Carl Rommel

My anthropological research examines dreams taking the shape of “projects” in contemporary Egypt. As lower-middle class men devise small business projects for profit making and social improvement, the military-backed regime undertakes spectacular mega projects in the desert to showcase its grandeur and national-development ambitions. Based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork, media analysis and historical data, the research analyses social, economic and political effects of Egyptian project dreams across scales. It showcases how politicians and ordinary citizens alike turn to projects to set material and social improvements in motion. Centering the analytic “project dreamwork,” my study foregrounds a ubiquitous template for future-making that has often been pushed to the background. In this way, I seek to inaugurate an anthropology of the project form, injecting the project at the center of interdisciplinary debates about aspiration, masculinity and authoritarian statecraft. To date, I have conducted twenty-five months of fieldwork, primarily during a research project funded by Riksbankens Jubileumsfond. At NEC, I will work on a book manuscript based on already collected data. Moving across spheres and scales, my monograph will foster unique bottom-up perspectives both on Cairo’s informal economy and on the desert developments that President el-Sisi calls The New Republic.