Script ethnography: narrating the extramoral politics of Egypt's media industry

Academic investigations across disciplines are timelessly invested in cinema/media’s interrelation with societies, cultures, and subjectivities. However, the filmic apparatus necessarily erases any trace of the labor behind it in order to acquire its power. This leaves a pressing question: what can the inner processes and infrastructures of media-making reveal and defy about dominant understandings of media politics? Based on two years of multi-modal ethnographic research following the laboring lives of media’s technical workers in Egypt, this seminar will demonstrate that an attentive consideration of the labor of media can articulate an alternative kind of politics—an extramoral politics. “Extramoral”—neither moral nor immoral—emphasizes the contradictions and ambivalences of conduct that the global neoliberal economy imposes on political subjects through labor. The focal point of the seminar is an analysis of the labor relations of on-location filming in Cairo, which moves across different urban geographies, from the slum to the elite gated community. These labor relations defy the formal/informal binary and exemplify an understanding of politics that goes beyond, yet still accounts for the exploitation, governance, and resistance paradigms. Simultaneously, the seminar delves into conundrums of narrating these contradictions and ambivalences of conduct by experimenting with methodological inspirations from cinematography and scriptwriting.

Pitt Rivers Museum Research Seminar in Visual, Material and Museum Anthropology, Hilary 2024

Fridays, 12pm-1.30pm

In person at the Pitt Rivers Museum Lecture Theatre.

Convened by Chihab El Khachab and Chris Morton