Social Science Research Council

"Law-Mindedness and Social Mobility in Egypt"

This project will investigate legal practices and significations of the law, or what may be described as "law-mindedness," among Egypt's new middle class in Port Said, Egypt. This study is intended to show that the invocation of the law can have social and antisocial implications, and to support the assertion that communities create their own legal meanings. I suggest that decisions to access or avoid the courts for the resolution of problems are strongly influenced by, as well as constitutive of, class identity, because legal behavior has symbolic and ethical value. This research builds upon prior studies that have demonstrated the link between law and social differentiation, and seeks to gather evidence that law contributes to social differentiation not only in material ways but also because it is a locus for the contestation and production of social meaning. This project is intended to develop the position that law is simultaneously instrumentalist (standing apart from social relations) and constitutive (setting the terms of everyday life) by analyzing the way that law as a distinct set of institutions, actors, and texts has implications for everyday life and social relations. Using ethnographic methods of participant-observation in an urban community, I will gauge the extent to and circumstances under which individuals seek legal recourse and will observe legal activity in relation to other economic, social, and political factors. Further, I will be conducting extensive in-depth interviews with community inhabitants about specific cases, the legal process, and law codes, in order to elicit interpretations of legal practices and attitudes toward the law. I anticipate that this data will shed light on how law-mindedness is constituted through historically situated practice and discourse in daily life in an urban community in Egypt, and will contribute to our understanding of legal subjectivity in the Middle East.