The Practice and Politics of Archaeology in Egypt

LYNN MESKELLa Department of Anthropology, Columbia University, New York, New York 10027, USA

ABSTRACT: Archaeologists working in Egypt have rarely considered the local/global ramifications and responsibilities of their field practices: many continue to operate under what might be termed the residual effects of colonialism. Taking an explicitly postcolonial stance I argue that there is much more at stake than the intellectual enterprise. This paper outlines the ways in which scholars could undertake a more engaged archaeology and how we might more closely be involved with the people and pasts of modern Egypt. The connected tensions of tourism and terrorism are foregrounded, demonstrating that heritage issues are salient to both spheres. Finally, I explore the nations relationship to its pharaonic past over the past few centuries and include some contemporary articulations and representations. KEYWORDS: Egyptian archaeology; Colonialist views of Egypt; Orientalism; Tourism; Postcolonial theory; Terrorism; Heritage industry

In the eighteenth century, a new breed of traveller began to flock into Cairo, Europeans with scholarly and antiquarian interests, for whom Masr was merely the picturesque but largely incidental location of an older, and far more important landscape Over the same period that Egypt was gaining a new strategic importance within the disposition of empires, she was also gradually evolving into a new continent of riches for the Western scholarly and artistic imagination.

AMITAV GHOSH, IN AN ANTIQUE LAND

This paper attempts to combine several diverse strands of argumentation surrounding the political context of archaeology in Egypt. First, I endeavor to situate Western intervention in Egypt from a postcolonial position. This puts in the foreground the colonial practices of taxonomizing and controlling both
aAddress for correspondence: Department of Anthropology, Columbia University, 1200 Amsterdam Avenue, New York, New York 10027. Voice: 212-854-7465; fax: 212-854-7347. LMM64@columbia.edu

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present and past through scientific discourses such as cartography, geography, and archaeology. The discussion oscillates between narratives of the colonial past and accounts of current field practices. I also suggest a number of disciplinary options which might remedy the situation in terms of the ethics and responsibilities for foreign field projects. Linked to this point is my suggestion that archaeologists should be more mindful of local communities and the modern context of their work. By extension, those that tour Egypt have been largely disinterested in the local sphere and its contemporary ramifications. I assert that the two situations are interwoven. Clearly, people choose to tour ancient Egypt rather than its modern, living counterpart, and their desires for an untainted living museum have real effects at both national and local levels. Tied to tourism and foreign interaction is the increase in terrorism over the last decade. Here I suggest that touring ancient Egypt and the constitution of the heritage industry in Egypt are factors indelibly intertwined with these acts of violence. As a rule, archaeologists working in Egypt have been reluctant to comment or be drawn into political discussion. Lastly, I argue against the traditional idea that modern Egypt has little connection to its pharaonic history. Drawing on architecture, monuments, artistic traditions, textbooks, and national symbolism, I suggest there has been a fluid relationship with the pharaonic past over the last 100 years. If this connectivity is erased or undermined, we risk privileging the ancient past and ignoring Egypts more recent heritage. By divorcing Egypts history from its people we might make our work as archaeologists (or visitors) less problematic and entangled, but we also commit symbolic violence and reinvigorate the remnants of a colonial regime.

EGYPT IN POSTCOLONIAL PERSPECTIVE

Taking a radical stance, I argue here that archaeological practice in Egypt is indelibly entangled in the types of hegemonic practices that once characterized colonialism in the Middle East and that now contribute to the tensions of postcoloniality. My own background brings this into sharp relief. I was initially trained in Australia, in a political climate where indigenous people had a clear voice in the archaeological endeavor and where white practitioners themselves were constantly under scrutiny. After further training in England I undertook fieldwork in Egypt and saw a very different suite of practices and a general lack of engagement at the local level, a situation that still typifies the discipline of Egyptian archaeology. By default, archaeologists working in Egypt generally assume that their priorities for research should be placed in the foreground and that the considerations of local people are secondary. Often the latter have been considered a hindrance to archaeologys project: a sentiment sometimes reinforced by certain sectors of the Egyptian government. Archaeology is closely linked to tourism, which offers substantial eco-

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nomic gains for a developing country. The economic gains tend to remain largely in the hands of Western companies operating within the new global arena, rendering suspect the notion that ordinary Egyptians benefit from large-scale tourist expenditures, despite the deployment of governmental imperatives to facilitate tourism. It similarly results in the ascendancy of foreign desires for commodification and leisure over local concerns and standards of living. The case study of the relocation of the community at Gurna is the most salient instance of this imbalance of power (see Mitchell 2000). Yet these issues are seldom discussed within the discipline because of a lack of political engagement or an unwillingness to challenge government policy. Archaeologists, too, have a stakealbeit a purely academic onein directing attention towards monuments rather than people. The tangential matters of agricultural encroachment, site management, and protection are points raised by more concerned archaeologists, but it is the ancient material remains that are privileged over living communities. Scholars are reticent to discuss the interrelated domains of tourism, the heritage industry, and multi-layered nationalist objectives within Egypt. How did we arrive at this point? Clearly the long history of foreign intervention in Egypt has made the country an archaeologists paradise, a territory all our own, steeped in a history of Western looting and excavation. As such, archaeology was already enmeshed in colonialist ideologies, and therefore it has proven easier for practitioners to continue their operations in the time-honored ways. Colonial constructs are not simply situated in a past. As I argue, this substrate of residual colonial practice is being worked against in the present: it is both nostalgically re-worked and inventively adapted. Many archaeologists might seem unaware or, worse, unconcerned with the ethical dilemmas underscored here. Ameliorating our predicament will entail sacrifices and changes for foreign fieldworkers that threaten to disrupt a long and fruitful tradition of practices. Bringing about change will mean a substantial revisioning of the archaeological project, and the ways in which individuals operate in the field. Large archaeological expeditions will have to divert funds and energy into contributing something at the local level, other than paying village workmen and buying supplies. Along with these initiatives comes the dissemination of archaeological findings and the inclusion of smaller voicesallowing for the impact of heteroglossia on an atheoretical and authoritarian field like Egyptian archaeology. Archaeologists will have to consider the place of local museums, heritage centers, and educational facilities. This process would take place at the local level, where foreign institutions contribute to the initial construction of museums and local authorities administer and benefit from their operation. People can learn to appreciate the inherent values of the past without necessarily having to identify with them in any personalized way, thus countering the arguments about Islamicization made by archaeologists. Local people, school groups, visitors, and

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tourists would all be involved. Andreas Huyssen coined the term musealization to describe the current obsession with the heritage industry and the culture of the museum. In the latter half of this century there has been a proliferation of museums and heritage sites around the globe. In an ironic turn Huyssen quips that we might be running out of the past due to our avid consumption of history. We have a long way to go in Egypt since there is a dearth of museums and heritage sites to celebrate the longue dure of its multi-stranded histories. Here I suggest we have to engage in dialogue with those concerned with developments in social geography and heritage studies to fully understand the processes of tourism, cultural exploitation, and symbolic violence that surround the promotion of an archaeological past. Prioritizing the past in the present has serious and often violent consequences for those who happen to dwell among the ancients. At the heart of these programmatic statements is the fundamental question I keep returning to: how did we inherit such a situation? Younger archaeologists are inculcated with the belief that Egyptians today are divorced from pharaonic civilization and that this occurred through the process of Islamicization. These severed ties with antiquity underscore all narratives about a contemporary lack of interest in the past and result in an unwillingness to engage in the dialogue. It is the argument that excuses us from the conversation altogether and yet it is usually unsubstantiated or left unchecked. At the end of this paper I argue against the persistent idea that the Egyptians themselves are not interested in their pastthat this is something reserved for Western interpreters. As part of this assertion I mean to imply that we, as Western archaeologists, have been remiss in our responsibilities to the people of Egypt, that we have not conveyed our findings nor instigated education and outreach programs nor have we aided in the construction of local museums. In a sense the colonialist modes of operation have had residual effects upon the practice of archaeology in Egypt. Only in a postcolonial climate can we begin to see this as yet another appropriation of the pastthe past as a resource and a source of knowledgewhich excludes the site of production itself. It is crucial to recenter the colonial entanglements that marked the start of a professionalized Egyptian archaeology (see also Reid 1985). Colonialism entails the establishment and maintenance of domination over a separate group of people, who are viewed as subordinate, and over their territories, which are presumed to be available for exploitation (Jacobs 1996:16). As Nick Dirks has argued (1992:6):
colonialism provided a theatre for the Enlightenment project, that grand laboratory that linked discovery and reasoncolonial expansion both necessitated and facilitated the active exercise of the scientific imagination. It was through discoverythe siting, surveying, mapping, naming, and ultimately possessing of new regions that science itself could open new territories of conquest: cartography, geography, botany and anthropology were all colonial enterprises.

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We should see archaeology as deeply embedded within those discourses as well. This situation is clearly expressed in 19th century British imperialism, in which territorial expansion ensured that raw materials and resources would be controlled. The monumentality of the past is yet another example of a cultural resource to be appropriated. This form of intellectual colonialism sought to extricate Egypt from its past glories and future potentials in service of the ruling empire. Egypt and its riches are still seen as a global resource and thus as a responsibility that involves heritage managers, conservators, planners, funding bodies, and international organizations. Today archaeologists occupy different positionsthat of facilitator and managerthis time in the service of Egypt as a modern nation. Some might claim that we also facilitate our academic ventures simultaneously, so as not to cast this as an entirely altruistic endeavor! Foundational to colonial imperatives was the notion that subject cultures require management and regimes to articulate, map and control resources, specifically their monumental past. Following these sentiments, individuals and organizations still assert that the Egyptians themselves are incapable of managing these resources: they are to be effectively administered and controlled by the West. Despite the fact that the ultimate decision-making resides with the Egyptian Antiquities Service, they rely heavily on international archaeological investment for both fieldwork and preservation. A compelling example of this reliance on international agencies is the effort of UNESCO and German engineers to relocate Abu Simbel after construction of the Aswan High Dam. UNESCOs funding of the Nubia Museum in Aswan is another high-profile initiative that has become embroiled in controversy over questions of ethnicity, citizenship, and transnational culture (Smith 1999). Yet this is not to advocate that we relinquish our efforts to conserve the materiality of the past or that studying and preserving a global world heritage is a wholly negative endeavor: rather that we recognize the lingering elements of a colonial scheme in our thinking. In many respects our desire to know, label, and excavate is not so different from the sentiment expressed by Balfour addressing the British House of Commons on the necessity of Britains occupying Egypt:
We know the civilisation of Egypt better than we know the civilisation of any other country. We know it further back; we know it more intimately; we know more about it. It goes far beyond the petty span of the history of our race, which is lost in the prehistoric period at a time when the Egyptian civilisation had already passed its prime.

The European heritage could not rival pharaonic time-depth and complexity and thus it became necessary to appropriate and co-opt Egyptian heritage into a Western construction of origins. This we all know and are familiar with since Saids magnum opus (1979) and its resultant critique (Bhabha 1994, Jacobs 1996). But if Saids influence has been pervasive, so also is the concern to move beyond his general critique, both in the sense of breaking down the monolith of colonialism, and in engaging more directly than our Orientalist

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forebears with the realities of an Orient that resists reification in Western discursive or political formations. We search both for voices outside as well as those raised against the Orientalist establishment. There is the fear that if we accord totalizing power to such entities as the West, or the Orientalists, we will fail to understand and recognize the spaces of resistance while unwittingly aligning ourselves against those spaces. This is the fear voiced by Dirks (1992:10) and one that finds support with most postcolonial scholars. I am not suggesting that the study of Egypt has resisted theorization. Timothy Mitchells work on the representation of Egypt through the Worlds Fair is a prime example (1988), as is Hassans account (1998) of memory and identity. Yet despite these incursions our most frequent engagement has been with the discourse of so-called Egyptomania and our interest in the representation of Egypt and the Orient more generally (e.g., Curl 1994, Humbert et al. 1994, Shohat and Stam 1994, Lant 1997). Scholars of cultural reception and those interested in the politics of representation have spent decades documenting the ways in which Europe conceived of and constructed specific visions of Egypt. It was a particularly exoticized and eroticized gaze, constructing Egypt as infantilized, playful, yet voluptuous, and commodified (Meskell 1998). It is a fascinating topic and the source of numerous volumes and exhibitions. Interestingly, we, as scholars, have always been concerned with the European encoding of a pharaonic past, rather than looking to the source itself, again removing Egypt from its spatio-temporal setting and again interpolating it into Western Enlightenment regimes of power, invented origins, and cultural evolution. Such an argument has been developed for the Middle East more generally by Bahrani (1998).

SYMBOLIC VIOLENCE, TOURISM, AND TERRORISM

Amongst archaeologists it has long been said that the Egyptian people, because of the impact of Islam, hold no special relationship with antiquity and that they are largely disinterested in knowing their past, much less preserving it. However true this may seem, such generalizations make it easier for Westerners to continue their current practices in Egypt, for us to taxonomize and interpret, and to conduct our field strategies in our current quasi-colonial manner without any attempts at reflexiveness. To date, the only substantive analysis of archaeology, heritage and tourism has been conducted at Gurna (FIG. 1). Tim Mitchell is a political scientist, not an archaeologist, although his insights are vital for all of us. In a recent paper he explores the complex machinations between the Egyptian government and one local community (Mitchell 2000), a situation that involved the forced relocation of the Gurnawis, the promoters of the tourist trade, and the development of an open-air museum. Mitchells study focuses upon the reactions of the local people of Gurna in their desperate attempts to reclaim their homes and their only source

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FIGURE 1. Gurna Village, 1995.

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of income, which is generated from tourism. This struggle involved diverse local groups resisting top-down global pressures for a museum in aid of a shared world heritage. Working in the Valley of the Nobles for several field seasons, I understand the threats of destruction, the escalating pressures of tourism, and the fractious relationships between archaeologists, tourists and Gurnawis. It was far from an easily resolvable situation as later events demonstrated: we are being asked to privilege one group over the other, the dead over the living as it were, and this has uncomfortable repercussions. In 1996 the people of Gurna, threatened with the eviction and demolition of their homes, wrote a petition stating that
[we] have become threatened in our homes, we have become agonized with fear, while our houses are demolished above our heads and we are driven from our homeland. The pretext for all this is that we damage and do harm to tourism and that we threaten the safety of the monuments. We do not understand who has fabricated these rumours. We come from the monuments and by the monuments we exist. Our livelihood is from tourism (quoted in Mitchell 2000).

Many archaeologists have seen other sides to this argument, such as the longterm destruction of the tombs and the threats of looting. But we have to recognize our place as interlopers in a foreign country and that our life experiences are contrary to those invoked in the petition. We again must question why dead Egyptians are more important than living ones. Whether we like it or not, archaeologists are complicit in various forms of real and symbolic violence at Gurna and elsewhere: our work provides the raw material for a burgeoning tourist industry and is conducted under the auspices of the Supreme Council of Antiquities. We, too, work under guidelines set out by the national government and are similarly scrutinized by the local government inspectorate. As Mitchell documents, there have been more than 50 years of attempted relocation at Gurna. More recently the authorities have deployed bulldozers, armed police officials, tourism investors, and U.S. and World Bank consultants: quite clearly the heritage industry has made use of violence in achieving its goals. In one attempt at relocation four people were killed and at least 25 were wounded. In 1998 the head of the Luxor City Council was quoted in AlAhram as saying that the shanty town of Old Gurna (FIG. 2) would have to be depopulated because you cant afford to have this heritage wasted because of informal houses being built in an uncivilized manner (quoted in Mitchell 2000). Yet Gurna is not an isolated instance: the Egyptian government was also trying to move families away from the pyramid at Meidum, the temples in Esna and Edfu, and from around the Great Pyramids in Giza. Officials succeeded in removing from Gurna some 1,300 families who lived in traditional mud-brick houses directly on top of the Tombs of the Nobles and these 400 tombs constitute a major tourist attraction. Many of the Gurnawis are now housed in newly built concrete buildings at a nearby village, New Tarif, set up largely by Egypts Armed Forces. While some may see this as steps toward

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FIGURE 2. Sennefer coffee shop, Gurna, 1995.

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modernization, the concrete constructions at New Tarif are less suited to the Egyptian climate and could be perceived as alienating in this specific context. It is clear that violence has been enacted here on all levels, both real and symbolic, against the Gurnawis, ironically in the name of their own national heritage. The global remains privileged territory. Lila Abu-Lughod lucidly encapsulates the issue, differentiating the various local and national spheres enmeshed in the tension over Gurnas past and future. One difficulty lies in separating out patriotic concerns for the preservation of Egyptian heritage, stemming from pressures of tourist revenues at both state and private levels, from considerations for the community (AbuLughod 1998:162). Acknowledging the importance of Egypts archaeological treasures, she also reflects on the plight of ordinary people whose needs cannot be brushed away, as simply as the archaeologist might do to reveal the glories of the past. The metaphor of brushing away is pre-figured in all such interventions. As Abu-Lughod clearly argues in the case of the Gurna relocation, while many at the higher governmental levels and lite classes are socially concerned and even sympathetic, they remain tied to their particular values and priorities, which are, in turn, structured by a specific vision of national modernity. Even our vision of the local is complex and multi-faceted, projecting a myriad of views and experiences surrounding a single site. As Jane Jacobs (1996:35) has eloquently argued :
It is precisely in the local that it is possible to see how the past, including imperial and pre-imperial pasts, inheres in place. This is not an archaic residue, but an active and influential occupation. A pertinent example of this is given by the places that are designated as heritage, such as historic buildings or other cultural sites. These are inherited artefacts but they gain an active influence in the present by way of the various popular meanings and official sanctions ascribed to them. The making of heritage is a political process. Certain places may be incorporated into sanctioned views of the national heritage while others may be seen as a threat to the national imaginary and are suppressed or obliterated. It is not simply that heritage places symbolise certain values and beliefs, but that the very transformation of these places into heritage is a process whereby identity is defined, debated, and contested and where social orders are challenged or reproduced (Karp 1992:5). Heritage is not in any simple sense the reproduction and imposition of dominant values. It is a dynamic process of creation in which a multiplicity of pasts jostle for the present purpose of being sanctified as heritage.

In an explicitly political move, Suzanne Mubarak, the wife of the Egyptian president, said that the people of Luxor are the priority in this project. If some villages have to be removed in order to save our heritage, that does not mean we dont care for individuals. On the contrary we are giving them a better alternative with complete services.1 The Egyptian government has been talking about vacating Gurna since the time of president Gamal Abdel Nasser. The secretary-general of the Supreme Council for Antiquities, Ali Hassan, reported to the media that some 250 houses had been demolished in Gurna as

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part of the authorities campaign to create an off-limits zone on the West Bank of Luxor. The total cost of the infrastructure for the creation of the new village was E103.8 million. Official figures say there were 7,388 people living in Gurna, estimated to reach 15,000 by the year 2020. There are supposedly 1,776 houses in New Tarif built on an area of 261 acres. Understandably, the villagers have been deeply suspicious of the governments intentions. Past attempts to relocate people, specifically in model communities with vernacular architecturemost notably that of Hassan Fathihave failed. Since January 1996, houses in Old Gurna have been regularly demolished, which Ali Hassan says has led to the discovery of new tombs of pharaonic nobles. The governments plan has been described as reinventing Thebesusing the ancient Greek name for the area of modern day Luxor. The intent was the creation of a large living museum, replacing the traditional or dead museums: open-air museums replace those under cover, sound replaces hushed silence, and visitors are not separated from the exhibits by glass. Gurna was a major tourist center until an attack on November 17, 1997 by Muslim extremists took the lives of 58 foreigners and four Egyptians. This attack on the West Bank of Luxor severely damaged Egypts lucrative tourism industry, which earned the country $3 billion a year. Over the last decade tourism has waxed and waned with the incidents of terrorism. A glance at the figures from Egypts Tourist Authority show a significant drop of 12.8%, equating to a decline of 56.8% in numbers of tourist nights spent in Egypt. While a few Egyptologists reported the news of the attack on various websites, the topic did not fuel further discussion. It was considered an extreme instance in an escalating series of militant attacks on tourists over the past few years. This silence is part of a wider malaise in Egyptology as a discipline. Egyptologists have convinced themselves that they have little to do with the lived experience of people like the Gurnawis and remain outside the processes at work, processes that they are deeply implicated in by the nature of their work, and the very subject matter of archaeology. Another nodal point in political, religious, economic, social and spatial terms is the 1997 massacre by Islamic militants at the Temple of Hatshepsut (FIG. 3). This violent episode at one of the most iconic monuments of the pharaonic pastenacted primarily against touristssomehow eluded Egyptologists or was deemed outside their intellectual territory. The Temple of Hatshepsut is often cited as a supremely modernist architectural feat, in a teleological construction that ensures its translatability to a contemporary audience. The locale of the temple is a potent one: surrounded by a bay of cliffs, the temple is set in against the natural rock: a perfect cipher for the nature:culture divide. The temple is also a concrete statement of the fundamental human desire to achieve eternity. Chris Rojek (1993:195) argues that temples built in the names of the rulers of Ancient Egypt at Luxor are salient examples of this desire, as are the Taj Mahal and the Lincoln Memorial. In each a megalomaniac quality can be discerned along with their grandeur and beauty.

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FIGURE 3. Temple of Hatshepsut, West Bank, 1996.

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The visual spectacle of the temples space has long been recognized and indeed is similarly celebrated as a performative space: the opera Aida is often performed there. Thus ancient and modern Egypt become seamlessly enmeshed. Foremost, it is a tourist site, closely situated near other famed sites such as the Valley of the Kings, the Valley of the Queens, the Valley of the Nobles, the Colossi of Memnon, and so on. It is a major stopping point on the touring track of visitors travelling to Luxor. Reports from the Egyptian authorities suggested that the attack was primarily aimed at the police and security forces. However, this strategem was generally assumed to be a government ploy to allay fears and to minimize damage to the tourist industry at large. The targets of the attack were predominantly tourists. There had been similar attacks in the past, such as the terrorist assault in Cairo in September of 1997, where three gunmen specifically ambushed a tourist bus in front of the Cairo Museum, killing at least nine tourists and wounding another 19. Three gunmen opened fire and tossed explosives at buses parked outside the Egyptian Museum in Tahrir Square.2 This famous location, home to the treasures of Tutankhamun and thousands of other archaeological masterpieces, is a key tourist site for almost every visitor to Egypt. Tour groups congregate there en masse in ostentatious tour buses which only serve to flag their foreign presence. Many other local buses regularly stopped in Tahrir Square carrying Cairenes around the city, yet they were spared. Clearly tourists were the prime target, ensuring complete global coverage for the militant cause and maximum damage to the national economy and world-wide profile. For the people of Egypt, the economic benefits from tourism are often less than anticipated. It is well documented that the majority of tourist investment in the developing world has in fact been undertaken by large-scale companies in North America or Western Europe. This is by no means a charitable venture since the bulk of such tourist expenditure is retained by the transnational companies involved; only 2225% of the retail price remains in the host country (Urry 1990:6465). At the same time, we have to ask whether many developing countries have much alternative to tourism as a development strategy. While there are serious economic and social costs, such as the symbolic violence to the displaced persons at Gurna, it is very difficult in the absence of alternatives to see that developing countries have much choice but to promote their attractiveness as objects of the tourist gaze, particularly for visitors from North America, Western Europe and Japan. According to Urry (1990:132), the sovereignty of the consumer and trends in popular taste are colluding to transform the museums social role. As in the planned open-air museum at Gurna, the overwhelming mass of the population, such as the people of the entire West Bank, will inevitably be excluded. While heritage politics generally concerns the local, the specificities of place, it is by no means a process removed from broader spatialities. Sanctioned heritage is taken up into national imaginings, as Jacobs suggests (1996:36). As we have seen with Gurna, local sites are heavily connected to global processes of commodification. The politics of identity is undeniably also a politics of place. But as Ja-

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cobs argues, this is not the proper place of bounded, pre-given essences, but rather an unbounded geography of difference and contest.

EGYPT IN HYPERREALITY
Other forms of symbolic violence are enacted in Egypt, again in the service of tourism, and I would suggest that tourists willingness to take part is key in these struggles. In recent decades the large hotels, primarily 5-star tourist hotels, have created spaces in which tourists are presented with an Egyptian experience, but prevented from any real encounters with the country or its people. Through hyperreal constructions of themed restaurants or complete Egyptian villages one can attain a specific sense of the culture without any immediate contact (Baudrillard 1993). I would suggest that constructing a village inside a palatial hotel is more extreme than the more familiar themed restaurant or bar, although an extension of the same principle. Quite insidiously, foreigners can experience Egypt without coming into contact with its realities, thus allowing hotel chains to further monopolize additional foreign currency. Tourists are spared the sort of encounters and negotiations that once characterized visiting communities like Gurna: people begging, children trying to sell dolls, people offering services etc. This kind of bargaining and begging was perceived to be an uncomfortable experience for many tourists (Abu-Lughod 1998:162, Mitchell 2000). Through the simulacra proffered by the hotels, the tourist can avoid the unpleasant reminders of economic inequality and and he or she can simply enjoy the commodification of an exotic culture. Where this differs from the theme parks and heritage sites in Europe, though, is that most Egyptian examples seek to reproduce poorer, rural or balady villages, whichmany city dwellers in Egypt would also shun (FIG. 4). Hotels are presenting a vision of an authentic Egypt that is inherently Orientalized: it is poor, crudely constructed, rural, and indelibly reminiscent of ancient times (Mitchell 1990). It implies that life is essentially unchanged through the millennia, encapsulating the past, but not requiring the client to leave the confines of luxury. No human costs or consciences are factored into these constructions. Employees working in such hotels have been trained, educated in various languages, and basically instructed in the types of behaviors and roles they are expected to adopt (Rojek 1993, 2000). In this the Egyptian example is like many others around the globe: employees are compelled to adopt specific personae. By juxtaposing the luxury and opulence of a Western hotel complex with the modest, even quaint renderings of village life, certain propositions are made about civilization and hierarchy. Apart from the obvious racist overtones that pervade such hyperreal villages, Egypt is misrepresented by a static, continuous, and endlessly same village. Mock village sites are essentially populated by co-opted actors dressed in

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FIGURE 4. Reconstruction of balady village, Pioneer Hotel, Kharga Oasis.

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costume, serving food, pouring beer (with all its anti-Muslim associations), making craft goods and generally functioning as entertainment. Such performances are also about a commodified gaze of inequality, about those who serve and those who are there to be entertained. This certainly opens up another space for colonial fantasies of the Orient to be played out, now through the agency of the leisure industry. One has to question why many tourists might feel happier in visiting such constructed spaces rather than in actually encountering Egypt. Is this simply a response to the perceived threat to tourists safety that terrorists impose? Or are such practices part of the problem in the first instance? Perhaps for many ordinary Egyptians, foreigners are perceived not as individuals but as anonymous, indistinguishable groups who come en masse to visit the splendors of an Egypt past and who are fundamentally uninterested in meeting or making connections with living people: in fact they want to be spared such encounters at all costs. Would those same people feel the same sentiments travelling in Italy, Britain, or Australia, and would this ultimately prevent them from meeting the locals? Surely part of any authentic experience (and I use this term advisedly) of anothers homeland is to engage with its native population. With the increase of globalization in the pursuit of foreign products and experiences and more adventure-oriented, culturally charged tours, it would seem contradictory to negate such interactions. To reconcile such a contradiction I can only advert to the persistent residual impact of Orientalism and racism which marks certain groups as undesirable, and troublesome, and not possessing any cultural cachet. However, those who construct their identities as travellers rather than tourists will probably recognize the value of meeting local people in terms of authenticity, cultural exchange and perhaps even resistance to expected norms. I have often witnessed young travellers in Egypt who explicitly go native in an attempt to distance themselves from the older, more bourgeois tourists so that they may experience Egypt first hand by befriending a local, visiting a family home or becoming involved on a more intimate level. Much of this is short-lived: trains, planes and feluccas ensure that these experiences are transitory. And it must be said that even these putatively authentic social relations frequently operate within the discourse of colonial desire.

CONFRONTING EGYPT
Archaeologists, like anthropologists, must accept that they work within living communities, even if they study their long dead ancestors. There are exceptions to the rule, such as archaeologist Diana Craig Patch, who has organized field programs under the auspices of the Supreme Council of Antiquities and the American Research Center in Egypt with funding provided by USAID to train Egyptian inspectors in current field methodologies (Craig

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Patch, forthcoming). A team from Southampton working at Quseir, led by Stephanie Moser and David Peacock, has begun work on community outreach and museum programs. These are relatively new initiatives and ones that provide compelling examples of what archaeologists can and should be doing in Egypt. In most instances, archaeologists tend to fly in, do their fieldwork, pay their local workmen, and leave. We publish our results in scholarly journals, go to conferences, and sometimes encourage an Egyptian student to attend our academic institution. We do not usually involve ourselves in outreach programs in Egypt, involve local people in our interpretations, or publicize our results locally (in plain English or Arabic). Moreover, we do not recognize the importance of building museums or training Egyptian people in conservation or heritage management: nor do we expect to learn from the Egyptians and their unique experience. We then complain that they are ignorant, uneducated, and uninterested in Egyptian heritage. This common assertion, made by many people within the discipline, makes conducting research in Egypt and work in general less arduous and complicated. It excuses us from the dialogue. In 1998 and 1999 I co-directed a survey project in the Saqqara area and subsequently learned more about interrelationships between archaeologists and the local community than I did about settlement patterns in pharaonic times. As I had expected, these agricultural workers did not want us traversing their fields: they were frightened and often confrontational about archaeologists and the Antiquities Services taking away their land. And they often constructed elaborate narratives to explain that the topsoil came from Memphis, for instance, and so finding objects there only pointed to sites further east from Saqqara, conveniently away from their fields. We cannot blame them. Waving a piece of paper signed by a government official is perhaps the best way to alienate a group of farmers, and archaeology has subsequently achieved a poor reputation in this area. This situation might be remedied if archaeologists were to make some efforts towards involving people at a community level, discussing plans and findings, publicizing results in a meaningful manner, and creating education and museum facilities. In my few days away from Saqqara that year, after a particularly confrontational episode with one farmer, I decided to look more closely at the Egyptian urban landscape for some fragments of memorialization to the pharaonic past. This was not especially hard to find: examples are found in simple domestic decoration, public transport, civic monuments (FIG. 5), aeroplanes, and in logos of concrete companies, insurance brokers etc. Antiquity is constantly invoked in representations and celebrations of Egypt. Specifically in the 1920s and 1930s a neo-pharaonic style of architecture blossomed, generally attributed to Uthman Muharram (Volait 1988:45). This movement utilized the pyramid and pharaonic temple edifices in public buildings around Cairo. The period also witnessed the nationalistic paintings of Mahmud Said and the sculptures of Mahmud Mukhtar such as those that adorn the mauso-

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FIGURE 5. Civic building in the Delta, 1999.

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leum for Sad Zaghul, directly inspired by pharaonic style and motifs. Between 1930 and 1952 other overtures were made to the pharaonic past; Naguib Mafouz set his first three novels in ancient Egypt, the nationalistic use of Tutankhamuns tomb, the creation of the Museum of the Egyptian Civilisation, and the rewriting of the Egyptian past in school textbooks (Coudougnan 1988, Reid 1997). As Hassan recounts (1998:204), schools are the dissemination centers for knowledge of the pharaonic past, whereas Islamic heritage is integral to growing up at home. Many scholars have documented the movement known as pharaonicism (e.g., Marlowe 1965, Gershoni and Jankowski 1986, Goldschmidt Jr. 1988, Reid 1997) and its direct invocation of pharaonic ancestry in both cultural and biological spheres (Meskell, forthcoming). One has only to consult recent accounts of Egypts modern history to find examples from a variety of spheres that document the complex relationships between pharaonic Egypt and its modern Arab counterpart. The pharaonically inspired building program continued in later decades, yet perhaps on a more informal level. Thus we can document more recent casual and vernacular constructions away from government-orchestrated programs. In desert locations outside Cairo I found remarkable buildings celebrating pharaonic style, mostly warehouses and industrial buildings (FIG. 6). One example clearly incorporated both pharaonic and Islamic iconographies, patterns one might assume to be mutually exclusive and contradictory. Additionally, there are numerous statues and monuments around Cairo itself, such as the huge mural dedicated to the Egyptian armed forces in the suburb of Heliopolis (FIG. 7). This monument is on the main route to the airport and thus visible to every tourist travelling into Cairo. It is also at the heart of the Egyptian military complex, headquarters and officers clubs, and near Mubaraks residential palace, a prime area for national symbols and iconic resonances linking past and present. This massive mural documents the glory of an ancient empire and traces it through from pharaonic images of battle (pharaohs, chariots, archers) to modern images of warfare. The ancient representation of the Eye of Horus is juxtaposed with the symbol of nuclear energy. Ancient hieroglyphs and modern Arabic script sit side by side. With the ancient representation of the Nile as its uniting theme, the prowess of the Egyptian military is taken through from the Bronze Age to the modern era replete with rocket launchers, tanks, and planes. Pharaonic imagery is thus foregrounded in this potent locale, which includes nearby free-standing ancient monuments of obelisks and royal statues. The mural is also near the main headquarters of the national airline Egyptair, which employs the image of the pharaonic falcon deity, Horus. This image is emblazoned everywhere in this part of Cairo, in statuary, on billboards, and now in neon. Each plane in Egyptairs fleet is also named after an ancient Egyptian deity. A cynic might declare this propagandistic, a way of manipulating the glories of the past, but I would counter that this use of symbols and signs reinforces a connectivity with the past, allowing the Egyptians the intellect and sophistication

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FIGURE 6. Warehouse in the western desert, near Cairo, 1999.

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FIGURE 7. Mural celebrating Egyptian military history, Heliopolis, Cairo, 2000.

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to deploy the past on the basis of national pride, much as the Greeks or Turks might (Hamilakis 1996, Hamalakis and Yalouri 1996, papers in Meskell 1998). In an interesting parallel, the modern Greek people are often portrayed as inherently different and separated from their past, just as modern Egyptians are, but through different processes, such as ethnic mixing and enculturation. Clearly there is no single, monolithic ideological relationship between the modern Egyptian state, the people of Egypt, and their pharaonic past. Some sectors of the community undoubtedly feel proud and connected to their ancient heritage; government and tourist-related industries will seek to stress links to antiquity; others may recognize the importance and treasures of the past, but might not feel any specific lineage; while still others may simply enjoy picnicking amongst the ruins on holidays along with hundreds of their fellow countrymen. Pharaonicism may have declined since the 1930s, but there have been other engagements between modern and ancient Egypt, at both national and popular levels and through different social spheres. Recently, Lila Abu-Lughod has documented the ways in which relations with the pharaonic past, archaeology, and archaeologists have been encoded in popular culture, namely the ever-popular television soap operas (1998). In her work on the TV series Dream of the Southerner, she shows how an educated local teacher, a self-taught Egyptologist, struggles with a tomb-robber over the rightful place of antiquities in Egypt. In the serial, the local Egyptian archaeologist is portrayed heroically, as someone who recognizes the national importance of ancient treasures. The tomb-robber on the other hand, works with foreign collectors and one of his cronies actually sets an Islamist group against the Egyptologist. This scenario reinforces the government-sanctioned view through an extremely popular medium of representation. The popularity and long-standing appeal of such themes suggests a concerted message that is of interest to various groups. This impels us to rewrite our old narratives about the lack of connectivity between past and present and to recognize the colonialist substrate that inheres in such assertions. The colonialist endeavor was activated by numerous desires and needs; it took hold in a variety of forms; and colonialist formations survive and are reactivated today in a multitude of ways (Jacobs 1996:17). Most of us either visit Egypt or practice Egyptian archaeology as if we still inhabited an ancient landscape, ignoring the living people and their traditions. There are exceptions, but they remain somewhat unique in the wider sphere of practice in Egypt. Archaeologists must become more politicized, certainly more theorized about the activities and their implications and more active in their negotiations in a fuller global settingand that includes the local level. Only when this level of involvement is achieved can we truly enter discussions about responsibility and ethics and make our proper contribution to the social sciences and, more importantly, to the people of Egypt.

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
A version of this paper was presented for the presidential panel on politics at the Archaeological Institute of America meetings in December 1999. It represents preliminary work in an ongoing project. The current version owes much to subsequent discussions with a number of colleagues: Lila AbuLughod, Zainab Bahrani, Emma Blake, James Conlon, Ian Hodder, Elizabeth Smith and Tim Mitchell. Their support and encouragement in this new endeavour are greatly appreciated.

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NOTES 1. Quoted from Emad Mekay in the Middle East Times (http://metimes.com/ issue30/eg/4luxor.htm). 2. From CNN interactive news (http://www.cnn.com/WORLD/9709/18/egypt. attack.730/index.html)