UC Berkeley

This dissertation examines the Egyptian counterrevolution of 2013 through an ethnographic account of young men living in a rural Nile Delta province associated with state power and corruption. Building on two years of ethnographic fieldwork, it considers the moral dilemmas of corruption through forms of giving and kinship, paying particular attention to the ways that love produced through affinal kinship justifies making exceptions to the law. Through a historical investigation of the origins of the Egyptian nation-state, this research posits the formative role of the conscription of the Egyptian peasantry during the reign of Mohammed Ali Basha, arguing that the politics of the counterrevolution can be traced back to this constitutive moment. Through the conscription of the peasantry en masse, Ali Basha also instituted the family as the sovereign exception to the law and laid the conditions for the army to emerge as the primary institution for the expression of popular will.