Author's note: An earlier version of this paper was presented at the Middle East Studies Association annual meeting, Los Angeles, November 1988. I am grateful to Lila Abu-Lughod, Nathan Brown, Terry Burke, Robert Fernea, Fred Lawson, David Ludden, Susan Slyomovics, Stefan Tanaka, Peter von Sivers, and the anonymous IJMES reviewers for their comments. None of them are responsible for the views expressed here.

¹ George, Foster, Foreword to Richard Critchfield, Shahhat: An Egyptian (Syracuse, 1978), p. ix, emphasis added.Google Scholar

² Vivian, Gornick, “Metaphor for Egypt,” New York Times Book Review, 01. 14, 1979, p. 12.Google Scholar

³ Pierre, Gourou, Les paysans du delta tonkinois: Etude de géographie humaine (Paris, 1936), p. 577;Google Scholar English translation, The Peasants of the Tonkin Delta: A Study of Human Geography, vol. I of 2 (New Haven, 1955), p. 664.Google Scholar

⁴ Henry, Habib Ayrout, Moeurs et coutumes des fellahs (Collection d'études, de documents et de témoignages pour servir à l'histoire de notre temps) (Paris, 1938; reprint ed. New York, 1978), pp. i, 12.Google Scholar In the United States in the same period, Robert, Redfield'sTepoztlán, A Mexican Village: A Study of Folk Life (Chicago, 1930) marked a shift in interest among anthropologists from “primitive” to “folk,” or later “peasant,” societies. The shift was a reaction to the 1919–1920 Mexican revolution, which had its origins in the resistance of Indian villages to the colonization of their land by Mexican sugar estates.Google Scholar

⁵ Cf., James C. Scott, The Moral Economy of the Peasant: Rebellion and Subsistence in Southeast Asia (New Haven, 1976);Google ScholarSamuel, Popkin, The Rational Peasant: The Political Economy of Rural Society in Vietnam (Berkeley, Calif., 1979).Google Scholar

⁶ The major editions of Ayrout's work are: Henry, Habib Ayrout, Moeurs et coutumes des fellahs (Paris, 1938; reprint ed. New York, 1978);Google Scholar 2nd revised ed., entitled Fellahs (Cairo, 1942); Arabic, ed., al-Fallāhūn, trans. Muhammad, Ghallāb (Cairo, 1943, 8th Arabic, ed. 1968);Google ScholarEnglish, ed., The Fellaheen, trans. Hilary, Wayment (Cairo, 1945);Google Scholar U.S. ed., The Egyptian Peasant, trans. John, Alden Williams (Boston, 1963).Google Scholar The Russian translation is mentioned in Ayrout, , al-Fallāhūn (1968), p. 7. I have mostly quoted from the Wayment translation of 1945, as this is the version used by Critchfield.Google Scholar

⁷ Bowles was removed from the State Department in November 1961 and made Special Representative of the President for African, Asian, and Latin American Affairs. He visited Cairo and met with President Nasser in February 1962. William, J. Burns, Economic Aid and American Policy Towards Egypt, 1955–1981 (Albany, N.Y., 1985), pp. 131, 249.Google Scholar

⁸ Ayrout, , Egyptian Peasant, p. xvi.Google Scholar

⁹ Ibid., pp. v-vi.

¹⁰ Richard, Critchfield, Villages (Garden City, N.Y., 1981, reprint ed., 1983), p. 64.Google Scholar

¹¹ Richard, Critchfield, The Long Charade: Political Subversion in the Vietnam War (New York, 1968), p. 208.Google Scholar

¹² Critchfield, , Villages, p. 66. The bulk of the short chapter on Vietnam in this book is repeated from The Long Charade, but quotations from the British military advisers in the first book are repeated in the second without quotation marks, as Critchfield's own views.Google Scholar

¹³ Mohamed, Heikel, Autumn of Fury: The Assassination of Sadat (New York, 1983), pp. 8–10.Google Scholar

¹⁴ See John, Waterbury, The Egypt of Nasser and Sadat: The Political Economy of Two Regimes (Princeton, 1983), p. 261.Google Scholar

¹⁵ Robert, Fernea, Review of Richard Critchfield, Shahhat: An Egyptian, Middle East Journal, 33/4 (1979), pp. 506–7.Google Scholar

¹⁶ Critchfield, , Shahhat, pp. xiii–xiv.Google Scholar

¹⁷ Fred, H. Lawson, “Rural Revolt and Provincial Society in Egypt, 1820–1824,” International Journal of Middle East Studies, 13 (1981), p. 146.Google Scholar

¹⁸ John, J. A. St, Egypt and Nubia, Their Scenery and Their People (London, 1845), pp. 378–86; Lawson, “Rural Revolt.”Google Scholar

¹⁹ Critchfield, , Shahhat, p. xxv.Google Scholar

²⁰ Ibid., p. 4.

²¹ Ibid., p. xv.

²² Ibid., p. III.

²³ Ibid., p. 195.

²⁴ Ibid., p. 101.

²⁵ Ibid., p. 138. Critchfield seems to be well aware of the effects of this kind of imagery. One of his earlier studies of peasants is an account of a group of Arabic-speaking pastoral nomads in southwestern Iran, written during the regime of the Shah and told through the life of an individual named Ya⊂qub, which Critchfield spells as Jacob. In his preface to the book's second edition (published by Indiana University Press in 1988), he explains that “I spelled Jacob the Biblical way to underscore its old testament quality”—for in those days “nobody mentioned Ayatollah Khomeini,… and Islam, though a total way of life for Bedouins, seemed relatively benign.” The Golden Bowl Be Broken: Peasant Life in Four Cultures, 2nd ed. (Bloomington, Ind., 1988), p. ix.

²⁶ Cf, Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt (Cambridge, England, 1988), pp. 21–32.Google Scholar

²⁷ Critchfield, , Shahhat, p. xiii.Google Scholar This is Critchfield's only acknowledgment of his debt to Ayrout, from whom the passage is lifted almost verbatim: “Under foreign domination for years and centuries at a time, by Persians, Greeks, Romans, Byzantines, Arabs, Turks, French and English,” wrote Ayrout, , “the fellaheen have changed their masters, their religion, their language and their crops, but not their manner of life” (The Fellaheen, p. 19).Google Scholar

²⁸ Ayrout, , The Fellaheen, p. 106.Google Scholar

²⁹ Critchfield, , Shahhat, p. 89.Google Scholar

³⁰ Ayrout, , The Fellaheen, p. 132.Google Scholar

³¹ Critchfield, Shahhat, p. xvi.Google Scholar

³² Ayrout, , The Fellaheen, p. 20.Google Scholar

³³ Ayrout, , The Egyptian Peasant, p. 13.Google Scholar

³⁴ Cf., Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, pp. 122–25.Google Scholar

³⁵ Gustave, Le Bon, Les lois psychologiques de l'évolution des peuples, translated into English as The Psychology of Peoples (New York, 1898), pp. 4–5, 13, 199–200.Google Scholar

³⁶ Gordon, Allport, Handbook of Social Psychology, ed. Gardner, Lindzey and Elliot, Aronson, 2nd ed. (Reading, Mass., 1968), 1:41.Google Scholar

³⁷ Gustave, Le Bon, Psychologie des foules, translated into English as The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind (New York, 1896), p. 36.Google Scholar

³⁸ Ayrout, , The Fellaheen, p. 94.Google Scholar

³⁹ Ibid., p. 134.

⁴⁰ Ibid., p. 116.

⁴¹ Ibid., p. 100.

⁴² Ibid., p. 116.

⁴³ Ibid., p. 125.

⁴⁴ Ibid., p. 95.

⁴⁵ Ibid., p. 33.

⁴⁶ Ibid., p. 110.

⁴⁷ Ibid., p. 132–38.

⁴⁸ Ibid., p. 132.

⁴⁹ Ibid., p. 154.

⁵⁰ Ibid., p. 15.

⁵¹ Ayrout, , Moeurs et coutumes, p. 132.Google Scholar

⁵² The peasant, Ayrout explained, “being of a childlike disposition, cannot be presented a model house without being taught, in a kindly way, the ‘directions’ which go with it… This pedagogy is more important than the material realization” ( The Egyptian Peasant, p. 130). For a discussion of this relationship between effects of structure, individuality, and pedagogy in colonial practice, see Mitchell, , Colonising Egypt, pp. 44–48, 92–94.Google Scholar

⁵³ Ayrout, , The Egyptian Peasant, pp. 19–20, 151.Google Scholar

⁵⁴ There was also an active debate on these issues in the press. In al-Ahrām on 02 17, 18, 19, 1937, for example, Bint al-Shāti⊃ ⊂Ā⊃isha ⊂Abd al-Rahmān), the author of al-Rīf al-Misrī (Rural Egypt) (Cairo, 1935) described the evils of the cotton processing industry, explaining how 25,000 children aged 8–15 were employed that year loading and unloading the ginning machines in cotton ginning and pressing factories, working amid stifling dust from 5 A.M. to 9 P.M. each day without a break (Ayrout, , The Fellaheen, p. 63).Google Scholar

⁵⁵ Ayrout, , The Fellaheen, pp. 158–59.Google Scholar

⁵⁶ Ibid., p. 23.

⁵⁷ The quotations in this paragraph all come from the back cover of the paperback edition of the book.

⁵⁸ Ayrout, , al-Fallāhūn (1968), p. 7.Google Scholar

⁵⁹ Ayrout, , The Fellaheen, pp. 41–42.Google Scholar

⁶⁰ Ayrout, , The Egyptian Peasant, p. 18, emphasis added;Google Scholarcf., Gabriel Baer, “Submissiveness and the Revolt of the Fellah,” in Studies in the Social History of Modern Egypt (Chicago, 1969), p. 102.Google Scholar

⁶¹ Ayrout, , The Fellaheen, p. 104.Google Scholar

⁶² Critchfield, , Shahhat, p. 86.Google Scholar

⁶³ Ayrout, , The Fellaheen, p. 106.Google Scholar

⁶⁴ Critchfield, , Shahhat, pp. 86–87.Google Scholar

⁶⁵ Ayrout, , The Fellaheen, pp. 79–80.Google Scholar

⁶⁶ Critchfield, , Shahhat, p.5.Google Scholar

⁶⁷ Ibid., p. 63.

⁶⁸ Ibid., p. 59.

⁶⁹ Ibid., p. 15.

⁷⁰ Ibid., p. 51.

⁷¹ Ibid., p. 35.

⁷² Ibid., p. 20.

⁷³ Ibid., p. 55.

⁷⁴ Ibid., p. 12.

⁷⁵ Ibid., p. 74.

⁷⁶ Ibid., p. 35.

⁷⁷ Ibid., p. 41–42.

⁷⁸ Ibid., p. 44.

⁷⁹ Ibid., p. 50.

⁸⁰ Ibid., p. 60.

⁸¹ Ibid., p. 101.

⁸² Ibid., p. 147–48.

⁸³ Ayrout, , The Fellaheen, p. 30.Google Scholar

⁸⁴ Ibid., p. 133–34.

⁸⁵ Critchfield, , Shahhat, p. 38.Google Scholar

⁸⁶ Ayrout, , The Fellaheen, p. 119.Google Scholar

⁸⁷ Critchfield, , Shahhat, pp. 29–30.Google Scholar

⁸⁸ Ibid., p. xv.

⁸⁹ Ibid., p. 9.

⁹⁰ Ibid., p. 17.

⁹¹ Ibid., p. 16.

⁹² Ibid., p. 78–79. The book's tone is persistently misogynist; another rape victim is shown in a photograph, smiling at the camera, with a caption that describes her as a “willful, flirtatious fourteen- year-old” (Ibid., p. 103).

⁹³ Ibid., p. x.

⁹⁴ Ibid., p. 139.

⁹⁵ Ibid., p. 100.

⁹⁶ Ayrout, , The Fellaheen, p. 107.Google Scholar

⁹⁷ Critchfield, , Shahhat, p. 162.Google Scholar

⁹⁸ Ayrout, , The Fellaheen, p. 109.Google Scholar

⁹⁹ Critchfield, , Shahhat, p. 89.Google Scholar

¹⁰⁰ Ayrout, , The Fellaheen, pp. 109–10.Google Scholar

¹⁰¹ Critchfield, , Shahhat, p. 89.Google Scholar

¹⁰² When the villagers have had enough of all the violence, there remains the possibility of kayf, “a word of profound significance” according to Ayrout. He says it denotes “a kind of wakeful passivity which means doing nothing, saying nothing, thinking nothing” ( The Fellaheen, p. 136). Critchfield explains that “in Egypt there is a mental state called kaif when a man does nothing, says nothing, and thinks nothing. It is a kind of wakeful passivity” ( Shahhat, p. 183).

¹⁰³ Critchfield, , Shahhat, pp. 227–31.Google Scholar

¹⁰⁴ Ibid., p. xiv.

¹⁰⁵ Ibid., p. 233.

¹⁰⁶ Ibid., p. 231–32.

¹⁰⁷ Cf., Edward Said, Orientalism (New York, 1978), pp. 160–64;Google ScholarMitchell, , Colonising Egypt, pp. 26–27.Google Scholar

¹⁰⁸ Critchfield, , Shahhat, pp. 230–32.Google Scholar

¹⁰⁹ Ibid., p. 107.

¹¹⁰ Ibid., p. 227.

¹¹¹ Ibid., p. xiv.

¹¹² Ibid., p. 30.

¹¹³ Ibid., p. 19.

¹¹⁴ Terry Burke, personal communication. The village has two primary schools and one intermediary school, and has also produced two local judges and a medical doctor.

¹¹⁵ Critchfield, , Shahhat, p. xviii.Google Scholar

¹¹⁶ Ibid., p. 107.

¹¹⁷ Ibid., p. 228, 108.

¹¹⁸ Ibid., p. xii.

¹¹⁹ See in this respect Rosalind O'Hanlon's critique of pitfalls of the Subaltern Studies project on the history of subordinate groups in colonial South Asia, “Recovering the Subject: Subaltern Studies and Histories of Resistance in Colonial South Asia,” Modern Asian Studies, 22, 1 (1988), pp. 189–224.Google Scholar

¹²⁰ lscan, M. Yasar, Review of Critchfield, Shahhat: An Egyptian, American Anthropologist, 82 (1980), p. 961;Google ScholarSam, Beck, Review of Critchfield, Shahhat: An Egyptian, Journal of American Folklore, 93(1980), pp. 487–88;Google ScholarJohn, G. Kennedy, Review of Critchfield, Shahhat: An Egyptian, American Ethnologist, 7, 1(1980), pp. 220–21.Google Scholar

¹²¹ Critchfield, , Shahhat, p. xii.Google Scholar

¹²² Critchfield, , Villages, p. vii. Cf. n. 12.Google Scholar

¹²³ Critchfield, , Shahhat, pp. iv, vi.Google Scholar