Connected in Cairo Growing up Cosmopolitan in the Modern Middle East [Paperback]

For members of Cairos upper classes, cosmopolitanism is a form of social capital, deployed whenever they acquire or consume transnational commodities, or goods that are linked in the popular imagination to other, more modern places. In a series of thickly described and carefully contextualized case studiesof Arabic childrens magazines, Pok?mon, private schools and popular films, coffee shops and fast-food restaurantsMark Allen Peterson describes the social practices that create class identities. He traces these processes from childhood into adulthood, examining how taste and style intersect with a changing educational system and economic liberalization. Peterson reveals how uneasy many cosmopolitan Cairenes are with their new global identities, and describes their efforts to root themselves in the local through religious, nationalist, or linguistic practices.

Mark Allen Peterson is Associate Professor of Anthropology and International Studies at Miami University. He is author of Anthropology and Mass Communication: Media and Myth in the New Millennium and co-author of International Studies: An Interdisciplinary Approach to Global Issues.

A beautifully nuanced account of the interpenetrations of global and local media practices, other consumption practices, and the people for whom they are relevant. . . . A model for the use of ethnographic work for understanding how and why media practices have the impact they do on the lives of their consumers, producers and critics. It is a very smart and sophisticated book.Overall, this book makes an important contribution to the growing literature on affluent class formations in the region and their particular role as mediators of both the discourses and the material circulation characteristic of globalization. It also brings a fresh perspectiveto discussions of mass media in the Middle East.Connected in Cairo provides an accessible and instructive reading of the everyday construction and negotiation of what isl“I