012b, 1), life stories “bridge cultural history with personal biography;” they are also “moral constructions, tales of virtue and non-virtue, which may act to guide us in our ethical lives.” Paraphrasing the title of McAdams’ book, Plummer continues that the life stories “we construct of our lives may well become the ‘stories we live by’” (2012b, 1). What really matters to people is fashioned into a narrative that keeps on being told in their life stories. For that reason, life stories are a crucial tool for ethnographic research.

The possibility of ‘reading cultures’ (Plummer 2012b, 10) by telling and listening to, writing and reading, a life story is precisely what this book aims to achieve. Sayyid’s story is both a way for Sayyid to make sense of his life, its opportunities and constraints within a certain time and place, and a glimpse for us into the socio-cultural and moral world from which the telling emerges. His story is embedded in historical developments and communal values while at the same time showing his unique way of dealing with and being part of the changing socio-political context in which he tries to embody and live his ethical tale.

Life Story ApproacheThe narratives are thus multilayereds and Genres

Life history is a well-established genre within the historical disciplines. The tradition of biographies of “great men,” has long been replaced by interest in oral history dedicated to “ordinary lives,” stories from the margins and from those who are neglected, silenced, and subordinated or “deviant.” Particularly the intersection of macro and micro history—instead of perceiving it as an opposition—and researching social change by a biographical focus have been productive fields for historians (Ginzburg 1991; Mintz 1982; McLeod and Thomson 2012; Plummer 2012a). The dual focus on history—that is, how time is lived in the life story as well as how historical times play out in shaping the life (Plummer 2001, 39)—makes the life story an important tool for historians.

The biographical approach has also been widely used in sociology, particularly within the study of deviance (Miller 2012). Sociologists like Denzin and Plummer are prolific writers probing into a broad use and application of (interpretive) biography (Denzin 1989, 2012, 2014; Plummer 2001, 2012a, 2012b). In the interpretive biographical method, the emphasis is put on “self, biography, history and experience” in which “process and structure must be blended with lived experience” (Denzin 2012, 6). The researcher is encouraged to collect in-depth personal histories since a person can tell multiple stories about his or her life. Not only do individual lives contain multiple narratives, no personal story will contain all the stories that could be narrated. For that reason, it is advised to combine the personal story with self-stories of other individuals located in the field of research.

In my previous research, in which Sayyid was crucial but not focal, I combined the historians’ concern for intersecting scales of micro and macro developments as played out in the artists’ community—a group that shares elements of secrecy and marginality with other “deviant” groups—with the sociologists’ concern for triangulation. I collected oral histories of Sayyid’s colleagues to trace the developments of the entertainment trade. I will take this background along in writing this book without going back to their stories in detail. They will be approached through Sayyid’s narratives on his colleagues and the changes they have witnessed together in “the trade.” The previous stories were what Plummer (2001, 20–24) calls short life stories, whereas the present narrative is a long life story told over many recorded sessions and many years of sharing experiences. Having previously taken short life stories of Sayyid’s colleagues—mostly women—I have a profound background of the intricacies of “the trade,” and I will also be able to point out the gendered difference in how stories about it are told.

Sociologists, such as Denzin and Plummer, as well as many anthropologists (Clifford and Marcus 1986; Rabinow 1977; Reed-Danahay 2012; Herzfeld 1997; Caplan 1997) have refocused the interest in biographical methods to the representational powers in writing the other’s story. The trend toward “reflexivity” in anthropology is influenced most of all by postmodern and feminist critiques on the power relations inherent in ethnographic accounts. Reflexivity led to heightened awareness of how knowledge is actually construed within the dialectic encounter between the self and the other. This, however, sits in a tense relationship with the realization that not only does the researcher represent the other, but this representation is also intimately influenced by the anthropologist’s own positioning. Combined with a postmodern skepticism toward general “knowledge claims” and “grand narratives,” the focus was turned inward to the role of anthropologists within their own writing on others (Anderson 2012; Miller 2012; Schielke and Debevec 2012).

With the spread of postmodern thought, distinctions between “author and subject, autobiography and biography, fiction and fact become more and more blurred” (Plummer 2012a). This led to the genre of the auto-ethnography, in which the ethnographer is inside the text in an autobiographical way (Denzin 1989; Reed-Danahay 1997, 2012). Or, in Denzin’s words: “all ethnographers reflexively (or unreflexively) write themselves into their ethnographies. The ethnographer’s writing self cannot not be present . . .” (٢٠١٤, ٢٦). Although the “reflexive turn” is immensely important within anthropology, the auto-genre has also been criticized as “self-absorbed” or, following Geertz, “author saturated” (Anderson ٢٠٠٦, ٣٦٧). The anthropologist’s exposure of self should be relevant and not for its own sake, lest the reflexivity lead to losing sight of the interlocutors in the study. It might—unintentionally—shift the balance of power to the anthropologist as author, whereas its original aim was to restore the balance toward the teller.

Nevertheless, the reflexive turn has had a lasting impact. The need to reflect on the research context, dialogic interaction, positioning of researchers and interlocutors, research ethics, and power relations has become essential to all anthropologists. Whether this requirement foregrounds the researcher or not depends on the aim and topic of the study. Although the present book is not meant as an auto-ethnography, I—as an ethnographer or anthropologist—will be present in several ways. Not only did I initiate the project and translate and edit Sayyid’s story, I am also a (small) part of that story due to our long friendship and collaboration, on which Sayyid occasionally reflects in his narration. I will also add several sections providing background information on the trade and the popular artists’ community to provide insight to the socio-cultural context of Sayyid’s narration. Yet Sayyid’s life story will be central.

I have not chosen a dialogical style simply because it was principally a monologue from Sayyid on his life and experiences. The sessions followed a certain ritual. Usually we sat together in the morning on the purple chairs in front of his shop (see figure 2). I always found him waiting for me there with the newspaper and the shisha at hand. We usually chatted a bit about what I had done since the last time I saw him, his latest news—usually business- and family-related issues—and particularly politics, as it was a period of unrest in Egypt. After ordering tea and preparing his shisha, he gave a sign that the recorder could be switched on. His power of concentration usually flagged after an hour, after which we sat and chatted for a while.

Although I occasionally interrupted him with questions and points for clarification, he made it clear that he was going to tell the story his way and would come to my queries in due course. Before and after the sessions and during the final session I could raise questions about outstanding issues or missing plots in the story. Yet it was mostly one concentrated story line per session, usually ending with a preview for the story he would tell next time. Accordingly, to convey the sense of his style of narrating, an unbroken story line is most fitting.

Quite often, however, his story was interrupted by the events going on in the street in front of us: our shoes were cleaned, a row had to be settled, a neighbor’s death was announced, tomatoes or bananas were bought or a drum was sold, and his many friends and acquaintances had to be greeted and kissed on the cheeks. This vivid street life was a small ethnography in itself. Also, Sayyid’s mood before and during the telling was sometimes influenced by his daily sorrows, family affairs, and lack of clientele for the small music shop, issues he raised before switching on the recorder. I will try to convey some of the flavor and the small talk before and after the recordings in the introductory paragraph to each section.

I have chosen to call it a bio-ethnography for several reasons. The ethnography part of the description is meant to convey the sense that his story is a way of “reading cultures” about the trade, about manhood, and about a specific way of living in popular neighborhoods like Muhammad ‘Ali Street. The ethnographical aspects of Sayyid’s story line are abundant for various reasons. In a way, this book is a follow-up of my ethnography “A Trade Like Any Other,” in which Sayyid was my “key informant.” Our common history in researching the trade made this a natural theme in our conversation. On the one hand, this occasionally meant that he did not explain every detail, knowing that I knew and had observed these things; on the other hand, this shared interest also imprinted my interpretation of Sayyid’s story line perhaps more than would have been the case for another listener. During my stay, a group of American dancers came to Sayyid’s shop to hear his stories about the olden days. They had come to his shop because of my book, and I saw that Sayyid was well-versed in telling stories about past traditions in the trade. In a way, Sayyid had become an ethnographer in his own right.

Because this is a biographical project, the term bio might seem obvious. However, I have come across other possible terms, such as life story, life history, oral history, self-story, personal story, and auto-ethnography. The latter might have worked well since, from Sayyid’s perspective, it is an autobiography. With the conventional distinction in mind between biography as an account about someone else—a life produced by another person—and autobiography as a first-person account—a life produced by one’s self, Sayyid’s story would for the larger part belong to the latter genre. That would have made “auto-ethnography” a suitable term. Yet auto-ethnography has come to denote the specific genre that focuses on the reflexive visibility of the anthropologists rather than the interlocutors, in particular as members of the social world under study (Anderson 2006; Denzin 2014; Reed-Danahay 1997). For that reason, I do not consider it an appropriate description of this book.

Yet, as Liz Stanley (2012) points out, due to the blurring of genres and the reflexive turn, the division between autobiography and biography is less clearly demarcated. Not only do autobiographies often contain biographies of other people, as is certainly the case in Sayyid’s story, the genres also overlap in their recognition that the knowledge is situational and contextually produced in relation to the social location and interaction between those involved in its production. So, I perceive this project as an ethnographic biography (Herzfeld 1997) narrated mostly as a first-person account by Sayyid, while I take ample space to explain the context of his narrative.

Narrative Performance of Communal Moral Tales

Narratives are versions of multiple potential stories, told in a specific context. For that reason, they can be conceived as “socially performative” in nature (Stanley 2012, 51). The study of narrative enables us to investigate both a world view and the way the story is structured and produced. Through the self-sto...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Introduction
• Part 1
• Part 2
• Part 3
• Part 4
• Part 5
• Part 6
• Final Thoughts
• Sayyid‘s Final Reflections
• Notes
• Glossary
• Bibliography