Abstract:

This paper examines ethnographic fieldwork with lower-middle class men in Cairo who devise and launch small businesses and investments glossed as “projects” (mashari‘; sing. mashru‘). My ethnography underscores Egyptian project-making as inherently speculative, requiring constant movement, awareness of opportunities across urban space and social networks, and the skill to forge and stabilize fleeting connections between people, materiality and capital. When discussing what makes a successful mashru‘, my interlocutors emphasize perseverance, an instinct to trust and follow, and the ability to seize serendipitous moments while knowing when to let go.

The paper also demonstrates that similar ideals animate anthropological practice. As funding structures designate the time-bound research project as the default format for anthropological research, we are tasked to exploit serendipity inside the parameters of the “project form” (Graan 2022; Graan & Rommel 2024). The success of my three-year research project is ultimately contingent on multiple speculative bets: which interlocutors to follow, which ethnographic stories to pursue, which literary trends to adopt, which colleagues to collaborate with, and which journals to submit to. Moreover, the fact than I am running a research project with men who are themselves busy projecting adds another layer to the mirror effect. During my research in Cairo, it is not always clear who is trying to speculate whom into whose projects. 

In conclusion, I reflect on these parallels to propose “co-projecting” as form of “asymmetric reciprocity” (Young 2006) that provides a novel and, in some cases, more realistic account of the embedded lives of ethnographers and interlocutors. I also suggest that serendipity might not only be invaluable as anthropologists move across inherently unforeseeable ethnographic fields (Rivoal & Salazar 2013). In an era when project-making rests on speculation and serendipity, and when projectification saturates anthropology, the success or failure of any anthropological career is predicated on multilayered registers of serendipity tamed by the project’s distinct organizational form.

BIO:

Carl Rommel is a Researcher at the Department of Cultural Anthropology and Ethnology, Uppsala University. His current research, ‘Egypt as a Project: Dreamwork and Masculinity in a Projectified Society’, is funded by Riksbankens Jubileumsfond. Rommel’s research on sport, masculinity, revolution, urbanism and “projects” in Egypt has been published in Men & Masculinity, Critical African Studies, Middle East – Topics & Arguments, Soccer & Society, MERIP and Social Anthropology/Anthropologie Sociale. His first monograph was Egypt’s Football Revolution: Emotion, Masculinity and Uneasy Politics (University of Texas Press, 2021). He has also co-edited Locating the Mediterranean (Helsinki University Press, 2022) and co-authored An Anthropology of Crosslocations (Helsinki University Press, 2024).