Table Of ContentPreferred Citation: Armbrust, Walter, editor. Mass Mediations: New Approaches to Popular Culture in the
Middle East and Beyond. Berkeley: University of California Press, c2000 2000.
http://ark.cdlib.org/ark:/13030/ft8k4008kx/
Mass Mediations
New Approaches to Popular Culture in the Middle East and
Beyond
Walter Armbrust
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS
Berkeley · Los Angeles · London
© 2000 The Regents of the University of California
Preferred Citation: Armbrust, Walter, editor. Mass Mediations: New Approaches to Popular Culture in the
Middle East and Beyond. Berkeley: University of California Press, c2000 2000.
http://ark.cdlib.org/ark:/13030/ft8k4008kx/
Preface
Mass Mediations examines popular culture broadly, in terms of economics, politics,
conventions of taste and aesthetics, and performance. The “popular” is an integral part of a
wide cultural spectrum, not a set of practices to be opposed to “elite” culture. High/low
distinctions such as those commonly made in the West are sometimes part of cultural
discourse in Middle Eastern societies, but they rarely operate in a strictly analogous fashion.
Our focus, therefore, is less on what popular culture is than on what it does in its mass-
mediated forms, namely, to create new scales of communication and, consequently, new
dimensions of modern identity.
A wide variety of media are considered, including recorded music (as well as live
performance), television, cinema, and print media ranging from mass-circulation weeklies to
postmodern novels. All the material examined here is underrepresented in scholarship on the
Middle East. This volume therefore helps to fill gaps in the regional literature. Growing
excitement over new communications technologies makes it easy to overlook the historical
depth of mass media in the Middle East. Consequently, we include several chapters that
analyze historical dimensions of mass-mediated culture. Of course, the very idea of a Middle
East is itself a political issue. We respond to this concern by addressing transnational
dimensions of Middle Eastern identities that challenge conventional assumptions about the
region and its relation to Western societies.
Relations between metropolitan societies and the colonized are an important part of
contemporary history. However, on many levels the unfolding of modernity in colonial and
postcolonial societies has scarcely been described or analyzed. The literature on Middle
Eastern popular culture is so impoverished partly because concerns about Western power and
Western representational practices have overwhelmed analyses of non-Western modernities
that can be understood in their own terms. The scale of social practice with which this book is
most concerned, therefore, is one at which important expressions of modernity occur for large
numbers of people but one which has thus far eluded extensive analysis.
Most of the chapters in this volume initially took shape at two conferences in 1995, the
American Anthropological Association (AAA) meeting and the Middle East Studies
Association (MESA) meeting, both in Washington, D.C. The AAA panels, titled “Expressive
Culture in the Middle East: Modernity, National Community, Transnational Contexts,” were
conceptualized by myself and Ted Swedenburg, and several of the papers benefited from
comments by Lila Abu-Lughod, who was discussant for half of the papers (I was discussant
for the other half). The papers for the MESA panel, titled “Public Culture in the Arab Middle
East II: Transnational Contexts,” received valuable comments from Joel Beinin. Several of
the papers were also presented at a symposium, “The Politics of Culture in Arab Societies,” at
Princeton University in spring 1996. The symposium took place as part of the program of the
Institute for the Transregional Study of the Middle East, North Africa, and Central Asia,
under the directorship of Abdellah Hammoudi. As the essays underwent their metamorphosis
from conference papers to book chapters they benefited from comments by Susan Ossman
and Gregory Starrett. We also thank University of California Press editor Lynne Withey for
her guidance and patience. Finally I wish to thank all the contributors to the volume for their
excellent contributions and for their patience. Roberta Dougherty played a crucial role in the
final round of copyediting and in preparing the index. Turning the papers into a book has been
a lengthier process than any of us foresaw, but in the end I hope all will agree that the whole
volume is greater than the sum of its parts.
Note on Transliteration
In Arabic transliterations long vowels and emphatic consonants are not differentiated in the
text from their closest English equivalents. The ayn and hamza are used. Some Egyptian and
Syrian colloquialisms have been used where the authors deem appropriate, or where correct
transliteration of a text (within the limits of the simplified transliteration system used in this
volume) demands it.
1. Introduction
Anxieties of Scale
Walter Armbrust
Mass Mediations examines the role of mass-mediated popular culture in defining the scale
and character of social interaction in the Middle East. Mass media are now as ubiquitous in
Karachi and Cairo as they are in Dearborn and Los Angeles. Few question their importance in
the contemporary process of constructing the boundaries of social identity. Although mass
media potentially raise as many questions as sociological ingenuity can devise, in this volume
we address primarily the larger, more inclusive issues that lend themselves to questions of
scale: modernity, nationalism, and globalization. Our goal is to examine these issues of
general relevance in ethnographic and historical detail. By examining a broad set of analytic
issues in fine-grained regionally oriented perspective, we hope to shed light on the complex
phenomenon of mass media without inevitably forcing the analysis into a common scale—
specifically, the global—or reducing the analysis of modernity to a tension between global
and local cultural forms. In particular, constructing the local so as to preclude consideration of
the nation-state as a viable framework for modern social action risks analytic distortion.
Together the chapters herein suggest that modernity need not be associated definitively with
either nationalism (as it often has been) or globalization (which is increasingly taken to signal
the irrelevance of the nation-state).
• • •
The Middle East
Our regional focus is the Middle East, which for the past two decades has been a lightning rod
for anxieties about the reality of conceptual boundaries. In the wake of Edward Said’s
Orientalism (1978) the very idea of a Middle East has come under suspicion. For some the
Middle East as a cultural entity is a prime example—perhaps the prime example—of how
European discourse created the definitively non-Western and thereby defined the Western by
distinguishing it from an opposite created by political and social convention. Area studies
programs are a postwar manifestation of this kind of logic, and consequently, in the wake of
Said’s critique, Middle East–oriented projects—and to a much lesser extent area studies in
general—are often frowned on. By adopting this particular regional perspective, we are not
trying to revive a much-criticized analytic framework. However, the Middle East, precisely
because of the passions and ambiguities it evokes, is an ideal forum for considering the role of
mass media in both creating and transcending the boundaries that define scales of social
action. A quick perusal of the volume’s contents shows that the area focus ranges from
Pakistan (Richard Murphy) to Dearborn (Andrew Shryock)—not the Middle East of cold war
era area studies—and that all the chapters make reference to relations that go beyond their
immediate environs. Framing the volume around such a disputed entity as the Middle East
helps to draw attention to the issues of scale, cultural conditions (modernity, or for some,
postmodernity), and contemporary history. This is all to the good; it is precisely the volume’s
purpose.
But in another sense one perhaps ought to question the ongoing deconstruction of this region.
There is an institutional politics of analytic scale that has to a great extent delegitimized the
Middle East as a regional analytic framework. This delegitimization is based on a false
presumption that in a larger academic context the area concept is dead—allegedly superseded
by more robust global comparative approaches, which are institutionally based in academic
disciplines or international studies centers rather than the old area studies framework. But, in
fact, the area concept is alive and well for some. In the past decade those who have written
about Latin America, Africa, or Asia have benefited from institutional investment that is
massive compared to investment in Middle East–oriented knowledge.[1] African, Asian, and
Latin American specialists can criticize the area studies framework now axiomatically
disparaged as the critique of Orientalism steadily hardens into orthodoxy. But they can do so
while enjoying a steady supply of area-specific jobs. Of course, academics who study the
Middle East would also like to be able to have their cake and eat it too—to acknowledge the
limits and insufficiencies of the area concept without having to participate in a rhetoric of
dissolving the institutional framework within which they work. In contemporary academia
one should be able to engage in both cross-regional comparison within a discipline and cross-
disciplinary comparison within an area studies framework. Disciplinary and regional
perspectives are by no means mutually exclusive.
Nonetheless, the past two decades have been increasingly marked by an anti–area studies
rhetoric, though it is often informal rhetoric and it has never been followed to its logical
conclusion on the institutional level. The critique of area studies occurred in the context of a
gradual crystallization of transregional analysis, now often conflated with “globalization.”
This happened in conjunction with a clear pattern of institutional shift toward identifiable area
specializations other than the Middle East. “Area studies” became a stick used to beat Middle
East specialists in particular. If connections between power and the production of knowledge
are truly a prominent academic concern, it would seem imperative to ask whether the recent
shift in institutional backing of area specialties was entirely due to intellectual priorities. What
role do interests shaped by national criteria play in the reshaping of academic institutions?
Surely a very substantial one. This is not to say that there is a neat correspondence between
national interest and institutional priorities. The point is that the politics of presence and
absence at the institutional level are closely tied to the politics of the nation-state. A growing
institutional interest in transnational phenomena is not necessarily even connected to scales of
interaction at the “global” level; it is quite clearly connected to interactions that affect the
United States. These interactions vary in character and intensity. What ties them all together is
the nation-state as an analytic and practical framework.
For example, one might speculate that commercial interest in Latin America and Asia—
currently areas of intense academic interest—is obvious. Latin American and Asian markets
and, increasingly, productive capacity are important to the economic future of the United
States. Although commercial interest need not be strictly national (and probably never was),
the congruence of national ethnic categories, commercial interest, and institutional response to
precisely these interests and categories does not suggest the imminent irrelevance of the
nation-state. American academic interest in Africa is more complex. African resources and
markets are clearly on the horizon of commercial interest, but the main impetus to increasing
interest in African studies is, in many cases, less the importance of Africa than the politics of
relations between African-Americans and the dominant population of European descent.
Whether increased attention to Africa stems from the efforts of African-Americans to put their
concerns on the intellectual agenda or from a growing appreciation for the commercial
potential of African markets, it would be deceptive to think of institutional attention to Africa
as the product of global or transregional forces to the exclusion of national considerations.
Of course, the United States has commercial interests in the Middle East as well. But from a
national policy perspective—regardless of any considerations of such issues as human rights
or sound economic development—U.S. Middle East policy could not be more successful than
it is now. The price of the oil so crucial to our consumption habits is at a historic low. Money
spent on oil is conveniently recycled into the metropolitan economy by cooperative Arab
states. The large and influential constituents of American society who see the Middle East
through the lens of Israeli politics[2] observe a continuing occupation of Palestinian territory
that goes virtually unchallenged on an international level. Both Iraq and Iran are preoccupied
with trying to break free of American-sponsored economic and political embargoes; both
states provide continuing pretexts for maintaining an American military presence in the
region. With the demise of the Soviet Union, American backing of Islamic insurgency
directed from the Pakistani frontier can be conveniently forgotten. In the Maghreb a
simmering Algerian civil war threatens no vital “American” resources, and thus the conflict,
for all practical purposes, does not exist in the American media. On the domestic front there is
no effective Arab-American or Muslim-American pressure to put any other Middle Eastern
issues into the political discourse.
One could plausibly argue that the Middle East absorbs the lion’s share of American foreign
policy attention. What is increasingly difficult to argue is the notion of a strong academic
institutional connection between imperial ambition and the exercise of power. Making the
power/knowledge nexus so crucial to Said’s Orientalism into a “seminal event” (Hajjar and
Niva 1997, 4) for Middle East specialists has been a Faustian bargain. If academic scrutiny of
the Middle East helps to construct the cultural basis for imperial domination, we should now
be witnessing a diminution of American interference in the region, and of course nothing
could be farther from the truth. Middle East particularism as an institutional construction is on
the wane (to the benefit of Asian, Latin American, and African particularisms). The withering
of academic interest in the Middle East has often been abetted by the field of Middle East
studies itself, a substantial portion of which embraced the idea that the very existence of a
discipline of Middle East studies in the United States was antithetical to the interests of those
living in the region.[3] That portion of the field has gotten its wish. But the result is that
precisely the “expertise” deemed dubious by left-leaning academics interested in the Middle
East has been privatized and removed from the scrutiny of academics. As institutional
commitment to the production of academic knowledge of the Middle East wanes, openly
partisan private foundations designed to influence Middle East policy flourish.[4] Universities
were the institutions most likely to hire individuals who questioned the political status quo
vis-à-vis the Middle East. As Irene Grendzier put it, “The mainstream [of Middle East
studies] has never been the only stream, nor the one in which the most creative, insightful and
urgent intellectual work is to be found. Generally speaking, however, those who have resisted
the canons of orthodoxy have not been the ones to shape the dominant motifs of research”
(1997, 11). A mainstream reduced to a trickle is even less likely to produce a critical mass of
scholars who oppose the canons of political orthodoxy.
Commercial interest, although not the only element structuring Middle East studies in the
United States, could still conceivably revive the fortunes of Middle East studies. But with
matters running so smoothly in the Middle East (from a purely cynical perspective of national
interest), there is little potential for intensification of U.S. commercial exploitation of the
region, hence little incentive for increased institutional investment in studying it. In Latin
America, Asia, and Africa, where prospects for intensification of commercial activity are far
greater, U.S. institutional investment is correspondingly higher. But whether or not local
knowledge is necessary to promote commercial or national interest depends on how interests
are defined. It is no coincidence that the one region of the world in which the United States
has recently gone to war is also an area of decreasing institutional importance in academia.
The Gulf War was first and foremost a conflict to defend national interests, whether or not
one agrees with the way those interests were defined.[5]
In the end we have nothing to gain from accepting globalization as the logical antithesis of
either a national or a regional focus. Even some of the prominent figures in globalization
discourse are less hostile to the area concept than many Middle East specialists who are
encouraged by contemporary institutional realities to steer clear of obvious manifestations of
area interest. For example, Arjun Appadurai, an early advocate of transnational approaches to
cultural studies, is well aware of the dangers of throwing the area studies baby out with the
post-Orientalist bathwater:
Left-wing critics of area studies, much influenced by the important work of Edward Said on
orientalism, have been joined by free-marketeers and advocates of liberalization, who are
impatient with what they deride as the narrowness and history fetish of area-studies
experts.…Bedeviled by a certain tendency toward philology (in the narrow, lexical sense) and
a certain overidentification with the regions of its specialization, area studies has nonetheless
been one of the few serious counterweights to the tireless tendency to marginalize huge parts
of the world in the American academy and in American society more generally. (1996, 16–
17)
The Middle East, a charter member of institutionalized area studies, and more recently the
scapegoat for those who oppose it, is now a serious candidate for marginalization. The Gulf
War and ongoing American threats of military action are not a product of dubious area
expertise but of general, willful, ignorance. Middle East exceptionalism truly is a danger, but
casting an area focus as a choice between a myopic outdated antimethodology and complete
surrender to globalization is no way to remedy the situation.
Mass Mediations therefore fills a general need for continuing a viable regional literature
situated in relation to more generalized intellectual and institutional concerns. The intellectual
agenda currently most prevalent points toward a global analytic framework thrown into relief
by various forms of interaction at more localized scales but explicitly not at the level of the
nation-state. This intellectual agenda, however, does not correspond to institutional priorities.
It is our own national framework—cultural, political, and economic—that dictates the
institutional presence or absence of regional studies and the shape of academic disciplinary
discourses. The chapters in this volume help to qualify and focus debates over scales of social
interaction and their significance to our analyses. On the whole they suggest that global/local
tensions are the crucial frame of analysis if one decides to make them so. But the decision to
make them so is as embedded in institutional and power relations as any other discourse.
This volume also answers a more specific need to address the effect on Middle Eastern
societies of mass media and related phenomena such as mass consumption. This inevitably
requires attention to connections between the Middle East and metropolitan societies. We
therefore hope to capture something of the complex transitions between scales of social
interaction without, however, taking globalization rhetoric as a universalizing master
narrative. This is because globalization is part unfinished agenda and part sociological reality.
• • •
And Beyond
In the United States the study of transnational immigrant populations, a growth area in all
relevant academic disciplines, focuses on exactly the same areas as the wider job market:
Latin America, Africa, Asia. The overarching rationale for this is that transnational and
transregional considerations now take priority over social phenomena understood as relevant
primarily within national and area boundaries. But the categories we actually study, as distinct
from the rhetoric of non-place-specific analytic frameworks, are defined by a national
criterion: the U.S. census. A well-known strategy of colonial domination, enumeration of
social types “helped to ignite communitarian and nationalist identities that in fact undermined
colonial rule” (Appadurai 1996, 117). In the contemporary United States enumeration also
forms the basis of political activity. Over the past decade there have been hundreds of job
openings for the study of American immigrant communities, virtually all of them structured
around U.S. census categories. The reasons for this are complex. Some of the rapid increase in
positions that study those particular American immigrant communities can be accounted for
by changes in academic culture. Students are increasingly viewed as paying customers (rather
than the products of academic business) who must be satisfied; because more of the customers
are now of Hispanic, Asian, or African origin, courses must be offered that are tailored for
those markets. The logic of this pattern is hardly free of national considerations. The groups in
question are the most rapidly growing ethnic populations within the United States. A truly
global analytic framework would demand greater attention to such places as the Middle East,
South and Central Asia, Oceania, and Europe. But the zones of ambiguity (according to the
enumerative categories of the census) are not necessarily slated for greater institutional
investment.[6] “Globalization” is less about an interconnected world than it is about the
complex ways that the world is apprehended from the United States.[7]
Middle Eastern immigrant communities—invisible in the U.S. census, and almost equally so
in terms of institutional investment—are the focus of two chapters in Mass Mediations.
Andrew Shryock’s “Public Culture in Arab Detroit” makes a powerful case that even
relatively mobile transnational communities still must contend with a powerful imperative to
reterritorialize—to become rooted in a place and in national institutions. Anthony Shay’s
“The 6/8 Beat Goes On” looks at popular music in the Iranian community of Los Angeles.
Although motives for relocating to the United States are complex in both communities, as is
the class and ethnic makeup of both communities, the Iranian community of Los Angeles can
be properly described as an “exile community” (see Naficy 1993), the members of which
cannot necessarily maintain movement back and forth from the country of origin to the United
States. The population of Arab Dearborn, by contrast, has much less difficulty maintaining
contact with its countries of origin. In the short term the result is that Iranian Los Angeles
possesses a higher degree of autonomy in media production than Arab Dearborn. Shay notes
that entire genres of Iranian popular music essentially moved offshore after the Islamic
Revolution, and the market for this music is the Iranian-American immigrant community as
well as Iran itself. Traditional vernacular genres and “classical” music (insofar as such
distinctions can be applied to Iranian music) as well as modernized variants of Iranian music
flourish in Los Angeles. The decisive factor in this autonomous Iranian production in the
United States is the considerable sense of isolation the community feels as a result of the
political reality of the Islamic Revolution.
In Dearborn modern Arabic music (and indeed most media content) comes from its countries
of origin,[8] while another segment of the local cultural scene depends on local (American)
financing. Shryock shows how American financing is contingent on certain types of cultural
content: culture that invokes a sense of the “folkloric” (rather than the modernity constructed
by most Arabic cultural products in the Middle East); and Arabic culture presented in English.
Whether the two communities, Iranian Los Angeles and Arab Dearborn, can preserve the
sense of cultural difference essential to theories of transnationalism depends largely on a
continued influx of immigrants. In Dearborn modern Arabic media and cultural products
appeal mainly to first-generation immigrants who still speak Arabic. Iranian Los Angeles is a
newer community—substantially a post-1978 community—and is also more affluent than
Arab Dearborn. These factors give Iranian Los Angeles certain advantages in maintaining a
cohesive community outside of national institutions. Whether this remains true for second and
third generations of Iranian immigrants is an open question. But the juxtaposition of the two
communities presented in Shryock’s and Shay’s chapters does not suggest a generalizable
pattern of transnational or globalized culture outside the influence of a steadily withering
nation-state.
• • •
Globalization
Currently the presumption that global interaction will inevitably take precedence over all
other frameworks for organizing social life dominates discussions of modernity. Most who
write on globalization make a distinction between consciousness of the phenomenon and the
reality of global systems of economics and, to some extent, politics and culture. Global, or at
least transregional, systems are far from new, and the reality of such systems inspires little
dispute. Janet Abu-Lughod (1989), Immanuel Wallerstein (1974), and Eric Wolf (1982),
among others, have outlined various ways that transregional economic systems of various
scales have operated long before the twentieth century. However, consciousness of
globalization as a crucial framework for social action is generally thought to be a quite recent
phenomenon, and the significance of this phenomenon is a much more contentious issue.
Advocates of globalization as an analytic strategy assume that the roots of global
consciousness in its contemporary form extend no deeper than the latter half of the twentieth
century, or perhaps even to only the past three decades when digital technology became
prevalent. Globalization discourse posits a new and unique configuration of these two broad
tendencies—the intensification of interconnectedness due to the expansion of world economic
systems and the consciousness of that interconnectedness. All analyses of globalization are
necessarily vague on the exact relationship between the reality of world systems and the
consciousness of these systems, because all analyses are forced to recognize at some level the
unevenness of the institutional and technological infrastructures that make possible a
relationship between an expanding world system and consciousness of it. Mike Featherstone,
for example, qualifies his analysis of globalization processes:
For many of the people in the world the consciousness of the process of globalization, that
they inhabit the same place, may be absent, or limited, or occur only spasmodically.…At the
same time there are clearly systemic tendencies in social life which derive from the expansive
and integrating power of economic processes and the hegemonizing efforts of particular
nation-states or blocs. (1996, 70–71)
But, however qualified, globalization discourse also implies an underlying technological
determinism: those parts of the world that have not yet been assimilated into the global system
will be assimilated at a later date. Resistance is futile. Communications technology and
media—phenomena emphasized throughout this book—play a crucial role in creating
globalization. The ultimate effects of assimilation to the global system, however, are hotly
disputed. Cultural homogenization is by no means assumed. Rather, discussion of
globalization revolves around a tension between the apparent homogenizing tendency of
globalized modes of production and consumerism (with media again playing a crucial role)
and the creation of localized cultural enclaves. Consumerism and its associated media
phenomena labeled “global” are usually Western, or at least metropolitan.
As Ella Shohat and Robert Stam put it, the global distribution of power, dominated by
Western Europe, the United States, and Japan, “still tends to make the First World countries
cultural ‘transmitters’ and to reduce most Third World countries to the status of ‘receivers’”
(1996, 147). Shohat and Stam do not emphasize the theme of metropolitan domination of
global media. Rather, they focus on the potential for both nonmetropolitan media (in which
some industries are actually quantitatively superior to Western production, if not more
profitable) and new forms of media to challenge metropolitan hegemony. Their metropole is
one in which spectatorial habits in “an increasingly transnational world, characterized by
nomadic images, sounds, goods, and peoples,…impacts complexly on national identity,
communal belonging, and political affiliation” (Shohat and Stam 1996, 164).
In the same vein, Ted Swedenburg’s “Sa‘ida Sultan/Danna International” addresses an
instance of transnational media flow that is nonhierarchical—not from a metropolitan
producer to a Third World receiver. Rather, the flow is horizontal between two
nonmetropolitan nations, from Israel to Egypt.[9] The impact of Sa‘ida Sultan, a transsexual
singer of Yemeni origin who became popular in Cairo through underground cassette tapes,
was indeed complex. But Swedenburg’s analysis of Sultan does not suggest media
“nomadism” so much as a mélange of sound and image calculated to appeal to a niche market
consisting of Israel’s gay subculture and, to a somewhat lesser extent, disaffected Mizrahim
who chafe at Israel’s European-dominated social hierarchy. As in many of the contributions in
Mass Mediations, Swedenburg finds it useful to discuss a transnational phenomenon through
national categories. Egyptian youth were certainly not the niche the singer was trying for. But
Sa‘ida Sultan’s border crossing is nonetheless quite locatable: the singer is highly suspect in
Egyptian public culture and rather contentious in Israeli society. She serves to mark important
borders between and within the two societies; she does not necessarily blur these boundaries
in any way.
Katherine E. Zirbel’s “Playing It Both Ways” provides another view of transnational media
consumption. Zirbel examines two Egyptian performance communities that relate quite
differently to both global and national trends. The Cairene community of Muhammad ‘Ali
Street exists largely outside the influence of global culture markets and has experienced both
the state’s favor and, more recently, its disfavor. Muhammad ‘Ali Street performers had their
day on the national stage but were never of interest in metropolitan venues. The other
community is Upper Egyptian, marginal within Egypt, and precisely the sort of phenomenon
favored in metropolitan “world beat” music that seeks to present itself as alternative to
dominant metropolitan trends. For Shohat and Stam, metropolitan audiences who experience
such culture “are reminded of the limits of their own knowledge and indirectly of their own
potential status as foreigners” (1996, 165). But Zirbel’s Upper Egyptians’ music was in fact
recorded entirely for the benefit of foreigners. Within Egypt this music might not have been
recorded at all, though it may well have been (and still is) performed at weddings and on
holidays. But the ability of the music to remind metropolitan listeners of their own potential
marginality is strictly a mirage. “Westerners describe such music as a quirky kind of disco
music that is consistently off kilter” (Zirbel, this volume). For them the music is essentially a
brand of exoticism, purchased entirely by reference to their own culture. These Upper
Egyptian musicians perform in a niche market every bit as circumscribed and locatable as the
gay subculture to which Swedenburg’s Sa‘ida Sultan markets herself. But Sa‘ida Sultan’s
market understands her: her image is predicated on a series of sly insider jokes. In the case of
these “Gypsy” musicians, as this community is marketed, the effectiveness of the music is
predicated on the audience’s inability to understand either it or its place in the “authentic”
Egyptian culture they imagine it represents.
Philip Schuyler’s “Joujouka/Jajouka/Zahjoukah” looks at a musical phenomenon similar to
that of Zirbel’s “Gypsies.” In Schuyler’s case the “world beat” marketing of a Moroccan
ensemble is the primary focus, whereas in Zirbel’s case the phenomenon is relevant to one
community of musicians and the main focus is on contrasting the two communities to each
other in relation to the state. The Master Musicians of Jajouka hail from a small Arabic-
speaking village near Tangier. They are “master musicians” only in the imagination of their
Western patrons. Like the Egyptian “Gypsies,” the Jajouka musicians are quite marginal in
Moroccan terms. Music of the Jajouka musicians is more plausibly nomadic than that of
Zirbel’s Upper Egyptians, at least insofar as “ownership” of the music is slightly ambiguous.
The ambiguity arises from disputes between the Jajouka musicians’ principal Moroccan
patron and the various Westerners—but particularly Brian Jones of the Rolling Stones—over
how to market the music and who gets the profits from their albums. Schuyler’s analysis of
the Jajouka phenomenon suggests none of the displacement or subversion implied by Shohat
and Stam’s celebration of nonmetropolitan performance in metropolitan venues. The Master
Musicians of Jajouka are very much whatever metropolitan audiences want to read into them,
including an association with paganism attributed on largely ideological grounds by various
Western scholars as a survival from either Berber or Roman culture (Hammoudi 1993, 30–
31). Judging by the Jajouka phenomenon as related by Schuyler, “world music” makes the
most sense in terms of metropolitan tastes for exoticism. These tastes are interesting in their
own right but are hardly new, and their existence hardly depends on a global stage. This is not
to say that complex syntheses of musical styles are not intentionally created all the time by
musicians (witness Sa‘ida Sultan, or American jazz, or modernist appropriations of imagined
primitivism such as Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring). But the horizons of musical audiences are
always both circumscribed and changeable under the right circumstances.
• • •
The Futility of Resistance
The most conspicuous loser in discussions of global consciousness is the nation-state, which
many consider outmoded as a framework for experiencing modernity.[10] In both the popular
media and academia the demise of the nation-state is thought by some to be an uncompleted
process, but the general trajectory toward its dissolution is an article of faith. This is true
across a wide spectrum of writing. For example, popular publications such as Wired, a trade
magazine that shills for the computer industry, regularly extol the virtues of globalization:
“Ultimately the migration of culture is not monolithic but mosaic, flowing over and around
borders, washing away strict definitions, surging into new social spaces created by the tools of
the age” (Couch 1997, 214). More thoughtful (and less obviously business oriented) voices
often concur. The anthropologist Michael Kearney puts the matter in terms that readers of
Wired would find familiar: “Globalization entails a shift from two-dimensional Euclidean
space with its centers and peripheries and sharp boundaries, to a multidimensional global
space with unbounded, often discontinuous and interpenetrating sub-spaces” (1995, 549).[11]
There is much evidence close at hand to support such observations. Our own media generate
globalization discourse relentlessly; our universities echo it, albeit with an avowedly
alternative agenda. However, the ready availability of globalization discourse to metropolitan
consumers in particular should also be a reason to be cautious about such pronouncements.
Much globalization rhetoric is prescriptive. To adopt globalization as an analytic framework
may be to make it a self-fulfilling prophecy. It has become difficult to separate globalization
as an agenda of economic determinism (Ferguson 1992) from globalization as a practice of
modern identity (Friedman 1995), or globalization as a postmodern culture of media
consumption (Baudrillard 1995). The totality of these agendas is like flypaper: even if one
rejects them, one is still forced to argue against them. Cultural practice not done in
consciousness of globalization becomes an affirmation of the local in response to the pressure
of the global.
