Pierre Desvaux and Gaétan du Roy

We recently edited an issue of Égypte/Monde Arabe, a journal published by the French research center in Cairo, Centre d’Études et de Documentation Économiques, Juridiques et Sociales (CEDEJ). We asked the question: “Are Cairo’s Zabbaleen an over-studied object of research?” The main focus was on Cairene waste pickers, Zabbaleen in Arabic. In this issue, we wanted to reflect on researchers and journalists’ fascination with this community settlement, especially in Manshyet Nasr, and its inhabitants. These Christian communities make a livelihood from waste collecting and recycling, as well as from pig farming, using organic waste to feed the livestock. As such, they situate themselves at the junction of fundamental questions linked to the capital city and to environmental issues, as they are sometimes described as environmental entrepreneurs due to the estimated high rates of recycling they achieve. Their situation underlines the flaws of the Egyptian State, which remains unable to grasp larger waste management concerns and to integrate these stigmatized communities in urban recycling. This issue of Égypte/Monde Arabe brings together contributions from diverse perspectives- academic researchers, a documentary director, a former Non-Governmental Organisation (NGO) activist-, and tackles the practical and ethical questions this ‘over-research’ poses. We highlight here four trends structuring the issue: the first one questions the interest for the community; we then stress the consequences of such ‘over-research’ on the community itself; thirdly, we question the knowledge produced about the community; and finally, we underline possible pathways to overcome the negative effects of over-research.

Four articles address the question of the Zabbaleen’s notorious reputation.¹ They seek to interrogate the reasons behind this international interest, to unfold the different narratives circulating about this community, and to gauge the effects this particular case study’s fame had on broader research fields like Coptic and Urban studies. The field of “Zabbaleen studies” is a peculiar one, where many researchers tend to neglect mentioning the fact that these neighbourhoods, especially the Muqattam area- the object of most studies, attracts a lot of attention. At least 15 Master theses, many development reports, several documentaries, a huge number of press articles and five PhD dissertations deal, at least partly, with the subject. Yet, many publications do not include this rich literature, probably to enhance the allure of a fieldwork site that can be perceived as difficult to access, although, on the contrary, it is safe and easily accessible from downtown Cairo.

These main questions are not only ethical, but also epistemological and related to the researchers’ positionality in the field. The observer’s gaze has an influence on the people observed, particularly under circumstances of over-research. Several contributions underline the consequences of such discourses on the community itself as new English-speaking intermediaries emerged to guide foreigners in the community, thus monopolising and homogenizing the voice of the community. Furthermore, several Zabbaleen, both workers and ordinary residents, have internalized this external scrutiny and discourse themselves. They use this discourse as a means to regain control over their self-narration, and as a way to fulfil external stakeholders’ expectations in order to meet development subsidies requirements. We insist that the consequences of this multiplicity of discourses should then be integrated into any further studies undertaken on the Zabbaleen.

An old anthropologist’s joke narrates that “the ‘definition of a Navajo household is one Indian home with eight anthropologists living in it.”² Similarly, we could say that the Muqattam area is a place inhabited by garbage collectors, researchers, journalists, documentary makers, and occasionally, Asian tourists visiting the cave churches built by the community’s priest, Father Samaan. Many studies on the Zabbaleen lack equilibrium between miserabilism and populism, two symmetrical bias skilfully analysed in sociological scholarship by Passeron and Grignon.³ Cairo’s garbage collectors are confined between a state of marginalization due to their profession and their religious identity, and an inflated image as environmental heroes, despite the dubious ecological character of their recycling practices. Indeed, most recycling industries take place directly in the densely inhabited zarrayeb (literally “pigsties”, Zabbaleen neighbourhoods are called this way by extension), with little or no protection. Both the neighborhood and workers are exposed to dangerous emanations from melting matters, such as plastics or aluminium. It is also important to underline the fact that the community is only capable of treating a small percentage of the capital’s total refuse, thus mitigating stories of environmental heroism.

The articles written by Maike Didero/Sarah Eldefrawafi and by Bénédicte Florin do not directly reflect on the status of the Zabbaleen as an object of study, but they offer new perspectives that converge on the necessity to decentralize studies on the community and link it to a broader context. The former deals with a broader overview of the community in the Egyptian political and economic context through livelihood shocks experienced by the Zabbaleen. For instance, the first rupture occurred in 2003, when the Egyptian government contracted foreign companies to collect the capital’s garbage, and then again in 2009, when their pigs were slaughtered according to a presidential decision following the so-called ‘swine flu’ crisis. Didero and Eldefrawi call for continuing to research community practices in order to assess the impact of rapidly evolving urban and economic problems, such as the recent inflation, and new governmental plans that deal with the question of refuse collection. Similarly, Florin’s article proposes an interesting comparison between Zabbaleen’s neighborhoods and the leather tanneries’ area, where communities experience compelling similarities due to their marginalizing activity.⁴ This viewpoint provides new insights on the question of the garbage collectors who are too often studied only in relation to the problem of urban waste collection. Florin skilfully shows that the type of activities they practice is not unique and that the same impurity stigma is also attributed to tanners.

The idea of “over” research is dubious. Can a place or community actually be over-researched, and how does this impact the contemporary processes of knowledge production? These questions necessitate an analysis into the ways in which a high density of research can lead to multiple outcomes. Prolonged scrutiny on the community has allowed us to understand the transformations and evolutions of activities, practices and social structures using long-term perspectives. Recognising the importance of historicising, the issue also republished a 1980 article by Gunther Meyer. His work remains pioneering in the field as it puts into perspective how knowledge and narratives build around the community are frequently recycled, and addresses critical research angles for future studies. The articles by Florin and Didero/Elfrawafi both acknowledge the necessity of a renewed approach to communities like the Zabbaleen, which goes beyond a position inherited from colonial anthropology. Within this perspective, the community has been placed almost as if ‘out of history’. The proliferation of similar works has situated the community in a state of self-isolation, out of time and space, and objectified as a stable whole. Hence, the issue reinforces this call to analyze the epistemological complexities of anthropological objects, as well as to contextualise new research within previous works in order to avoid the trend of ‘over-research’. This approach would allow for a much-needed plurality of research to coexist and develop relationally.

Pierre Desvaux, « Introduction » ; Gaétan du Roy, « Imaginer les marges urbaines du Caire : les zabbâlîn en récits »; Natalia Duque, Gaétan du Roy, « Interview avec la réalisatrice Julia Varga »; Géry de Broqueville, « Genèse d’un Muqattam médiatisé ». ↩
This sentence quoted in the issue’s introduction comes from Mayssoun Sukarieh, Stuart Tannock, “On the Problem of Over-researched Communities: The Case of the Shatila Palestinian Refugee Camp in Lebanon”, Sociology 47, no. 3 (2012): 496. ↩
Claude Grignon, Jean-Claude Passeron, Le savant et le populaire. Misérabilisme et populisme en sociologie et en littérature (Paris: Points, 2015). ↩
The tanneries’ district, al-Madabigh, is located close to the center of Cairo. Tanneries have been threatened repeatedly to be relocated outside the city by government measures. Since 2017, they have been expelled from the neighbourhood to be relocated to the city of Badr, which is situated 80km to the east of Cairo. ↩

Authors' Bios

Pierre Desvaux is an associate researcher at PACTE and currently a teaching assistant in the Department of Geography at the University of Grenoble Alpes. He received his PhD in Geography from the University of Grenoble Alpes in 2017. His research focuses on political ecologies of infrastructures, urban service provision and waste repurposing, in Southern and Northern cities, especially in Egypt and France.

Gaétan Du Roy is a researcher at the CRHiDI, Saint-Louis University in Brussels and an invited professor in that same university. He was previously a postdoctoral fellow at the FNRS in Belgium, at the University of Pennsylvania and at the Berlin Graduate School, Muslim Cultures and Societies. He is a specialist on the religious and urban history of contemporary Egypt. His main theme of investigation is the history of Christian–Muslim relations in Egyptian cities. He has published extensively on Egyptian Copts and on other related subjects. His main publications include: ‘Imaginer les marges urbaines du Caire: les zabbalin en récits’, in Égypte Monde Arabe,19, 2019; ‘Bénie soit l’Égypte. Prier pour la nation dans l’espace public révolutionnaire’, in Archives de Sciences Sociales des religions, 181, 2018; ‘Abuna Sam‘ân and the new charismatic trend within the Coptic Church’, in Nelly Van Doorn (dir.), Copts in Context, South Carolina University Press, 2017.

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