ANTHROPOLOGY, CHANGE, AND DEVELOPMENT Methodological Approaches to Societies in Transformation How to Make Sense of Change Edited by Yasmine Berriane Annuska Derks Aymon Kreil Dorothea Lüddeckens Anthropology, Change, and Development Series Editors Laura Camfield, School of International Development, University of East Anglia, Norwich, UK Catherine Locke, School of International Development, University of East Anglia, London, UK Lan Anh Hoang, School of Social and Political Sciences, University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Australia Mainstream development studies have tended to neglect important aspects of experience in developing countries that fall outside the conven- tional preserve of development intervention. These neglected phenomena include consumption, modernity, and mobility and ambivalent expe- riences such as uncertainty, mistrust, jealousy, envy, love, emotion, hope, religious and spiritual belief, personhood and other experiences throughout the lifecourse. They have most closely been addressed through critical ethnography in the context of contemporary developing societies. We invite volumes that focus on the value of ethnography of these contemporary experiences of development (as change), not only to address these neglected phenomena, but also to enrich social science thinking about development. More information about this series at http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14768 Yasmine Berriane · Annuska Derks · Aymon Kreil · Dorothea Lüddeckens Editors Methodological Approaches to Societies in Transformation How to Make Sense of Change Editors Yasmine Berriane Annuska Derks French National Center for Scientific Department of Social Anthropology and Research (CNRS) Cultural Studies Paris, France University of Zurich Zürich, Switzerland Aymon Kreil Ghent University Dorothea Lüddeckens Anderlecht, Belgium University of Zurich Zürich, Switzerland Anthropology, Change, and Development ISBN 978-3-030-65066-7 ISBN 978-3-030-65067-4 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-65067-4 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2021. This book is an open access publication. 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This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland Acknowledgments This edited volume is the result of several years of exchange and collaboration that took mainly place—between 2014 and 2017— within the working group “Norms and Social Order(s)” of the Univer- sity Research Priority Program (URPP) Asia and Europe, an interdisci- plinary research structure that was funded by the University of Zurich from 2006 to 2017. We would therefore like to first thank the Univer- sity of Zurich for making this exchange possible and for supporting and funding a doctoral seminar on epistemological and methodological chal- lenges of the study of change (Fall 2015), and the international work- shop “Snapshots of Change: Assessing Social Transformation in Qualita- tive Research” (Zurich, 23–24 October 2015), which was sponsored by the URPP Asia and Europe, the UZH-Graduate Campus, the Zürcher Universitätsverein (ZUNIV), and the Wilhelm Jerg Legat Foundation. A grant by the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) further enabled us to publish this volume open access. This volume was first conceived in 2015 during the abovementioned international workshop. We are therefore also much indebted to Melek v vi Acknowledgments Saral and Thiruni Kelegama, our two co-organizers, and to all the partic- ipants and colleagues who provided valuable insights both during this event and during the years that followed. The editorial board and the anonymous reviewers at Palgrave Macmillan provided detailed and most helpful suggestions for revisions of all chapters. We owe also much grat- itude to Sally Sutton and Rivka Eisner, who went out of their way, to correct and proofread all the chapters. Contents 1 Making Sense of Change: Methodological Approaches to Societies in Transformation—An Introduction 1 Yasmine Berriane, Annuska Derks, Aymon Kreil, and Dorothea Lüddeckens Part I Scales of Change 2 Scales of Change and Diagnostic Contradictions: Shifting Relations Between an Emigrant Community and Its Diaspora 33 Anne-Christine Trémon 3 Seeing Social Change Through the Institutional Lens: Universities in Egypt, 2011–2018 61 Daniele Cantini 4 Conceptualizing Change in the Cuban Revolution 89 Marina Gold vii viii Contents Part II Biographies of Change 5 Social Change and Generational Disparity: Education, Violence, and Precariousness in the Life Story of a Young Moroccan Activist 115 Christoph H. Schwarz 6 Rescuing Biography from the Nation: Discrete Perspectives on Political Change in Morocco 139 Irene Bono 7 “A Proper House, Not a Barn”: House Biographies and Societal Change in Urban Kyrgyzstan 165 Eliza Isabaeva 8 When a Coterie Becomes a Generation: Intellectual Sociability and the Narrative of Generational Change in Sayyid Qutb’s Egypt 187 Giedr˙e Šabaseviˇci¯ut˙e Part III Change in the Making 9 Spatializing Social Change: Artisanal and Small-Scale Gold Mining in Upper Guinea 213 Anna Dessertine 10 The Affects of Change: An Ethnography of the Affective Experiences of the 2013 Military Intervention in Egypt 237 Maria Frederika Malmström 11 Funeral Reforms in Taiwan: Insights on Change from a Discourse Analytic Perspective 257 Urs Weber Index 277 Notes on Contributors Yasmine Berriane is a Political Scientist and a tenured Researcher at the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS, Centre Maurice Halbwachs, Paris). Her research examines political and social transformation in Middle Eastern and North African states, especially in contexts where neoliberal reforms and norms are introduced. Her empirical focus is on power relations, practices and institutional changes in these contexts. More recently she has focused on the sociopolitical impacts of the intensified commercialization of land in North Africa. Irene Bono is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the Depart- ment of Culture, Politics and Society at the University of Torino. Her research interests focus on the government of inequality and the role of non-institutional actors in processes of state formation and transfor- mation. She has published several peer-reviewed articles and co-edited several books on these topics. Daniele Cantini is a Social Anthropologist currently working at the Oriental Studies Department at the University of Halle, Germany. He has conducted research in Egypt, Germany, Italy, Jordan and Lebanon, ix x Notes on Contributors on higher education systems, privatization processes, doctoral studies, migration, religion and youth. He has (co)edited books and special issues of journals on these topics and has published extensively in scientific journals. He is the author of Youth and Education in the Middle East: Shaping Identity and Politics in Jordan (London: I.B. Tauris, 2016). Annuska Derks is an Associate Professor in the Department of Social Anthropology and Cultural Studies at the University of Zurich and holds the Chair for Social Anthropology, with a focus on Social Transforma- tion Processes. She has carried out extensive ethnographic fieldwork in Southeast Asia, in particular in Vietnam, Cambodia and Thailand. She has written on migration and transnationalism, on labour, servitude and bondage, and on gender and sexuality. In her more recent research she explores the links between material culture, social change and inequality in research projects tracing the lives, movements and entanglements of everyday objects and forest products turned into global commodities. Anna Dessertine has recently been appointed to the position of tenured researcher at the Institut de Recherche pour le Développement (IRD) in France, and holds a PhD in anthropology from Université Paris Ouest Nanterre. Her work is concerned with the role of mobility in the produc- tion of rural spaces in northeastern Guinea, where the artisanal exploita-