Spring 2022, CairoThematic Course
The Social Under our skin. Who Else is in our Body?
Course details
- Cycle
- Spring 2022, Cairo
- Length
- 12 weeks
- Format
- Hybrid
- Taught in
- English
Share
Discuss it with AI
- Choose your preferred AI assistant.
- A new tab will open with a prompt prepared for this page.
- Press Send to begin exploring the page through dialogue, CILAS-style.
About the course
This course put forth the body as a methodology to understand critical and complex social realities. Looking at the body and embodiment, this course aims to anthropologically understand what is under our skin? By asking this question we sophisticate our relationship with “our” bodies. Does our body know our culture and our class? How do our bodies reproduce power structures, are disciplined and experience pain? How can bodily violence such as torture and bodily discipline such as hunger-strikes help us understand wider structural violence and resistance? What does it mean for our bodies to enter networks of exchange? How can we spatially analyze social webs by looking at different spaces our bodies occupy and by looking at our bodies as spaces? Expanding from traditional notions of the body , we will think about and culturally contextualize emotions, vulnerability, agency and faith; and even further by questioning ‘memory’ and how our bodies could be an archive to the cultural and the social.
Who teaches it
Farah Hallaba obtained her MA in Social Anthropology and Visual Ethnography from University of Kent. She started انثروبولوجي بالعربي in 2019, aiming to publicize anthropology in an accessible way and in Arabic. She has been doing short engaging online videos and collaborative workshops since then. Currently Farah is a resident fellow at CILAS teaching Ethnographic Studies
Course flow
Sessions without a date
Understanding embodiment in anthropology and as anthropologists.
- A. Strathern. 1996. The Social Body: Mauss to DouglasRecommended Readings
- Pierre Bourdieu - Selected ReadingsRecomended Readings
- Foucault - Selected ReadingsRecomended Readings
- The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the WorldRecomended Readings
- Matters of Life and Longing: Female SterlisationRecomended Readings
In class
- DiscussionDiscuss relevant cases circulating (Hunger Strikes in Egypt & Palestine)
It is not all about Sharawii; Religion, Nationalism, Othering and Organ Transplant.
- Sherine Hamdy, “Our Bodies Belong to God”Recommended Readings
- Farha Ghanam, Live & Die Like a ManRecomended Readings
- Chapter in Identity and Health - on male military service ethnography
- Karin’s work an something on Labour and the male body
Our bodies as part of the urban metabolism, and are they spaces on/of its own?
In class
- Field visitIn-class activity: This session we will go out into the city and reflect on our embodiment.
In transition to the next session, we will reflect on what does ‘Dying While Being Borrowed’ mean.
- Nancy Scheper-Hughes’s work - Selected ReadingsRecomended Readings
- Sarah Ahmed’s “Cultural Politics of Emotions”Recomended Readings
- Samuli Shielke’s work - Selected Readings
Personhood
Course reading list
- Chapter 1 in Health and Identity in Egypt Book: “Spirit Possession among Women in Low-income Cairo”On-going Reading List (for potential readings)
- For the Living and The Dead, Elizabeth WickettOn-going Reading List (for potential readings)
- Carl Rommel, Chapter 6 Football Revolution Ch 6: “When the Game Feels Like Politics, It Doesn’t Feel Like Much at All”On-going Reading List (for potential readings)
- Extra: Noha Fikry “Of Pigeons and Men: Gender in/of relating, more-than-human in the making”On-going Reading List (for potential readings)
- Chapter 5 in Health and Identity in Egypt Book: “Mushahra: The Justice and Injustice of Infertility , Hania Sholkamy .On-going Reading List (for potential readings)
- Berlant, Lauren Gail. 2012. Cruel optimism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.On-going Reading List (for potential readings)
- Masculinities in Egypt and the Arab WorldOn-going Reading List (for potential readings)
- Bruno Latour, “How to Talk about the Body” 2004On-going Reading List (for potential readings)
- Foucault - Docile BodiesOn-going Reading List (for potential readings)
- Bourdieu - Issues of Embodiment and AuthenticityOn-going Reading List (for potential readings)
- Marcel Mauss. “Techniques of the Body,” translated by Ben Brewster, Economy and Society 2:70-88. 1973 [1936]On-going Reading List (for potential readings)
- “The Mindful Body: A Prolegomenon to Future Work in Medical Anthropology”, Nancy Scheper-Hughes and Margaret M. Lock, Medical Anthropology Quarterly, Volume 1. No 1, 2009On-going Reading List (for potential readings)
- “Bodies that Don’t Matter: Death and Dereliction in Chicago”, Eric Klinenberg, Commodifying Bodies, Nancy Scheper-Hughes& Loic Wacquant, Sage Publications, 2002, (pg.: 121-135)On-going Reading List (for potential readings)
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MP84xOictqYLink in the document (page 2); the document does not tie it to a unit
- https://www.jstor.org/stable/25758076Link in the document (page 3); the document does not tie it to a unit
Get the CILAS newsletter
New courses, open calls and articles from CILAS, in your inbox.
18 October 2026
Join CILAS's Spring semester of 2026
- Spring 2026, Cairo
