Description
TitleSuperstitious women: race, magic, and medicine in Egypt (1875-1950)
Date Created2020
Other Date2020-10 (degree)
Extent1 online resource (v, 319 pages) : illustrations
DescriptionThis dissertation explores the role that wise women, especially Upper Egyptian female healers, played in the global development of anthropological expertise and the robust spiritual economy of healing in nineteenth and early twentieth century Egypt. Despite repeated campaigns by government officials and doctors to discredit their knowledge and outlaw their practices, wise women controlled a widespread market in occult objects that remained crucial in the everyday lives of Egyptians. The project combines Middle East history’s rich foundation of gender/women’s and social history, with insights from science and technology studies, critical race and post-colonial studies, and budding scholarship on the Islamicate occult sciences to consider how racialized constructions of the Upper Egyptian peasant woman—along with the socio-medical, spiritual, and economic worlds they inhabited—shaped the making of modern Egypt.
I recast histories of magic, medicine, markets and museums through the ideas and practices of wise women. The development of anthropological thought in interwar Egypt and abroad, I argue, hinged on the study of “superstitious” healing practices (khorafa) or “old wives medicine” (tibb al-rukka) attributed to Upper Egyptian and formerly enslaved East African healing practitioners. My study uses wise women’s amulets and talismans—collected in Egypt by anthropologists, medical officials, and private collectors—as an archival source to write the social and intellectual histories of lower-class women, formerly enslaved Africans, and Upper Egyptian migrants who left few traditional archives.
The dissertation combines analysis of material objects, namely amulets housed in European and Egyptian ethnographic collections, with traditional nineteenth and twentieth-century archival sources in Arabic and Ottoman Turkish on magic (sihr), occult sciences (al-ulum al-gariba), and medicine (tibb), to reconstruct the political and spiritual economies of healing in late Ottoman and interwar Egypt. Wise women and their amulets found themselves entangled in the “internationalization of social sciences,” not as mere objects of study or “go-betweens,” but critical producers of knowledge.
NotePh.D.
NoteIncludes bibliographical references
Genretheses, ETD doctoral
LanguageEnglish
CollectionSchool of Graduate Studies Electronic Theses and Dissertations
Organization NameRutgers, The State University of New Jersey
RightsThe author owns the copyright to this work.
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