E3W Literature | University of Texas

Kamran Asdar Ali
Planning the Family in Egypt: New Bodies, New Selves.
Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2002.
249 pages
ISBN 029270514X
Price: $22.95

Reviewed by Christopher Micklethwait

University of Texas anthropology professor Kamran Asdar Ali’s Planning the Family in Egypt: New Bodies, New Selves (2002) is a novel combination of historical research and ethnographic study that probes the intentions behind Egypt’s two-hundred-year efforts to slow population growth. Following in the Foucauldian footsteps of Timothy Mitchell’s Colonising Egypt (1988), Planning the Family studies how the Egyptian government’s family planning initiatives serve to discipline the population’s minds and bodies. The goals of these programs go beyond merely slowing the growth of Egypt’s population; the true goals, Ali argues, are to promote the Western model of the nuclear family, to redistribute the densely populated urban centers, and, ultimately, to foster a deeper sense of personal responsibility as citizens of a modern, liberal nation-state. Ali succeeds in deconstructing the rhetoric of development and social welfare to demonstrate its underlying goal of state hegemony.

Planning the Family draws on fieldwork Ali conducted in Egypt between 1992 and 1994 while a Population Council fellow and graduate student in anthropology at Johns Hopkins University. Throughout the book, Ali is cautious about his subject position as an outside observer. His ethnographic methods humanely eschew raw demography in favor of more culturally sensitive narrative and interpretive techniques. He frequently remarks on his own presumptions, particularly when his experience contradicts them, such as when peasant women’s responses to his questionnaire on fertility, sexuality and the female body surprise him, prompting him to remark:
We were critically unaware, despite our pretensions of cultural sensitivity and my training in anthropology, that the constitution of their individuality was embedded in a multiplicity of social and communitarian relationships. We believed that the information received from them would help us develop policies through which we could teach them about scientifically proven sexual pleasure and the statistically analyzed normative human body. (83)
These personal interjections work well to support Ali’s conclusions because they illustrate how demographic methodology and Western constructions of individuality and agency are incompatible with the lived experience of the Egyptian people.

The first part of Planning the Family recounts the history of family planning in Egypt as an extension of the wider demographic project of modernization begun by Muhammad Ali in the nineteenth century and revived with Nasser’s socioeconomic initiatives in the 1950s and 1960s, which would later suffer the intervention of international NGOs in the 1970s and 1980s. The Egyptian government, Ali explains, was coerced into adopting NGOs’ views that population growth primarily causes monetary inflation, overcrowding and food shortages in Egypt. Ali interprets the government’s rhetoric as blaming Egypt’s faltering economy on the urban poor and on rural peasants. Planning the Family reconsiders universalism and modernity as well as the true meanings of personal agency and citizenship in the postcolonial context.

The second part of Planning the Family explores the eroding distinction between rural and urban space in contemporary Egypt and connects this phenomenon to the social construction of the body and fertility. In these chapters, which contain the bulk of his ethnographic work, Ali demonstrates the strength of his methodology. Approaching his subject with an interest in culture rather than statistical demography, Ali succeeds at formulating a solid explanation for the popular resistance to the government’s family planning programs. This explanation, he argues, lies primarily in the conflict between the individualized construction of fertility and the body endorsed by family planning programs and the corresponding social construction of fertility and the body in folk medicine as practiced by traditional midwives. Ali links the contest over space in the government’s housing projects with the contest over the body in the implementation of fertility control programs. These chapters are of particular interest to literary scholars in the attention they give to the structural mythopoetics of the body and space in folk culture. He further relates these traditional notions of fertility to notions of the self in his discussion of emotions and jinn, which suggest that some selves in Egypt may coexist and cohabit in this world with spirits, animals, plants, stones, and God. These selves, always considered not to be true subjects, not possessing the true “I,” are continuously monitored by development programs, as exemplified by the family planning program in Egypt, so that they may be managed or perhaps transformed into “modern and responsible subjects” (that is, to those who do possess the true “I”) and be incorporated into the modern nation-state (98). Ali’s analysis of bodies, fertility, emotions, possession and the self demonstrate the inefficacy of demography-oriented methods of fertility control, which operate on Western notions of personhood.

Planning the Family is also unique in the way it addresses the role of Egyptian men in choices about contraception. Contrary to Western views of Muslim society, Ali does not describe the Egyptian nation-state’s power as patriarchal. On the contrary, Ali argues, the state infantilizes rural and poor men, whose positions in the household have already undergone drastic changes as a result of trans¬formations in the Egyptian economy: few men in these categories can afford to pay traditional dowries, and many of them are forced by unemployment to work abroad. Ali also debunks the presumed imbalance of power and lack of affection between husbands and wives in the Middle East, finding instead that couples he observed displayed far more affection than is typically presumed in studies of Middle Eastern family life.

The final part of Planning the Family addresses the local resistance to the government’s fertility control program in two camps: women’s and feminist groups on one hand and Islamist groups on the other. Ali recounts here how secularist women’s groups seek to expand the goals of family planning beyond fertility control to include also “social welfare, political freedom, and personal security” (146). More interesting, however, is Ali’s analysis of the role Islamist groups play in the debate on family planning in Egypt. Many readers will find the equations between Islamist and feminist resistance to Egypt’s national family planning agenda to be quite provocative.

Ultimately, Planning the Family makes a strong argument against naïve attempts at using fertility control to promote economic progress in the third world according to Western models. Planning the Family should not, however, be seen as an outright attack on the project of universal human rights and economic assistance to developing countries. Rather, it is a strong argument in favor of a dialectical approach that recognizes the clashes to be anticipated between local notions of the self and universal rights. Planning the Family introduces fertile arguments about how international NGOs promote a detrimental globalization by reproducing Western hegemonic relationships between state and citizen in developing countries. In a broader context, Planning the Family advances the academic debate over the constitution of the modern self and merits the attention of scholars beyond those interested solely in Egypt or the Middle East.