C

A
BEFORE (AND AFTER) NEOLIBERALISM: Tacit
Knowledge, Secrets of the Trade, and the Public Sector
in Egypt
JULIA ELYACHAR
University of California, Irvine
Anthropologists have good reason to hate neoliberalism.
1
Across the globe,
policies called neoliberal have had devastating impacts on the people with whom
anthropologists work. Referring to neoliberalism has become a shorthand way
of signaling all that is wrong in the ethnographic present, much as a previous
generation of anthropologists would refer to globalization. In the process, we have
risked turning neoliberalism from concept into epithet (Guyer 2007).
2
By way of
contrast, I draw here on neoliberalisms historiography to make sense of eldwork
I conducted in Cairo with public and private sector bankers.
3
I analyze my data in
light of debates in central Europe in the 1920s and 1930s that were foundational
to the establishment of neoliberalism. Those debates were about the feasibility of
conducting economic life through a planned public sector versus the free market
system.
Why turn to the history of political and economic thought to understand
actually existing neoliberalism in Egypt or elsewhere? Failures of neoliberalism are
often individualized, calling forth invitations to try again and get it right (Foucault
2008:215266; Mitchell 2002:272303). My goal is not to show the gap between
the ideas of neoliberalisms founders and neoliberalism in practice. Nor is it to
show traces of the past in the present as opposed to thinking about the future
(Munn 1992:166; see also Guyer 2007). To think seriously about the future, we
need to better understand the political debates and conceptual conicts that shape
our political and economic imaginary today. Otherwise, it can become too easy to
CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY, Vol. 27, Issue 1, pp. 7696. ISSN 0886-7356, online ISSN 1548-1360. C
2012 by the
American Anthropological Association. All rights reserved. DOI: 10.1111/j.1548-1360.2011.01127.x
BEFORE (AND AFTER) NEOLIBERALISM
project visions of the future along a path preordained by a singular vision of the past.
4
This is a matter of import for theoretical debates about neoliberalismanywhere and
for those defending the January 25th Revolution in Egypt as a revolution against
neoliberalism (Ambrust 2011).
I approach the broad issue of neoliberalism in this article by focusing on the
question of tacit knowledge. There are many possible meanings to tacit. The most
famous formulations in the 1930s were those of Heidegger and Wittgenstein in
philosophy. But the decade also saw the formulation of tacit desires in Freud; tacit
signs in Mead; and tacit concepts in Boas.
5
In this article, I am concerned with one
particular formulation of the tacit from the 1930s: tacit knowledge as understood
by philosopher of science Michael Polanyi and adopted by Friedrich Hayek in his
formulation of the knowledge problem that was foundational to neoliberalism.
The centrality of tacit knowledge is important for anthropologists to un-
derstand for a few reasons. Anthropology is characteristically occupied with the
tacitthat which we reveal and render explicit through critical inquiry and ethnog-
raphy (Kockelman 2007; Strathern 1998, 2005). Neoliberalism, by way of contrast,
is what we often dene ourselves against. But the tacit and neoliberalismare deeply
intertwined. My ethnographic research shows, furthermore, that arguments used
to justify privatization at all costs based on Hayeks early work do not hold up, even
on his terms. Finally, neoliberalism originated in debates among intellectuals in the
very specic historical circumstances of central Europe in the 1920s and 1930s,
which included the victories of Communism and the rise of National Socialism.
Neoliberalism is a theory grounded in a particular time and place. We can see
this better, and help provincialize neoliberalism, when we contrast the story of
its foundation with a very different debate in Egypt about the public sector and
privatization from the 1950s to this day.
CALCULATING THE PUBLIC SECTOR
My interest in tacit knowledge began in the eld, with a public sector banker
I will call Mr. Amir.
6
I would have known with my eyes closed that Mr. Amir
worked in the public sector when I rst met him toward the end of 1995. Neglect
of the public sector was palpable in the smells and the heat in the building where
he worked. Air conditioning in Mr. Amirs ofce groaned more than it cooled:
the hot and humid air of Cairo in July could not be cordoned off. Here was the
feel of Cairo as lived by its poor majority, struggling each day to get to work in
ancient public buses or furiously beeping microbuses to jobs that barely paid for
the commute and food for the kids.
77
CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY 27:1
The bank had garnered millions of dollars in capital from foreign donors for
loans to Egypts working poor, unemployed, and youth. About 30 of my informants
in those years received such loans. It was still possible in the 1990s for these young
men (shabab) to believe in the exemplary life of the microentrepreneur being
promoted by development agencies and the Egyptian regime. It seemed to my
informants to be the bank, rather than the regime as a whole, that was keeping
them from their goals. This would change by 2010.
I found my way to Mr. Amir by accident. I expected nothing much from
the interview, but it turned out to be a crucial part of my eldwork. Mr. Amir
had a college degree and spoke excellent modern standard Arabicbetter than the
bankers I workedwithinUSAID-fundedprograms whohadbeeneducatedinFrench
and English schools in Cairo. Nor did he sprinkle English phrases into his Arabic
like they did in an interview situationeven when talking about banks or business.
Rather, he might switch to a more popular (shabi) level of Cairene Arabic instead.
Mr. Amir conducted his nancial business in the ow of conversation, which was
punctuated, in turn, by a ow of cigarettes, phone calls, and streams of people
coming and going, offering coffee and water, and asking for help. He worked
three landlines on his sprawling desk without losing concentration or looking
harassed. Doors opened and closed; telephones rang and were answered; requests
were considered and addressed; cigarettes were passed across the room and lit.
Through these communicative channels, nance oweda kind of nance that
was neither abstract nor attening (Simmel 1978). Although Mr. Amirs way of
gathering, ltering, and processing information could appear chaotic, he had little
problem assessing risk or calculating value. His lending unit was protable and
had an excellent track record. His strongest lending technique and mode of risk
assessment, he said, was his sense (hiss) of the market, which he had honed over the
years.
Mr. Amir had started his banking career in 1965only a few years after
Gamal Abdel Nasser instituted sweeping nationalizations of Egyptian businesses.
He was born in a shabi neighborhood of Cairo and grewup before the Free Ofcers
Movement took power in a coup in 1952. He graduated from Cairo University
in 1965 with a degree in commerce (tigarah) and went straight to work for the
Industrial Bank. His training came on the job, like the craftsmen and small business
owners he specialized in funding.
The rst day I met Mr. Amir he was in the middle of a meeting with the
owner of a small publishing house established in 1913. The ties between the bank
and rm were long and friendly. Mr. Nadeem, the owner of the rm, had taken
78
BEFORE (AND AFTER) NEOLIBERALISM
out a number of loans from the bank. He recounted them by name: the sixth
World Bank loan at seven percent interest; the Saudi loan to the bank, at easy
terms, nine percent, from which the bank had gotten its four percent spread; and
the seventh World Bank loan. These loans were named, not abstract nance, and
both sides remembered the details of each deal.
Mr. Amir was an employee of the state (dawlah) and a defender of the wealth of
the Egyptian people held in the state public sector. The government (hukumah), by
way of contrast, often stole and privatized that wealth for the benet of a few. Mr.
Amirs job was to lend the states money and to make sure it would be returned.
Anyoneincluding government ofcialswho tried to steal the states wealth
was immoral. To guard against that eventuality, he had to knowthe market, as only
someone with long experience in constantly changing rules of the game could:
Whenever theres trade going on, whenever theres movement in trade,
theres going to be a parallel movement of swindling and chicanery, which
abound in the Egyptian market [en-nasb wa el-ihtiyal es-suq el-masri].
The swindlers a much nicer guy, much more appealing than the serious
man. The swindler will come in, dressed up all chic and beautiful, with
an impressive briefcase and cell phone. Hell talk to you real nice. Ive been
tricked lots of times. Now, I depend on my impressions and my sense of things,
100 percent. That is the only reliable way to know. Ive learned everything
from my experience with my clients, all coming in here with different styles
of dodging and feinting.
7
What can we make of a public sector banker who relies rst and foremost on tacit
forms of knowledge to preserve the states public resources? To answer, I will turn
to the calculation debate that led up to the establishment of neoliberal theory (as
well as theory of market socialism).
THE CALCULATION DEBATE AND JUST BEFORE NEOLIBERALISM
The calculation debate arose froma very practical policy dilemma.
8
Howcould
an economy be run without private property and thus without prices? The Soviet
Union and other experiments such as municipal socialism in 1920s Vienna faced
these urgent questions. Communist intellectuals and others sympathetic to the
possibilities of central planning had to demonstrate the feasibility of the economic
organization of a socialist society (Rosner 1990:55; see also Hull 2006:146). This
initiated a wave of concern with howto calculate and account for value in a socialist
system.
79
CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY 27:1
The debate began in central Europe, in countries that were once part of
the Austro-Hungarian Empire and its elaborate systems of knowing and counting.
Marxists such as Otto Neurath, head of planning in the brief Bavarian Soviet
Republic, argued that lessons of the war economy could be drawn on for a
centrally planned natural economy without money or prices (Neurath 1919,
2004; Chaloupek 2007; Hayek 1935:3032; Hull 2006:146). Ludwig von Mises,
then secretary of the Vienna Chamber of Commerce and organizer of one of
the most prominent seminars of the period (which involved one of his students,
Friedrich von Hayek), was scathing in his response. He outlined the problems
with calculation under socialism in his classic paper, Economic Calculation in the
Socialist Society, published in German in 1920 and in English in 1935 (Mises
1935). Socialists, he wrote, had not even begun to think seriously about the issues
involved with socialist economics.
Mises shifted the debate to the question of rationality itself. Rational economic
activity, he famously proclaimed, is impossible in a socialist commonwealth.
Socialism was the abolition of rational economy (Mises 1935:110, 130; see also
Hull 2006:147). State intervention in the economy would, moreover, inevitably
lead to a completely centrally planned economy (Hull 2006:147; Mises 1935).
This laid the ground for Hayeks later famous claim that planning robbed people
of their basic freedoms and turned them into serfs (Hayek 2007). Freedom relied
on price, which in a market situation could express even the unconscious desires
and knowledge of the individual. The only social system ever evolved for tapping
that knowledge and coordinating it as usable information was the system of private
property regulated by the rule of law. No single personlet alone a party or state
organizationcould know the economy. If an individual could not know what he
or she thought, then the very idea of central planning immediately collapsed.
Even if the state owned the means of production, socialist economists replied,
managers could still compete as if they were capitalists. Given the same technology
and resources as capitalists, socialist managers could also reach optimal market
equilibrium (Foley 2006; Vaughn 1980). The socialists focused on proving the
theoretical possibility of planning in a mixed economy to the detriment of exploring
the relation of this model to howmarkets actually worked (Vaughn 1980:542544).
The debate between Hayek and socialists had a huge impact on economic theory,
shifting it away from equilibrium analysis (Foley 2006; Hull 2006:150). The once
prevalent assumption that economies tended to equilibrium emerged as a special
case of a more general problemof howknowledge is acquired and communicated
(Hayek 2009:46). But wider implications of the knowledge problem raised by
80
BEFORE (AND AFTER) NEOLIBERALISM
Hayek were not widely addressed at the time (Vaughn 1980:551552). Some of
the questions that remained are of great import today.
MAKING AND UNMAKING THE PUBLIC SECTOR
In Egypt the debate about the public sector versus the free market came about
differently.
9
Debates and polemics among economists in central Europe about
planning and the public sector were not relevant to the establishment of the public
sector in Egypt in the 1960s. This does not mean that Egyptians were untrained
in economics or had no coherent approach to political economy. After all, Hayek
(let alone Mises) was marginal in the West until the revival of neoliberalism in the
1970s (Harvey 2005). Keynesian economics, which also relied on tools of planning
and was thus also a target of Hayeks wrath, was orthodox in Egypt as in the West.
Everyone in Egypt assumed the centrality of development economics and the
role of the state in economic life (Gouda Abdel-Khalek, personal communication,
March 30, 2010).
Most of the technocrats relied on by Nasser and his associates to run the
economy and to construct the public sector received their higher degrees from
universities in North America or Europe, from departments of commerce or plan-
ning, rather than economics per se. Abd al-Galil al-Imari had a degree in commerce
from Leeds University, had previously served in Egyptian administrations, and
was pretty much left alone to devise economic policy in the rst years after the
coup (Tignor 1998:68). Rashid al-Barrawi had been a professor in the School of
Commerce at Cairo University, had socialist credentials, but favored liberalizing
laws that restricted the growth of Egypts potential oil and mining industries (Tignor
1998:6869).
10
Aziz Sidqi, Egypts rst minister of industry and the chief architect
of the public sector, went to the United States in 1946 to receive two M.A.s,
in architecture and in planning, and then a Ph.D. in regional economic planning
from Harvard University in 1951, with a thesis Industrialization of Egypt: The
Case Study of Iron and Steel (Tignor 1998). Similarly, economics professors in
Egyptian universities in the 1940s and 1950s were usually educated abroad, mostly
in Great Britain or in the United States, while others went to France (Abdel-Khalek,
personal communication, March 30, 2010).
11
The Free Ofcers did not set out to create a socialist economy. But in the
wake of a U.S. retreat on promises for a loan to build the Aswan Dam and the
tripartite aggression against Egypt in 1957, options moved toward socialism. All
this built on a long history of resentment about the domination of nance capital
and foreign banks in the country. For example, while the debates about calculation
81
CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY 27:1
and the role of banks in a planned economy were under way in Central Europe,
banks in Egypt in the 1930s were still drawing in signicant deposits from Egyptian
investors and savers but sending those funds overseas to pay off their investors in
Europe, rather than investing anything in a national economy (Mitchell 2002;
Tignor 1998:35).
The Free Ofcers passedOrdinance Number 22in1957, whichstipulatedthat
all banks operating in Egypt were to have only Egyptian shareholders and Egyptian
directors (Tignor 1998:136). Banks such as Barclays Bank, the Ottoman Bank,
Credit Lyonnais, and Comptoir nationale dEscompte de Paris were made Egyptian
at a stroke. Some of these banks had been present in Egypt for more than 100 years
In the same year, the Free Ofcers laid the legal groundwork for the establishment
of the public sector and created the Egyptian Economic Organization (al-Muassasa
al-Iqtisadiya), the legal entity and primary instrument for the expansion of the public
sector in the years to come (Tignor 1998:136137). Nationalization proper began
in July 1961, with the issuance of laws 117, 118, and 119. In December of the same
year, the Supreme Council for Public Organizations was established to supervise
38 public organizations, themselves comprised of 367 companies. By 1967, the
sweep of organizations supervised by the Supreme Council was 48 organizations
overseeing 382 afliated companies, in operations ranging from arms production
to theatres (McDermott 1988:122).
The socialist laws left the power of the state virtually unchallenged in the
corporate sector (Tignor 1998:163). The Nasser regime proclaimed that it would
achieve popular control of economic institutions by way of public sector control
(Tignor 1998). Establishment of a public sector would drastically increase industrial
productivity even as it created a more just society (Tignor 1998). A pervasive
antimonopoly stance of the Free Ofcers (Vitalis 1995:215217) was matched by
the imperative of development. If capitalists would not invest to grow the national
economy, then the state would expropriate their resources and do it for them.
These views, rather than the calculation debate, shaped the making of the public
sector in Egypt.
The economy created by these Egyptian economists, planners, and engineers
looked quite different than the picture of economic domination painted so starkly
by Hayek in 1977 in The Road to Serfdom (2007). Like Hayek, the planners of the
public sector in Egypt were staunch antimonopolists (Vitalis 1995). But the public
sector they made was much different than what Hayek had predicted. Egypt ended
up with a loosely regulated public sector, where decentralization and a great deal
of freedom of operation reigned. The private sector, by way of contrast, was
82
BEFORE (AND AFTER) NEOLIBERALISM
tightly regulated (Tignor 1998). (A vast range of workshops producing all kinds
of economic services and products were generally left out of the debates about
planning.)
TACIT KNOWLEDGE AND ENTRENEURIAL SUBJECTS IN POLANYI
AND HAYEK
The debate about planning was in no small part a debate about knowledge.
Planned economies, whether socialist or Keynesian, relied on statistical information
gathered by state agencies. But this kind of technical knowledge missed much of
what was central to the actual workings of the market. Formal economic models
and statistics gathered by the state could not take into account the entire realm
of tacit knowledgeunsystematized, unverbalized forms of knowledge that were
integrated into the body itself, rather than being formed in the brain through the
study of books.
The idea of planning, Mises and Hayek maintained, rested on a fallacy. Dis-
persed fragments of knowledge existed in and were wedded to discrete bodies and
minds; they could not be brought together and abstracted in one mind (Hayek 1945;
Hull 2006:150). Both the socialists and the national socialists (and the Keynesians,
soon enough) were thus fatally misguided from an economic point of view. The
problem was not merely computational. Each person has some advantage over
all others because he possesses unique information of which benecial use can be
made, but of which use can be made only if the decisions depending on it are left
to him or are made with his active cooperation (Hayek 1945:530). As such, the
question of whether planning was possible lacked not only an answer but also the
intellectual mastery of a problem which so far we have only learnt to formulate
(Hayek 1935:242).
Hayeks formulation of this problem built, rst of all, on Misess critique
of socialist calculation. But like a good anthropologist (Strathern 1998, 2005),
Hayek also imported the concept of tacit knowledge from outside his eld to
shift the grounds of debate. He got the concept of tacit knowledge from Michael
Polanyi (brother of Karl). Polanyi was a chemist and polymath who had become
anticommunist after visiting the Soviet Union to investigate Soviet claims to a
proletarian science. He spent much of the rest of his life arguing for the freedom of
science and for a theory of tacit knowledge as central to all aspects of the scientic
endeavor as well as to economic life.
Polanyi argued that even in his own original eld of chemistry, the most exact
of sciences, something inexact was essential to scientic discovery (Gill 2000;
83
CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY 27:1
Polanyi 1966, 1974). This inexact source of knowledge lay inside the individual.
It could not be known or tapped even by the individual who bore that knowledge,
let alone to a scientic planner. Throughout his career, Polanyi emphasized the
individual nature of discovery, unhindered by ofcial or dogmatic interference
(Cash 1977). Economic life, just like science, could not be planned. Like science,
it should be left to evolve as a spontaneous order.
12
Scientic research, Polanyi wrote, should proceed like the free market. There
could be no central control, planning, or any form of association that determined
the actions of its members (Baker 1978:390). The scientist needed to be like
an independent businessman in liberal society (Baker 1978). Just as businessmen
needed to rely on freely available information to adjust the prices of his goods,
thus helping in regulating production, so the scientist used the results published by
other scientists in determining the course of his own research; and knowledge accu-
mulated as a result (Baker 1978). Polanyis simile for the scientistthe individual
entrepreneurial subjectis quite striking. Hayek overthrew the economic subject
as conscious individual. But he only went halfwayto an unconscious individual
economic subject.
TRAINING OUT THE TACIT IN THE PRIVATE SECTOR
According to Hayek, the free market alone can take advantage of tacit knowl-
edge. The public sector cannot use it. I found something different in my eldwork.
Granted, my data is limited, but I found that tacit knowledge can be cultivated
in the public sector and squashed in the private sector. Such a nding would
undercut Hayeks justication for why the public sector must be avoided at all
costs.
The public sector created under Abdel Nasser began to be privatized in
the 1970s. Privatization in Egypt and other postcolonial states at the time was
not justied through the theory and ideology of neoliberalism. The revival of
neoliberalism in the West was just under way in the 1970s (Harvey 2005). It did
not make its way into development orthodoxy until the 1980s and 1990s. Can we
say that conditions for the cultivation of tacit knowledge in Egypt increased with
privatization? Privatizationproceededunevenly andhas beencontestedat every step
of the way in Egypt by unions, unorganized workers, various political parties, and
professional organizations (see Beinen 2010). Privatization of the banking system
was agreed to in principle but was resisted in practice through the 1990s. As late as
1998, four state-owned banks still accounted for 80 percent of commercial deposits
84
BEFORE (AND AFTER) NEOLIBERALISM
in Egypt (OECD n.d.:1, I.4).
13
Ten years later, privatization had put about half
of the banking sector in private hands.
14
Given the obstacles to privatizing banks in Egypt in the 1990s, the USAID
and others instituted programs aimed at extending the scope of the private sector
via microlending. As part of my eldwork on micronance, I attended a number
of training sessions for bankers entering that eld. One such training session in
1995 was held in the Baron Hotel in Heliopolis, was funded by USAID, and was
led by one of my informants, Mr. Shawqi Adil, who was head of a microlending
program at the private sector bank NDB. Mr. Adil had begun working in nance
before the Free Ofcers coup of 1952. He worked for public sector banks in the
Nasser era and rejoined the private sector after 1976, having spent eight years in
the Gulf working for a Saudi Arabian bank, where he made his fortune. His mi-
crolending programwas extremely successful.
15
He was well funded by multilateral
funders and international NGOs, charged about 22 percent interest, and claimed a
100 percent repayment rate. Mr. Adil hoped his program would become the
Grameen Bank of the Middle East.
Inside the Baron Hotel in Heliopolis, some 80 young men and women settled
into their chairs for the second day of the training program. Adil gave a lecture
about banking, trust, and the informal economy. He then opened the oor for
questions. Audience members politely asked about repayment and loan policies
and other technical matters. A young man named Ahmed then asked a question
that led to a lively outburst of laughter, interjections, and more shouted questions.
Mr. Adil stood silent and perplexed for a minute. When things got chaotic, as he
later complained, he raised his voice, demanded silence, brought the impromptu
debate to a close, and returned to the format of the training session as if nothing
had happened.
The question that Ahmed had asked concerned a term from Egyptian Arabic
called fahlawah that is difcult to translate but can mean street smarts or trickery.
Ahmed wanted to knowif he could use fahlawah in retail banking as a representative
of the bank. Someone then asked Ahmed to dene fahlawah. He could not. Others
tried. They could not nd a satisfying denition, and completely ignored Mr. Adil in
their excitement. Mr. Adil thought the question was disrespectful and a distraction
from the topic at hand, as he told me later. I think he was wrong.
FAHLAWAH AND SECRETS OF THE TRADE
In Middle Eastern studies, fahlawah is usually discussed in the context of
popular Egyptian culture of the poor urban masses of Cairo. Fahlawah implies
85
CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY 27:1
such qualities as sharpness, cleverness and alertness and a kind of intelligence
that springs from experience rather than formal education (El-Mesiri 1978:50).
It comes from continuous interaction with all sorts of people, [through which] a
person becomes knowledgeable about human behavior (El-Mesiri 1978). Fahlawah
is a characteristic of the ibn al-balad, the young male heroic gure of the popular
classes who defends the weak and community property, and watches out for his
own (Elyachar 2005:137138; El-Mesiri 1978:41).
But fahlawah comes into local analyses of the Egyptian economy as well.
Economist Talaat Abdel-Malek, for example, has used the term to describe how
the Mubarak regime gave verbal compliance to orders from the United States and
the International Monetary Fund to privatize the economy, even while keeping up
practical resistance (Abdel-Malek 2002). A master of fahlawah knows with whom
he is dealing and howto act in any particular situation, in the market and in politics.
From this point of view, fahlawah can be used to advantage in the marketplace or
in politics by a weaker group against a stronger or as a way to access information
that is not available to all. El-Mesiris use of fahlawah as a kind of intelligence aptly
describes how Mr. Amir worked as a banker. Both Abdel-Maleks and El-Mesiris
usages described tacit knowledge, which Mr. Adil refused to consider. Rather, he
insisted on preformatted technical knowledge of a kind that Hayek said doomed
the public sector to failure.
Polanyi and Hayek located tacit knowledge in each individual. Individuals
were woven together in the market into a broader wholea spontaneous order
via the price system, which translated their knowledge into useful information.
Without that price system, tacit knowledge would remain buried. In Cairo, among
workshop owners of the popular classes, as Ahmed intimated with his question
about fahlawah, the situation is different. Knowledge in the workshops is trans-
mitted across generations through apprenticeship, and information is constantly
conveyed back and forth horizontally across workings in settings from the cof-
feehouse to the workshop to the street. This information is not accessible via a
uniform price system. Knowledge of the market and essential market informa-
tion is available to anyone who is a member of the same semiotic community
(Kockelman 2005:261262) or who is a master of the language and gestural re-
sources that would mark him as such. Mr. Amir was such a person. To access this
kind of knowledge of the market and how it worked from the outside, you needed
to be a master of fahlawah, which is where Ahmed seemed to be heading with his
question.
86
BEFORE (AND AFTER) NEOLIBERALISM
Fahlawah is not the only concept in Egypt that renders explicit tacit knowledge
in the market. Secrets of the trade (asrar el-mihnah) is another kind of tacit knowledge
that was recognized by my informants as central to market life. That was the case
both in craft workshops and in the public sector bank. Secrets of the trade usually
refer to tacit ways of doing things that were historically transmitted in the course of
apprenticeshipinthe craft guilds (tawaif al-hirayah). They didnot disappear when
guilds were dissolvedas legal entities.
16
These secrets were a legally recognizedform
of intellectual property in Egypt through its long nineteenth century (Chalcraft
2004, 2005). My informants completely accepted that those secrets were the
legitimate property of workshop masters.
17
Mr. Amir was being pushed by funders in the World Bank to demand that
his borrowers in small-scale enterprises send their workers for training sessions.
He refused this condition because his borrowers, he said, were too concerned
about losing their secrets of the trade: The manager is afraid of losing his skilled
workers and his secrets of the trade (asrar al-mihnah). We have to work around
those concerns. I was struck by his use of this term. I had not expected someone in
a public sector bank to be concerned about this concept associated with Ottoman
history and craft workshops. Like fahlawah, the topic of secrets of the trade is usually
conned to Middle Eastern studies, although they are not completely foreign to
Western economic history. They are discussed in literature on the guilds in England
through the early 19th century (Thompson 1993:234268)
18
and in Adam Smiths
The Wealth of Nations, where he writes of the guilds and secrets of the trade as part
of the Inequalities occasioned by the Policy of Europe (Smith 1981, vol. 1:135).
Smith was concerned that secrets of the trade could lead to deviations, whether
occasional or permanent, of the market price of commodities from the natural
price (Smith 1981, vol. 1:80). E. P. Thompson, by way of contrast, focuses on
secrets of the trade as part of the cultural commons of the guilds in English history
(Thompson 1993). Secrets disappeared in classical political economy after Smith.
The Turks (as they were called by Smith and others) and their secrets were
relegated to the footnotes and metaphors of economic history within the social
sciences. Then they disappeared from economics altogether. But their traces can
be found in modern property law, including copyright and intellectual property
and in the notion of trade secrets.
MANAGEMENT STUDIES AND TACIT KNOWLEDGE
I cannot say what rendered tacit knowledge and secrets of the trade invisible
to neoliberal policy makers and their local agents in Egypt. Polanyis and Hayeks
87
CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY 27:1
obsession with the individual as the locus of tacit knowledge may have been a cause.
Another reason might be a common distain for knowledge practices associated with
the popular classes of Egypt. Topics such as secrets of the trade and fahlawah can
seem both uneconomic and archaic. But management studies has had no such
worries.
Inspired by research carried out by anthropologist Jean Lave with tailors
and their apprentices in Liberia (Lave 2011), in the 1980s management studies
drew heavily on the notion of tacit knowledge. Lave formulated the concept of
communities of practice to talk about tacit modes of learning in an apprenticeship
situation. Her concept was transplanted by her student Etienne Wenger into
management studies and taken up by John Seely Brown, director of Xerox PARC
and also one of Wengers advisers. This spawned a mini industry of books about the
tacit knowledge lurking in communities of practice within the center of Western
market society.
Books and articles soon proliferated on the topic of tacit knowledge in jour-
nals and scholarly books in management studies as well as in the business press
(Allee 1997; Huysman 2004; Nonaka and Takeuchi 1995:103106; Tsoukas
2003:420425; Tsoukas and Mylonopoulos 2004:78). Management studies fo-
cused on tacit knowledge as being generated by practitioners of a trade who learn
by doing and are unable to describe what they know or how they know it. Practi-
tioners and theorists were interested in how to capture, transmit, or convert tacit
knowledge into explicit knowledge that could be used by an organization or rm.
19
Communities of practice became here a sociotechnical device that could generate
tacit knowledge. Tacit knowledge is collective in origin but unmarked by traces
of property or possession and thus is available for the taking by agents who could
mine, format, and claim it. Tacit knowledge became a new source for prot.
No one in the management debates brought up the question of property. That
is, no one talked about who should benet from the outcomes of tacit knowledge.
As long as secrets of the trade were recognized as property of the guild, the
prots of tacit knowledge accrued to members of the guild. As secrets of the
trade were written out of political economy and disappeared as a property right,
tacit knowledge lost its status as a collective form of intellectual property. Tacit
knowledge was individualized together with the community in communities of
practice (Duguid 2008). Tacit knowledge ended up back where Hayek and Polanyi
had located it: in the individual entrepreneurial subject. Tacit knowledge was but
a free resource awaiting appropriation by the rm. No property rights wed it to
the community in which it had been spawned. The rediscovery of tacit knowledge
88
BEFORE (AND AFTER) NEOLIBERALISM
thus appears to be another step in the inexorable march forward of neoliberalism.
But the story is not so simple.
TOWARD A CONCLUSION
Socialism was a utopian dream, according to Mises and Hayek. Polanyis
concept of tacit knowledge was central to their argument of why that was so.
But the neoliberal free market they espoused in contrast was at least as utopian.
Outcomes of policies called neoliberal and promoted by think tanks such the
Cato Institute, the Koch Brothers, and the Mont Pellerin Society that Hayek
himself founded, moreover, have little in common with the economic model and
functions of the market that Hayek espoused. The point of rereading the debates
that helped create neoliberalism, and locating them in their contemporary context
is not to measure the gap between the dream and the reality. Rather, it can help
us better understand how traces of those debates that are left out of dominant
accounts still affect us in the ethnographic present.
Opposed to the free market in the calculation debate was the public sec-
tor, with its potentially vast powers to destroy rationality and spread like a can-
cer through the economy as a whole. But the public sectorand Egypt was no
exceptionnever had the vast powers feared by the early neoliberals. Nassers
regime may have been totalitarian, but the public sector was not. Instead, it was a
sprawling entity. As Hayek predicted (but to different effect), no one could know
it, and no one, therefore, could control it (Tignor 1998:185). Decentralization and
autonomy prevailed (Tignor 1998). Egypt was not unique in this regard. Managers
under socialism could never could know or command everything (Verdery 1996,
2003). We need to know a great deal more about how rms in the public sector
actually worked. Unraveling the myth of a monolithic public sector is also an
essential part of decoding mystical beliefs in the free market.
Hayek raised complex and rich questions in the calculation debate. Most
anthropologists would be comfortable with those questions. Few would nd fault
with his critique of statistics as the basis for knowledge. Fewwould reject the insight
that markets are decisively inter-subjective and complex unplanned systems
(Foley 2006:207). It is a mistake to dismiss Hayeks early questions together with
the outcomes of the neoliberalism he helped create. Nor should we write about
neoliberalism as if it had agency (neoliberalism does this or that) or grant it more
coherence than it in fact possesses. For such an approach indirectly reinforces
the ideological coherence of neoliberalism, as Gibson-Graham (2006) pointed out
some time ago regarding capitalism.
89
CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY 27:1
Mr. Amir agreed with Hayek in many ways. Knowledge was unstable and em-
bodied, and it escaped statistics. But Hayek, following Polanyi, sawtacit knowledge
as internal to the discrete individual. Mr. Amirs tacit knowledge was a collective
affair. It belonged to those who spoke Egyptian Arabic, had access to its semiotic
resources, and were master practitioners of market life. Tacit knowledge was a
collective inheritance, embodied in collective subjects. It remained so even if not
recognized as a property right. A successful public sector banker had to be a son
of the people, ibn al-balad, the exemplary gure of Egyptian shabi culture. He had
to know how to maneuver in any kind of situation, how to talk the language of
the educated with the educated, the language of the streets on the street, and the
language of the elite with the state. He had to be a master of fahlawah (cleverness)
and to know how to operate and maneuver in all kinds of changing situations
(El-Mesiri 1978:49). For Hayek, the existence of tacit knowledge showed why
collective planning was a logical impossibility. For Mr. Amir, tacit knowledge was
a collective competence essential to the protability of the public sector bank. It
was his responsibility, as a custodian of state resources, to be a master of fahlawah
and tacit knowledge of the marketplace.
Secrets of the trade are a collective embodied knowledge practice. So is
fahlawah. The exemplary gure of the ibn al-balad, in turn, is a defender not only
of the weak and of community resources as traditionally understood but also of
collective semiotic resources and embodied knowledge. These semiotic resources
and embodied practices are forms of tacit knowledge. They are locally recognized as
being valuable; the exemplary gure of the ibn al-balad already makes this recogni-
tion clear. But unlike secrets of the trade, these resources and practices have never
been conceptualized as a property right. As tacit knowledge they have potential
economic value. This much we can take from Hayek, as well as from his various
intellectual heirs who theorized how to mine cultural practice for prot in the
1980s and 1990s (Elyachar 2005). But need we assume that the potential economic
value those resources and practices represent is always, necessarily, dispossessed
by neoliberalism once recognized? Debates about indigenous knowledge in politics
and in anthropology have made clear this need not be so. But those debates have
also shed light on the intellectual and political pitfalls of conceptualizing indige-
nous rights through the framework of intellectual property rights (Anderson 2009;
Coombe 1998; Hayden 2003). Debates in the history of thought from Egypt and
the Ottoman Empire about secrets of the trade as a property right could be useful
here as well.
90
BEFORE (AND AFTER) NEOLIBERALISM
Until recently, it has been easy to dismiss efforts to uncover new forms of
knowledge and value as inherently neoliberalmeaning, here, as leading inevitably
to dispossession. That answer has been pervasive in anthropology. To ask whether
the search for new forms of knowledge and value can lead to a different kind of
political project than neoliberal dispossession both takes us back in intellectual
history and forward to future political and eldwork projects. It shows how much
more complicated the history of neoliberalism is than we tend to believe. As
ethnographers of neoliberalism, we need to go back to the highly conjectural
moments of the 1920s and 1930s and pick up other strands of the debate about
neoliberalism. We also need to think about those footnotes of economic history in
Smith that reference secrets and guilds from the East and bring those back to the
forefront of our investigations into anthropology of the economic. In the process,
we will greatly enhance our ability to see traces of the future in the disasters that
neoliberalisms have wrought.
ABSTRACT
For anthropologists, the term neoliberal often becomes a shorthand for indicating all
that is wrong with the present. But such usage of the term can foreclose our ability to
imagine different futures. In this article, I go back to a time before neoliberalism, when
economists and philosophers were engaged in debates about the rationality of economic
planning within market economies, and in which the concept of tacit knowledge
was pivotal. These 1920s and 1930s thinkers, especially Hayek and von Mises, were
convinced that collectivism and planning would not work, and their work is cited still
today as having established the basis for laissez-faire (neoliberal) capitalism. I critically
juxtapose their ndings with a historical analysis of the public sector in Egypt, with
a short excursis into management theory (and research on tacit knowledge), and with
my own ethnography. Looking at the case of a successful public sector banker I worked
with in Cairo, I show how he relied on tacit knowledge as a collective inheritance that
was embodied in collective subjects and secrets of the trade. My ndings thus call
into question Hayeks argument about the irrationality of collectivism and economic
planning. They also point to the importance of tacit knowledge practices as collective
and public goods in our economic imaginary of the future.
NOTES
Acknowledgments. This article was presented as a paper at the International Center for Ad-
vanced Studies, New York University; the Department of Anthropology, University of California at
Irvine; and the Conference on Rethinking Capitalism, University of California at Santa Cruz. I thank
members of those audiences for their comments and questions. I also thank for their help, comments
and suggestions Essam Fawzi, Lisel Hampton for superb copy editing, Gouda Abdel-Khalek, Paul
Kockelman, Jean Lave, George Marcus, Toma z Mastnak, Timothy Mitchell, Laila Moustafa, Taylor
Nelms, Robert Tignor, and Jessica Winegar, as well as two anonymous reviewers of Cultural Anthro-
pology, the previous editors of Cultural Anthropology, Kim and Mike Fortun, and the current editors,
Charles Piot and Anne Allison. All remaining errors and oversights are my own responsibility.
91
CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY 27:1
1. I have noroominthis article todiscuss dominant approaches toneoliberalism, but the interested
reader can turn for summaries to Barry and colleagues (1996), Harvey (2005), Plehwe and
colleagues (2006), Rose (1996), and Saad-Filho and Johnston (2005). On neoliberalism in
Egypt, see Ambrust (2011), Elyachar (2005), and Mitchell (2002:209304). It would be more
accurate, in an article discussing the origins of neoliberalism, to use the original spelling of the
term, neo-liberalism, coined by Hayek and others to distinguish their theory from the failures
of liberalism, but I use the more common current spelling for ease of the reader.
2. Just to be clear, I am not saying that neoliberalism is ne after all, that neoliberalism doesnt
exist, that the words of neoliberalisms founders matter more than actually existing neoliber-
alisms in the present, or that movements against neoliberalism are misguided.
3. Most of the eldwork I draw on in this article was conducted between 1995 and 1996, with
follow-up eldwork in 2005.
4. I am grateful to Taylor Nelms for helping me formulate this point.
5. I am indebted to Paul Kockelman for this point.
6. I conducted these interviews with Mr. Amir together with my colleague Essam Fawzi.
7. This conversation took place in 1995, before the dramatic penetration of cell phone service
into Egypt. In the 1990s, the cell phone was still one of the symbols of a particular kind of
businessman.
8. My discussion of the calculation debate here is necessarily abbreviated. For three very different
reviews of the debate, see Foley (2006), Hull (2006), and Vaughn (1980). Thanks to Taylor
Nelms for referring me to Vaughn.
9. On history of the public sector in Egypt, see Waterbury 1983:57123; Vitalis 1995:169217;
and Tignor 1989, 1998.
10. See Vitalis (1995) for a crucial analysis of this period and the individuals I mention here.
11. Abdel-Khalek adds that in the 1960s through the early 1970s, classical and Keynesian eco-
nomics, economic development, economic planning, and public nance were key subjects
taught in economics departments. The Egyptian economists society, Soci et e Egyptienne
DEconomie Politique, de Statistique et de L egislation, supported the work of the profession
and published a quarterly Misr al-Muasirah/LEgypte Contemporaine. On its 50th anniversary in
1957, the society also published al-Iqtisad al-Misry Nisf Qarn (The Egyptian Economy in Half
a Century). My thanks to Prof. Abdel-Khalek for communicating this information to me. See
also Vitaliss discussion of the Fuad I Society for Political Economy, Legislation, and Statistics
and its role in the formulation of economic policy in the 1950s and the surprising reversal of
many of the Egyptianization policies of the late 1940s in Egypt (Vitalis 1995:202).
12. Although spontaneous order is usually associated with Hayek, the consensus is that he
borrowed the concept from Polanyi (Jacobs 2000). Istv an Hont traces the concept back to
Adam Smith (Hont 2005:105).
13. See OECD n.d.
14. See IMF 2007. Thanks to Timothy Mitchell for this reference.
15. One public sector bank called it the bank with the car (abu-arabiyah): the bank that went around
selling loans like fast food. It referred to the small size of the loans of such programs that were
based on the model of the Grameen Bank of Bangladesh.
16. On apprenticeship and secrets, see Herzfeld 2004.
17. The relation of the tawaif al-hirayah to the experience of the guilds in Western Europe is a
matter of much debate in the literature. For two good reviews of the debate, see Chalcraft 2004
and Ghazaleh 1995, 1999. In retrospect, that debate confronted, independently of subaltern
studies, the vast issue of commensurability and translation between the Western social science
categories and concepts in the Ottoman and Mughal empires.
18. Thompson relies heavily in this section on the writings of Francis Place. He mentions secrets
of the trade in relation to Places work with tailors (Thompson 1993:255, n. 4).
19. In one critique of the debate about tacit knowledge in management studies, Tsoukas puts
it as such: Tacit knowledge cannot be captured, transmitted, or converted, but only
displayed, manifested, in what we do. New knowledge comes about not when the tacit
becomes explicit, but when our skilled performanceour praxisis punctuated in newways
through social interaction (Tsoukas 2003:426).
92
BEFORE (AND AFTER) NEOLIBERALISM
REFERENCES CITED
Abdel-Malek, Talaat
2002 Exports: The Five-Piece Puzzle (2). Al-Ahram Weekly 587, May 2329.
[Cairo]
Allee, Verna
1997 The Knowledge Evolution: Expanding Organizational Intelligence. Boston:
Butterworth-Heinemann.
Ambrust, Walter
2011 The Revolution against Neoliberalism. Jadaliyya, February 23, 2011.
http://www.jadaliyya.com/pages/index/717/the-revolution-against-
neoliberalism-, accessed November 1, 2011.
Anderson, Jane
2009 Law, Knowledge, Culture: The Production of Indigenous Knowledge in
Intellectual Property Law. Northhampton, MA: Edward Elgar.
Baker, John R.
1978 Michael Polanyis Contribution to the Cause of Freedom in Science. Min-
erva 16(3):382396.
Barry, Andrew, Thomas Osborne, and Nikolas Rose
1996 Foucault and Political Reason: Liberalism, Neoliberalism, and Rationali-
ties of Government. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Beinen, Joel
2010 The Struggle for Worker Rights in Egypt. Washington, DC: Solidarity
Center.
Cash, John M.
1977 Guide to the Papers of Michael Polanyi. University of Chicago Library,
Department of Special Collections, The John Regenstein Library, September
1977, revised1996. http://www.kfki.hu/chemonet/polanyi/9602/trad1.html,
accessed August 8, 2011.
Chalcraft, John
2004 The Striking Cabbies of Cairo and Other Stories: Crafts and Guilds
in Egypt, 18631914. Albany: State University of New York
Press.
2005 The End of the Guilds in Egypt: Restructuring Textiles in the Long 19th
Century. In Suraiya Faroqhi, and Randi Deguilham, eds., Crafts and Craftsmen
in the Middle East: Fashioning the Individual in the Muslim Mediterranean. Pp.
338368. London: Tauris.
Chaloupek, Gunther
2007 Otto Neuraths Concepts of Socialization and Economic Calculation and
His Socialist Critics. In Elisabeth Nemeth, Stefan W. Schmitz, and Thomas
E. Uebel eds., Otto Neuraths Economics in Context. Vienna Circle Institute
Yearbook. Volume 13. Pp. 6176. Vienna: Vienna Circle Institute.
Coombe, Rosemary
1998 The Cultural Life of Intellectual Properties: Authorship, Appropriation,
and the Law. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Duguid, Paul
2008 The Art of Knowing: Social and Tacit Dimensions of Knowledge and the
Limits of the Community of Practice. In Amin and Roberts, eds., Community,
Economic Creativity, and Organization, pp. 6989.
Elyachar, Julia
2005 Markets of Dispossession: NGOs, Economic Development, and the State
in Egypt. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Foley, Duncan
2006 Adams Fallacy: A Guide to Economic Theology. Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press.
93
CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY 27:1
Foucault, Michel
2008 The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Coll` ege de France, 19781979.
Edited by Michel Senellare. Graham Burchell, trans. New York: Palgrave-
Macmillan.
Ghazaleh, Pascale
1995 The Guilds: Between Tradition and Modernity. In The State and Its Ser-
vants. Nelly Hanna, ed. Pp. 6074. Cairo: American University in Cairo Press.
1999 Masters of the Trade: Crafts and Craftspeople in Cairo, 17501850.
Cairo: American University in Cairo Press.
Gibson-Graham, J. K.
2006 The End of Capitalism (As We Knew It): A Feminist Critique of Political
Economy. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Gill, Jerry H.
2000 The Tacit Mode: Michael Polanyis Postmodern Philosophy. Albany:
State University of New York Press.
Guyer, Jane
2007 Prophecy and the Near Future: Thoughts on Macroeconomic, Evangeli-
cal, and Punctuated Time. American Ethnologist 34(3):409421.
Harvey, David
2005 A Brief History of Neoliberalism. New York: Oxford University Press.
Hayden, Cori
2003 When Nature Goes Public: The Making and Unmaking of Bioprospecting
in Mexico. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Hayek, Frederich August
1935 The Nature and History of the Problem. In Collectivist Economic Plan-
ning. F. A. Hayek, ed. Pp. 140. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
1945 The Use of Knowledge in Society. American Economic Review 35(4):519
530.
2007 [1977] The Collected Works of F.V. Hayek, vol. 2: The Road to Serf-
dom: Text and DocumentsThe Denitive Edition. Bruce Caldwell, ed.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
2009 [1943] Individualismand Economic Order. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Herzfeld, Michael
2004 The Body Impolitic: Artisans and Artice in the Global Hierarchy of
Value. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Hont, Istvan
2005 Jealousy of Trade: International Competition and the Nation-State in
Historical Perspective. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Hull, Richard
2006 The Great Lie: Markets, Freedom and Knowledge. In Neoliberal Hege-
mony: A Global Critique. Dieter Plehwe, Bernhard Walpen, and Gisela
Neunhoffer, eds. Pp. 141155. New York: Routledge.
Huysman, Marleen
2004 Communities of Practice: Facilitating Social Learning while Frustrating
Organizational Learning. In Organizations as Knowledge Systems: Knowl-
edge, Learning and Dynamic Capabilities. Haridimos Tsoukas and Nikolaos
Mylonopoulos, eds. Pp. 6785. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
IMF
2007 Arab Republic of Egypt2007 Article IV Consultation Preliminary Conclusions
of the IMF Mission. http://www.imf.org/external/np/ms/2007/091207.htm,
accessed October 20, 2007.
Jacobs, Struan
2000 Spontaneous Order: Michael Polanyi and Friedrich Hayek. Critical Review of
International Social and Political Philosophy 3(4):4967.
94
BEFORE (AND AFTER) NEOLIBERALISM
Kockelman, Paul
2005 The Semiotic Stance. Semiotica 1:233304.
2007 Enclosure and Disclosure. Public Culture 19(2):303305.
Lave, Jean
2011 Apprenticeship in Critical Ethnographic Practice (Lewis Henry Morgan
Lecture Series). Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
El-Mesiri, Sawsan
1978 Ibn al-Balad: A Concept of Egyptian Identity. Leiden, the Netherlands:
Brill.
Mises, Ludwig von
1935 Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth. In Collectivist
Economic Planning, F. A. Hayek, ed. Pp. 87130. London: Routledge and
Kegan Paul.
Mitchell, Timothy
2002 Rule of Experts: Egypt, Techno-Politics, Modernity. Berkeley: University
of California Press.
Munn, Nancy
1992 The Cultural Anthropology of Time: A Critical Essay, Annual Review of
Anthropology 21:93123.
Neurath, Otto
1979 [1919] Wesen und Weg der Sozialisierun. In Wissenschaftliche Weltauf-
fassung, Sozialismus und Logischer Empirismus. R. Hegselmann, ed.
Pp. 242261. Frankfurt am Mein: Suhrkamp.
2004 Economic Writings. Selections 19041945, with an introduction by Thomas
Uebel. Dordrecht, the Netherlands: Kluwer.
Nonaka, I., and H. Takeuchi
1995 The Knowledge-Creating Company. New York: Oxford University Press.
OECD
N.d. Egypt National Investment Reform Agenda Workshop Privatisation Session:
Reforming State Owned Banks, Draft Background Document, OECD/MENA-
OECD Investment Programme. http://www.oecd.org/dataoecd/18/57/
36807408, accessed June 2006.
Plehwe, Dieter, Bernhard Walpen, and Gisela Neunhoffer, eds.
2006 Neoliberal Hegemony: A Global Critique. New York: Routledge.
Polanyi, Michael
1966 The Tacit Dimension. Garden City, NY: Doubleday.
1974 Personal Knowledge: Toward a Post-Critical Philosophy. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press.
Rose, Nikolas
1996 Governing Advanced Liberal Democracies. In Foucault and Political
Reason. Andrew Barry, Thomas Osborne, and Nikolas Rose, eds. Pp. 3763.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Rosner, Peter
1990 Karl Polanyi on Socialist Accounting. In The Life and Work of Karl
Polanyi: A Celebration. Kari Polanyi-Levitt, ed. Pp. 5565. Montreal: Black
Rose.
Saad-Filho, Alfredo, and Deborah Johnston, eds.
2005 Neoliberalism: A Critical Reader. London: Pluto.
Simmel, Georg
1978 The Philosophy of Money. David Frisby, ed. Tom Bottomore and David
Frisby, trans. New York: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
Smith, Adam
1981 An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, vols. 1
and 2. Indianapolis: Liberty.
95
CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY 27:1
Strathern, Marilyn
1998 The Gender of the Gift: Problems with Women and Problems with So-
ciety in Melanesia (Problems in Melanesian Anthropology). Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
2005 Kinship, Law and the Unexpected: Relatives Are Always a Surprise. New
York: Cambridge University Press.
Thompson, E. P.
1993 Customs in Common: Studies in Traditional Popular Culture. New York:
New Press.
Tignor, Robert L.
1989 Egyptian Textiles and British Capital, 19301956. Cairo: American
University in Cairo Press.
1998 Capitalism and Nationalism at the End of Empire. Princeton: Princeton
University Press.
Tsoukas, Haridimos
2003 Do We Really Understand Tacit Knowledge? Handbook of Organiza-
tional Learning and Knowledge. Mark Easterby-Smith and Marjorie A. Lyles,
eds. Pp. 410427. Malden, MA: Blackwell.
Tsoukas, Haridimos, and Nikolaos Mylonopoulos
2004 Introduction: What Does It Mean to View Organizations as Knowledge
Systems? In Organizations as Knowledge Systems: Knowledge, Learning and
Dynamic Capabilities. Haridimos Tsoukas and Nikolaos Mylonopoulos, eds.
Pp. 128. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Vaughn, Karen I.
1980 Economic Calculation under Socialism: The Austrian Contribution. Eco-
nomic Inquiry 18(October):535554.
Verdery, Katherine
1996 What Was Socialism and What Comes Next? Princeton: Princeton
University Press.
2003 The Vanishing Hectare: Property and Value in Postsocialist Transylvania.
Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Vitalis, Robert
1995 When Capitalists Collide: Business Conict and the End of Empire in
Egypt. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Waterbury, John
1983 The Egypt of Nasser and Sadat: The Political Economy of Two Regimes.
Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Editors Notes: Cultural Anthropology has published a number of essays on banking
and credit, including Clara Hans Symptoms of Another Life: Time, Possibility,
and Domestic Relations in Chiles Credit Economy (2011), Douglas R. Holmes
Economy of Words (2009), and Karen Hos Situating Global Capitalisms: A
View from Wall Street Investment Banks (2005).
Cultural Anthropology has also published essays on numerous economies. See, for
example, Danny Hoffmans Violence, Just in Time: War and Work in Contempo-
rary West Africa (2011), Daromir Rudnyckyjs Spiritual Economies: Islam and
Neoliberalism in Contemporary Indonesia (2009), and Shao Jings Fluid Labor
and Blood Money: The Economy of HIV/AIDS in Rural Central China (2006).
96