1 00:00:00,150 --> 00:00:06,570 Good evening and welcome to the Middle East Centre at St. Anthony's College at the University of Oxford. 2 00:00:06,570 --> 00:00:13,740 My name is Michael Willis. I'm a fellow here at the Middle East centre. It is my great pleasure to introduce you to the. 3 00:00:13,740 --> 00:00:22,980 In our weekly series of Friday seminars, looking this term at the theme of dictatorship in the modern Middle East. 4 00:00:22,980 --> 00:00:25,290 And I'm very pleased to welcome this evening. 5 00:00:25,290 --> 00:00:30,630 One of my colleagues, one of the other fellows here at the Middle East centre, Professor Walter Armbrust. 6 00:00:30,630 --> 00:00:35,700 Walter is social anthropologist, working particularly on Egypt. 7 00:00:35,700 --> 00:00:42,480 And tonight he will be speaking on the theme of Egypt and will be building on his book that came out last year, 8 00:00:42,480 --> 00:00:47,910 which entitled Martyrs and Trickster's An Ethnography of the Egyptian Revolution. 9 00:00:47,910 --> 00:00:58,440 This was a boat that was built on two years living in Cairo directly after the Egyptian revolution, carrying out research on the revolution. 10 00:00:58,440 --> 00:01:05,250 And we're very, very lucky and pleased that Walter is joining us tonight to build off of that and build in 11 00:01:05,250 --> 00:01:10,590 some of his observations of the revolution to look at what has happened in Egypt since then. 12 00:01:10,590 --> 00:01:15,990 And we're building on mass and returned to this theme. Speaking under the title of that clip. 13 00:01:15,990 --> 00:01:23,500 I know I'm going to have trouble with this. Apocalypto tricks the politics in the age of pandemic, Walter. 14 00:01:23,500 --> 00:01:29,270 OK. Thank you, Michael. It's a pleasure to be participating in our own seminar when the fellows of the 15 00:01:29,270 --> 00:01:34,320 Middle East centre began discussing plans for our Friday seminar this term. 16 00:01:34,320 --> 00:01:41,780 It was back when we were still in lockdown. And my suggestion was that our theme should be crisis covered had plunged this into one. 17 00:01:41,780 --> 00:01:49,100 And it seemed pretty obvious that we would still be in one in the fall. So crisis is our main theme seemed topical. 18 00:01:49,100 --> 00:01:55,850 Unfortunately, I was misunderstood as having suggested that we do an entire term's worth of lectures on the Kovin crisis. 19 00:01:55,850 --> 00:01:59,330 That would indeed have been tedious and it wasn't what I had in mind. 20 00:01:59,330 --> 00:02:05,530 Though I did think that it would have been a shame to work steadily through a pandemic and say nothing about it. 21 00:02:05,530 --> 00:02:11,270 But well, I think there certainly are many implications to this particular pandemic driven crisis. 22 00:02:11,270 --> 00:02:14,930 The real point was that having just published the book on a revolution, 23 00:02:14,930 --> 00:02:22,690 it's called Martyrs and Trickster's and Ethnography of the Egyptian Revolution. I was thinking about links between crisis and politics. 24 00:02:22,690 --> 00:02:28,220 It's hopefully easy for listeners to see the point. A revolution is a form of political crisis. 25 00:02:28,220 --> 00:02:37,810 And the coup that ended the revolution instituted a reconstituted authoritarianism or arguably a new form of authoritarianism. 26 00:02:37,810 --> 00:02:42,430 There's quite a bit more that one could say about crisis and authoritarianism. 27 00:02:42,430 --> 00:02:47,290 Some listeners may have read my abstract and noticed the quote from Milton Friedman. 28 00:02:47,290 --> 00:02:52,210 Only a crisis, actual or perceived, produces real change. 29 00:02:52,210 --> 00:02:58,360 The rest of Friedman's passage from a book titled Capitalism and Freedom extols the fluidity created 30 00:02:58,360 --> 00:03:04,420 by crisis as an opportunity for the politically impossible to become politically inevitable. 31 00:03:04,420 --> 00:03:11,860 For him, that meant the prioritisation of economic freedom above any other formulation of freedom in the actual world, 32 00:03:11,860 --> 00:03:20,170 as opposed to Friedman's capitalist utopia. The elevation of economic freedom into a sacred principle made it possible for states to suppress 33 00:03:20,170 --> 00:03:27,700 politics and the interests of allowing the supposedly superior logic of the market to work unimpeded. 34 00:03:27,700 --> 00:03:35,980 There are other ways to formulate the relation of crisis to politics, such as the Italian philosopher Giorgio Again Bend's state of exception, 35 00:03:35,980 --> 00:03:40,570 which focuses on the institution of a legal civil war that empowers states to make 36 00:03:40,570 --> 00:03:46,390 unaccountable decisions on which citizens should live and which ones are expendable. 37 00:03:46,390 --> 00:03:50,530 Again, Ban is by no means the only scholar who pursues such ideas. 38 00:03:50,530 --> 00:03:57,690 The political theorist Akua Member, for example, makes similar observations in a work titled Niekro Politics. 39 00:03:57,690 --> 00:04:05,710 Mbembe finds the state of exception logic to be salient not just in the states we commonly recognise as dictatorships, 40 00:04:05,710 --> 00:04:10,150 but also in states that are formerly liberal democracies such as the United States, 41 00:04:10,150 --> 00:04:15,640 using the 9/11 attack to suspend the rule of law for certain categories of people, 42 00:04:15,640 --> 00:04:20,470 categories that are inevitably as elastic as the state wants them to be. 43 00:04:20,470 --> 00:04:26,020 Listeners who are familiar with Egypt will probably be thinking about the emergency law of 1958, 44 00:04:26,020 --> 00:04:33,580 which set the legal parameters for a state of emergency which was declared during the June war with Israel in 1967. 45 00:04:33,580 --> 00:04:42,790 Then it was lifted briefly in 1980, reimposed by Barak in 1981 and remained in force until the January 25th revolution in 2011, 46 00:04:42,790 --> 00:04:53,230 only to be reimposed by the fact that Sisi in 2013. States of emergency have underpinned authoritarian rule also in Algeria for 19 47 00:04:53,230 --> 00:05:01,030 years prior to 2011 and in Syria since the Baath Party came to power in 1963. 48 00:05:01,030 --> 00:05:09,280 I note that in this seminar, our keynote lecture, as it were, is Aswang, his book, The Dictatorship's Syndrome, 49 00:05:09,280 --> 00:05:18,940 he writes about the institutionalisation of dictatorship, how citizens are habituated to it and how they ultimately collude with it and consent to it. 50 00:05:18,940 --> 00:05:23,890 For me, the dictatorship syndrome has a rather exceptionals tone. 51 00:05:23,890 --> 00:05:29,500 It's full of lines such as the discussion of dictatorship in the United States and Western Europe has 52 00:05:29,500 --> 00:05:36,850 acquired an exotic dimension as Western Europe has rarely known dictatorship since the Second World War. 53 00:05:36,850 --> 00:05:45,160 Or in another line, he says, citizens of Western democracies whose basic needs are satisfied and who enjoy the protection of the law. 54 00:05:45,160 --> 00:05:52,480 Look on with shock and confusion at the tens of thousands of illegal MIDA migrants who leave their homelands. 55 00:05:52,480 --> 00:05:58,300 In other words, for Suadi, dictatorship is something that plagues the Middle East and other parts of the world. 56 00:05:58,300 --> 00:06:02,890 Not an issue or at least no longer an issue for the West. 57 00:06:02,890 --> 00:06:09,460 I understand that. That's why he has written this book as a kind of auto critique, a criticism of his own society. 58 00:06:09,460 --> 00:06:14,770 He prominently quotes from Delphia that comes out at the Y The Return of Consciousness, 59 00:06:14,770 --> 00:06:22,100 a searing auto critique of Egyptian society during the Nasser era, published in the 1970s after announcing his death. 60 00:06:22,100 --> 00:06:26,520 Auto critique is a good thing. And that's why it deserves credit for it. 61 00:06:26,520 --> 00:06:31,350 It does, however, have a different resonance when it's translated and presented in English. 62 00:06:31,350 --> 00:06:37,250 Contrasting Egypt and the Arab world with the West in favour of the latter is misleading at best. 63 00:06:37,250 --> 00:06:45,820 If it implies that European and American liberal democracies have to be a kind of gold standard to which the Arab world should aspire. 64 00:06:45,820 --> 00:06:53,860 So in the same spirit of auto critique, I want to suggest to modifications to Suan his vision of a dictatorship syndrome. 65 00:06:53,860 --> 00:07:01,360 The first is that dictatorship is one possible expression of a larger political formation, namely authoritarianism. 66 00:07:01,360 --> 00:07:09,490 Authoritarian regimes often have parliaments and elections that are essentially for show or are nullified by emergency laws. 67 00:07:09,490 --> 00:07:13,900 Egypt either repressive dictatorship is one such country. 68 00:07:13,900 --> 00:07:21,310 Political scientists have various terms for a range of phenomena connected to authoritarian strategies for regimes revival, 69 00:07:21,310 --> 00:07:26,680 upgraded authoritarianism, for example, or durable authoritarianism. 70 00:07:26,680 --> 00:07:31,510 These terms tend to be used to explain how regimes in the Arab world have adapted to 71 00:07:31,510 --> 00:07:37,810 pressures of globalisation or to European and American pressures to democratise. 72 00:07:37,810 --> 00:07:44,290 But at the same time, not only have Europe and the United States frequently given material support and political cover 73 00:07:44,290 --> 00:07:50,860 for authoritarian regimes contrary to their own publicly professed democratisation agendas. 74 00:07:50,860 --> 00:07:58,660 But it would also be astonishingly shortsighted to ignore the growing strength of an authoritarian impulse everywhere in the world, 75 00:07:58,660 --> 00:08:05,890 very much including Europe and the United States. It would be folly to deny the authoritarian impulse in the Republican Party, 76 00:08:05,890 --> 00:08:15,850 in the United States or in the dominant far right politics of Poland or Hungary, or indeed the Brexit Eriq Conservative Party in this country. 77 00:08:15,850 --> 00:08:23,260 The authoritarian impulse in these countries has not necessarily resulted in durable or irreversible authoritarianism. 78 00:08:23,260 --> 00:08:31,510 In all cases, but anyone who can't see the potential for it in all of these cases simply hasn't been paying attention. 79 00:08:31,510 --> 00:08:39,190 So in the interest of putting all of these emergent, if not necessarily consolidated, authoritarian isms on the same footing, 80 00:08:39,190 --> 00:08:43,960 the second modification I want to make to Alice Walton's vision is to put crisis at 81 00:08:43,960 --> 00:08:48,700 the centre of the discussion and not the institutionalisation of a dictatorship. 82 00:08:48,700 --> 00:08:54,820 Habitus as has done in the dictatorship syndrome. There are two kinds of crisis. 83 00:08:54,820 --> 00:09:02,500 One is event driven at a variety of scales revolutions and civil wars, earthquakes, hurricanes, tsunamis, 84 00:09:02,500 --> 00:09:09,910 droughts, pandemics, economic collapse ranging from the level of the nation state to the entire globe. 85 00:09:09,910 --> 00:09:16,920 All of them can make sedimented social, political and economic arrangements suddenly become fluid. 86 00:09:16,920 --> 00:09:24,510 The other kind of crisis is structured, not necessarily structured deliberately, but nonetheless constant and durable. 87 00:09:24,510 --> 00:09:34,010 To talk about the structuring of crises may sound paradoxical, since the very word crisis tends to conjure a sense of suddenness and unexpectedness. 88 00:09:34,010 --> 00:09:42,080 I'll explain what I mean by this, surely. My approach to crisis stems from having written a book about the January 25th revolution in Egypt, 89 00:09:42,080 --> 00:09:45,690 Marder's and Trickster's, which I've already mentioned, and so is Michael. 90 00:09:45,690 --> 00:09:53,380 A revolution is a political crisis with social and economic implications, and it's also the starting point of a transition. 91 00:09:53,380 --> 00:10:02,410 The problem is that it usually turns out to be a transition to something other than what the people who initiated the revolutionary events envisioned. 92 00:10:02,410 --> 00:10:07,690 The study of transitions as a branch of political science, sometimes called Transat Ptolemy. 93 00:10:07,690 --> 00:10:12,370 It's concerned mainly with transitions from authoritarianism to democracy, 94 00:10:12,370 --> 00:10:18,580 sociology and political and policy studies write about transitions and a slightly more expansive framework, 95 00:10:18,580 --> 00:10:23,050 but they focus still largely on institutions. In my book, 96 00:10:23,050 --> 00:10:28,420 I draw inspiration from anthropological understandings of transitions which are rather broader and more 97 00:10:28,420 --> 00:10:35,710 scalable than the narrowly political or institutional contexts of interest to our social science colleagues. 98 00:10:35,710 --> 00:10:39,940 One form of anthropological trans atolls, gee, if one wanted to call it that, 99 00:10:39,940 --> 00:10:45,010 derives from the study of ritual or the ritual process, as it's sometimes called. 100 00:10:45,010 --> 00:10:52,630 Anthropologists observe that all transitions followed a common form departure from a state of non activity into a state of 101 00:10:52,630 --> 00:11:01,690 indeterminacy within which those undergoing the transition can engage in behaviour considered aberrant and normal social circumstances. 102 00:11:01,690 --> 00:11:11,430 And finally, reintegration of the initial bands. Who are those going through the transformation into social norm nativity but in a new social status? 103 00:11:11,430 --> 00:11:17,100 The most convenient way for most of us to grasp the ritual process is to think about a marriage ritual. 104 00:11:17,100 --> 00:11:21,390 The initial hands, the bride and the groom depart from the social condition of being single. 105 00:11:21,390 --> 00:11:29,490 People are brought together in a way that allows them to perform extraordinary acts, not normally sanctioned as single individuals, 106 00:11:29,490 --> 00:11:37,930 such as kissing in public in the euro, American tradition, and then they reintegrate into society as married individuals. 107 00:11:37,930 --> 00:11:44,890 The interesting part of the process is the middle phase after the initial hands in the ritual have left their state of normatively, 108 00:11:44,890 --> 00:11:51,760 but before they've reintegrated in their transformed status, anthropologists call this liminal phase. 109 00:11:51,760 --> 00:11:59,950 The importance of liminality outside of narrowly conceived rites of passage has been recognised at a number of observations have been made about it. 110 00:11:59,950 --> 00:12:05,320 One is that when a group of people first enter into Liminality, think of, for example, 111 00:12:05,320 --> 00:12:10,780 a university class going through matriculation or graduation, they bond together. 112 00:12:10,780 --> 00:12:22,780 Social differences dissolve. Class, gender or ethnic differences, for example, may cease to have the same meanings as they do in normative society. 113 00:12:22,780 --> 00:12:29,200 A term for this sense of bonding is community tasks, essentially just a slightly fancy way of saying community. 114 00:12:29,200 --> 00:12:33,850 But it's a special kind of community in which everyone becomes equal outside of 115 00:12:33,850 --> 00:12:39,010 normal social time and structure as they go through a passage that may be difficult, 116 00:12:39,010 --> 00:12:48,040 traumatic, or in some cases even a trial of endurance. Another observation about Liminality is that it's potentially dangerous. 117 00:12:48,040 --> 00:12:54,940 People released from their normal social obligations might do all sorts of alarming acts to put it in terms of marriage. 118 00:12:54,940 --> 00:12:59,740 If there was no carefully controlled transition from singlehood to married status, 119 00:12:59,740 --> 00:13:06,820 youth in the grip of uncontrollable hormones might just fornicate wildly and all sorts of disasters would follow. 120 00:13:06,820 --> 00:13:15,400 Unplanned pregnancies or warfare between the Montagues and the Capulets or between Arab clans, if you want to think of it in those terms. 121 00:13:15,400 --> 00:13:21,720 That's why ritual exists to control the unpredictable contingencies of liminality. 122 00:13:21,720 --> 00:13:26,100 As I mentioned a moment ago, the ritual process is highly scalable. 123 00:13:26,100 --> 00:13:31,500 Think of the ritual process in terms of a transition, for example, from childhood to adulthood. 124 00:13:31,500 --> 00:13:38,760 We have an intermediate social category called adolescence. The state of being in between childhood and adulthood. 125 00:13:38,760 --> 00:13:43,140 The nature of adolescence varies tremendously from one society to another. 126 00:13:43,140 --> 00:13:44,880 For us, it's quite prolonged. 127 00:13:44,880 --> 00:13:53,040 Everyone knows that teenagers are crazy since we tend not to recognise them as adults until sometime in their late teens or early 20s. 128 00:13:53,040 --> 00:13:57,870 We have institutions to control their unpredictability. Organised sports. 129 00:13:57,870 --> 00:14:05,630 The Boy Scouts carefully chaperoned high school balls, debutantes and other coming of age rituals. 130 00:14:05,630 --> 00:14:09,560 So what does the ritual process have to do with politics? 131 00:14:09,560 --> 00:14:17,060 Well, if he had been in Tahrir Square in late January 2011, you wouldn't be asking that question. 132 00:14:17,060 --> 00:14:23,960 The momentum of the moment when the Mubarak era had been left behind and everyone was energised and thought they loved each other, 133 00:14:23,960 --> 00:14:31,640 despite their normal resentments of class, gender or sectarian affiliation, was community cast on a massive scale. 134 00:14:31,640 --> 00:14:38,600 Further amplified by mass mediation. This is where the story becomes more complex and interesting. 135 00:14:38,600 --> 00:14:43,220 Understanding ritual through the ritual process is often seen within anthropology as a 136 00:14:43,220 --> 00:14:48,710 conservative approach to ritual because it tends to explain how things stay the same. 137 00:14:48,710 --> 00:14:57,440 The liminal phase of the process is full of contingency and possibility for change, but change is always rerouted back into normatively. 138 00:14:57,440 --> 00:15:03,230 But understanding a revolution through the ritual process compels a wider set of observations. 139 00:15:03,230 --> 00:15:12,440 Most importantly, ritual exists precisely for the purpose of controlling the dangers of liminality and transitions we know will happen. 140 00:15:12,440 --> 00:15:16,730 But are all transitions predictable? The answer is no. 141 00:15:16,730 --> 00:15:18,710 All sorts of events, large and small, 142 00:15:18,710 --> 00:15:25,310 compel transitions in which there is no conventionalised means for controlling what happens in the liminal phase, 143 00:15:25,310 --> 00:15:32,480 the period of fluidity between the collapse of one order and the reconstitution of a new order in a revolution. 144 00:15:32,480 --> 00:15:39,220 There is no ritualised process to usher society back into the previous state of normatively. 145 00:15:39,220 --> 00:15:41,630 The Egyptian experience is instructive. 146 00:15:41,630 --> 00:15:48,830 After the initial burst of communities following the fall of the Mubarak regime, no power could fully govern the country. 147 00:15:48,830 --> 00:15:55,280 The liminal phase B, calm, protracted and as far as anyone could judge, open ended as this happened. 148 00:15:55,280 --> 00:16:00,020 The effervescence community last of the first moments of the revolution subsided. 149 00:16:00,020 --> 00:16:07,680 Though all of the subsequent political mobilisations attempted to recreate it inevitably with diminishing success. 150 00:16:07,680 --> 00:16:14,100 In such circumstances, Liminality, intrinsically pregnant with possibilities, becomes limbo, 151 00:16:14,100 --> 00:16:20,700 an uncomfortable sensation of disorientation in which common points of political reference such as the state, 152 00:16:20,700 --> 00:16:27,040 the police or the government no longer have the apparent solidity of the previous era. 153 00:16:27,040 --> 00:16:33,070 Limbo faintly resembles an army, Durkheim, in concept that means normal business. 154 00:16:33,070 --> 00:16:38,500 But in that case, the point was to explain such phenomena as suicide or social deviance. 155 00:16:38,500 --> 00:16:44,950 In the case of a transitional limbo, a more common possibility is for people to take sides. 156 00:16:44,950 --> 00:16:51,850 Old certainties may have been smashed, but a yearning for order is a fairly consistent impulse in all societies. 157 00:16:51,850 --> 00:17:00,250 And so the joyous bonding of community has turned into a much more defensive gravitation toward allies and hopefully safety. 158 00:17:00,250 --> 00:17:07,670 And for those who initiated rebellions against the state, it was a chance to formulate a new kind of state and society. 159 00:17:07,670 --> 00:17:17,210 But in Egypt and in other Arab societies that experienced revolutionary upheaval starting in late 2010, the state of political limbo was protracted. 160 00:17:17,210 --> 00:17:24,020 The transitional process was certainly grinding along in forms that were intelligible to political scientists elections, 161 00:17:24,020 --> 00:17:30,740 formation of political parties, constitution draughting, pressure to reform the police and the security forces. 162 00:17:30,740 --> 00:17:39,650 Judicial reform. In fact, pressure to reform all institutions from the Ministry of Culture to the Department of Traffic Violations. 163 00:17:39,650 --> 00:17:45,380 But in a state of revolutionary limbo, the more crucial transitions had to do with legitimacy, 164 00:17:45,380 --> 00:17:51,990 which was very hard to establish when the previous anchors of political normalcy had been compromised. 165 00:17:51,990 --> 00:17:57,330 This proved to be the perfect environment in which political Trickster's could flourish. 166 00:17:57,330 --> 00:18:01,740 Like the ritual process, tricksters are a universal form. 167 00:18:01,740 --> 00:18:07,230 To be clear, the universality of the form does not dictate what is expressed through it. 168 00:18:07,230 --> 00:18:12,990 Think of it this way. All languages have verbs and nouns as well as consonants and vowels. 169 00:18:12,990 --> 00:18:17,370 Those are universal, but obviously was expressed through them is not. 170 00:18:17,370 --> 00:18:23,820 So to say that the ritual process and the figure of the trickster are universal is not to say that having 171 00:18:23,820 --> 00:18:30,030 recognised this fact indicates that we necessarily understand what is being expressed through them. 172 00:18:30,030 --> 00:18:37,000 But it does mean that we have some basic principles through which to begin recognising what is being expressed. 173 00:18:37,000 --> 00:18:39,770 A trickster is a figure at home in the margins. 174 00:18:39,770 --> 00:18:47,090 Or he could say in Liminality Trickster's existant folklore, mythology, modern literature and popular culture. 175 00:18:47,090 --> 00:18:51,950 Coyote and Native American Culture. Lokey in Scandinavian mythology. 176 00:18:51,950 --> 00:18:55,730 Talk and Shakespeare. Tom Sawyer. Bart Simpson. 177 00:18:55,730 --> 00:18:58,880 They're all Trickster's as creatures of Liminality. 178 00:18:58,880 --> 00:19:08,090 They have no commitment to the existential certainties of normative culture, but they're skilled imitators who can make it up as they go. 179 00:19:08,090 --> 00:19:15,650 In anthropological and literary writing on Trickster's, they're seen as having tremendous capacity for both creativity and destruction. 180 00:19:15,650 --> 00:19:17,990 Which may sound paradoxical, but of course, 181 00:19:17,990 --> 00:19:26,880 one way to conceptualise creativity is precisely as the person or act that transcends boundaries and therefore breaks the mould. 182 00:19:26,880 --> 00:19:31,950 Prometheus was a trickster. He ended up strapped to a mountain with an eagle eating his liver. 183 00:19:31,950 --> 00:19:35,790 But the fire that he gave to human beings was a pretty good tool. 184 00:19:35,790 --> 00:19:43,380 We'd be fools to complain. Tricksters are sometimes too clever by half and end up disastrously like Prometheus. 185 00:19:43,380 --> 00:19:52,270 And sometimes they're the ones who trick others. Tricksters in politics is a new idea about a phenomenon that has occurred throughout history. 186 00:19:52,270 --> 00:19:59,890 Yet you might say its time has come now more than ever, trickster politicians are continually in our midst. 187 00:19:59,890 --> 00:20:06,760 Some familiar examples are Nigel Farraj, Boris Johnson and very obviously, Donald Trump. 188 00:20:06,760 --> 00:20:13,930 In a world dominated by a liberal internationalist order and underpinned by slavish adherence to free market ideology, 189 00:20:13,930 --> 00:20:19,960 political Trickster's in our age seem to be almost entirely far right populists. 190 00:20:19,960 --> 00:20:23,170 But if trickster politics is always a possibility, 191 00:20:23,170 --> 00:20:31,330 then the question arises as to why tricksters are sometimes listened to and become important and not at other times. 192 00:20:31,330 --> 00:20:35,620 Extreme crisis is an obvious factor. Consider Hitler, for example. 193 00:20:35,620 --> 00:20:44,650 His beer hall putsch in 1923 was derided as the work of a lunatic more suited to the comic opera than to serious politics. 194 00:20:44,650 --> 00:20:52,550 His demagogic skill and the violence of his ideas were recognised by some, but the initial response to him was often laughter. 195 00:20:52,550 --> 00:20:59,830 Without the economic collapse of the Weimar Republic and resentment at the harsh terms imposed on Germany after the First World War, 196 00:20:59,830 --> 00:21:05,020 you might well have remained a joke. In Egypt, by the end of 2011, 197 00:21:05,020 --> 00:21:15,040 one of the harbingers of the coup that brought an Fatime Sisi to power was an obscure minor politician and television journalist named Delphia Okasha, 198 00:21:15,040 --> 00:21:22,870 whose television talk show provided a forum for spewing bizarre conspiracy theories and praise for the military and security forces, 199 00:21:22,870 --> 00:21:27,510 including the still disgraced police. And our cash world. 200 00:21:27,510 --> 00:21:32,760 Egypt was under threat by a coalition of Freemason's, Hezbollah, Hamas. 201 00:21:32,760 --> 00:21:37,350 Israel, the European Union and NATO. Why? 202 00:21:37,350 --> 00:21:40,750 Why do you need to ask? You know, our caches lunatic TV show. 203 00:21:40,750 --> 00:21:47,220 It was self-evident that any foreign power would want to destroy Egypt just because it was Egypt or caches. 204 00:21:47,220 --> 00:21:52,590 Clownish monologues were mercilessly mocked in November and December 2011. 205 00:21:52,590 --> 00:21:59,580 But by the middle of 2012, he had become a symbolic lodestone for a growing backlash against the revolution, 206 00:21:59,580 --> 00:22:04,890 not just from shadowy dead enders from the Mubarak era who were said to be financing a wide 207 00:22:04,890 --> 00:22:11,850 range of provocateurs but from a broad swath of the middle and working class of Egyptians. 208 00:22:11,850 --> 00:22:17,250 Okasha was widely and credibly said to be working as an agent of Egypt's military intelligence, 209 00:22:17,250 --> 00:22:22,680 which was run at the time by Oblon, Phidias, Sisi and our cash is hyper nationalistic. 210 00:22:22,680 --> 00:22:29,550 Conspiracy mongering was consistent with Sisi and the elite military cadres that he represented. 211 00:22:29,550 --> 00:22:37,140 Sisi comes across much more clearly in Arabic than he does in the relatively bland foreign journalistic coverage of his regime. 212 00:22:37,140 --> 00:22:46,860 One doesn't need to scratch very far below the surface if Sisi to find his inner Okasha one, recalls that Sisi was Donald Trump's favourite dictator. 213 00:22:46,860 --> 00:22:48,060 Perhaps one bullshitter, 214 00:22:48,060 --> 00:22:57,440 which is to say a trickster politician coming from outside the governing system and making it all up as he goes recognisers another. 215 00:22:57,440 --> 00:23:02,720 It may seem broadly plausible that a true crisis, a collapsed economy, for example, 216 00:23:02,720 --> 00:23:07,040 or a revolution can function as the midwife to forms of politics that might 217 00:23:07,040 --> 00:23:12,080 have been considered deviant in whatever past for normal prior to the crisis, 218 00:23:12,080 --> 00:23:13,370 or to put it differently, 219 00:23:13,370 --> 00:23:23,210 that a smashed political system creates a fluid situation that permits a point of entry for outsiders to enter and influence a reconstituted system. 220 00:23:23,210 --> 00:23:29,690 But this doesn't explain why our current moment in history is so replete with ascendent right wing politicians, 221 00:23:29,690 --> 00:23:35,420 some of whom are intelligible as Trickster's or possibly many of the populists or Trickster's. 222 00:23:35,420 --> 00:23:42,950 If what we mean by populist is someone who reaches over or outside of a functioning political system to appeal 223 00:23:42,950 --> 00:23:50,220 directly to the masses in ways that would have previously been dismissed as impossible or illegitimate. 224 00:23:50,220 --> 00:23:53,640 After every lecture that I've given on trickster politics, 225 00:23:53,640 --> 00:24:02,890 people have come up to me afterwards and said things like this is a great way to think about Putin or now I understand Erdogan better. 226 00:24:02,890 --> 00:24:04,870 That might be pushing the point too far. 227 00:24:04,870 --> 00:24:13,120 One might instead focus on the phenomenon of conspiracy theories and ask, why do they have so much traction these days? 228 00:24:13,120 --> 00:24:18,820 Conspiracy theories are trickster tales that don't necessarily have an identifiable author. 229 00:24:18,820 --> 00:24:22,660 The point is that suddenly they're being taken seriously. 230 00:24:22,660 --> 00:24:30,040 More than a dozen Republican House and Senate candidates in the 2020 election espoused belief in something called Kuzin on 231 00:24:30,040 --> 00:24:37,120 a collection of conspiracy theories claiming that the world is run by a global cabal of Satan worshipping paedophiles. 232 00:24:37,120 --> 00:24:45,610 Two of them won office. A recent poll indicated that 56 percent of the Republican Party in the United States believes in Q and on that, 233 00:24:45,610 --> 00:24:51,910 it would be a mistake to think that there is something new about these trickster tales that we call conspiracy theories. 234 00:24:51,910 --> 00:24:59,590 What is unusual is that they're being taken seriously and not in the context of an existential crisis like a revolution. 235 00:24:59,590 --> 00:25:03,660 Read Richard Hofstadter's The Paranoid Style in American Politics. 236 00:25:03,660 --> 00:25:10,240 It contextualises Barry Goldwater's nomination as the Republican presidential candidate in 1964, 237 00:25:10,240 --> 00:25:21,030 first by tying him to the lunatic ravings of Joseph McCarthy, the tuffet okasha of American politics in the 1950s, and also to the John Birch Society. 238 00:25:21,030 --> 00:25:30,390 But then by tracing that line of paranoia all the way back to the anti Masonic and anti Jesuit movement in colonial America of the late 18th century, 239 00:25:30,390 --> 00:25:34,860 it was always there. But most of the time it didn't matter that much. 240 00:25:34,860 --> 00:25:39,270 Now it attracts attention and adherents in American presidential elections. 241 00:25:39,270 --> 00:25:49,740 But beyond the US, it's strongly tied to an authoritarian impulse that is global India, Turkey, Russia, Egypt, Hungary, Italy, Poland, 242 00:25:49,740 --> 00:25:52,410 the United Kingdom and the United States, 243 00:25:52,410 --> 00:26:01,200 all nominally liberal electoral democracies that are either flirting with or plunging deeply into authoritarianism. 244 00:26:01,200 --> 00:26:07,870 Why by now? What I'm suggesting, and I know this is shameless speculation, 245 00:26:07,870 --> 00:26:13,270 but I promised my colleagues that I would do this or that my lecture wouldn't be exclusively about Egypt. 246 00:26:13,270 --> 00:26:18,070 Why is it that much of the world lives in a state of structured liminality? 247 00:26:18,070 --> 00:26:28,200 Or more accurately, a form of un closeable liminality or limbo, an uncomfortable feeling of being stuck in a transition that never gets completed? 248 00:26:28,200 --> 00:26:35,550 One might also describe this as a structural crisis. Capitalism is the primary agent of this structured crisis. 249 00:26:35,550 --> 00:26:39,480 It always was predicated on economic expansion to function. 250 00:26:39,480 --> 00:26:47,850 It requires new resources, higher productivity, inevitably shifting requirements for labour and often pressure to reduce labour costs. 251 00:26:47,850 --> 00:26:56,820 New markets for surplus production. The effective capitalism was always anti stability, as Marx said in the Communist Manifesto. 252 00:26:56,820 --> 00:27:01,380 All that is solid melts into air and in a capitalist order. 253 00:27:01,380 --> 00:27:06,180 This lack of solidity in the economic system was mitigated in two ways. 254 00:27:06,180 --> 00:27:11,220 First, through Germany, which is often understood in everyday language, is simply domination. 255 00:27:11,220 --> 00:27:19,350 But Marxist most most famously gramme. She linked it to value systems which produce domination by consent of the dominated. 256 00:27:19,350 --> 00:27:24,660 It works by linking together two things which are incommensurate with each other. 257 00:27:24,660 --> 00:27:32,130 In this case, the inherent instability of an expansionist economic system linked to the most conservative social values, 258 00:27:32,130 --> 00:27:38,550 patrimonial ism, patriotism, tradition and religion, for example, properly functioning. 259 00:27:38,550 --> 00:27:45,150 Germany is actually characterised by a relative absence of overt violence applied by the state. 260 00:27:45,150 --> 00:27:52,350 One might argue that the head Germanic ideologies that underpin capitalism have been steadily breaking down, always in localised ways. 261 00:27:52,350 --> 00:27:59,490 But the global trend toward greater use of violence by states is unmistakeable as hegemonic illusions break down. 262 00:27:59,490 --> 00:28:08,850 Populations that had seen themselves as protected from the instabilities that endless capitalist expansion experience increasing precarity. 263 00:28:08,850 --> 00:28:14,790 This has nothing to do with actual poverty, which varies tremendously from one country to another. 264 00:28:14,790 --> 00:28:22,020 Nobody can argue that rates of actual poverty in the US are comparable to poverty in Egypt or the Sudan or Morocco. 265 00:28:22,020 --> 00:28:28,590 The middle classes of all of these places may empirically be better off in some ways now than they were a generation ago. 266 00:28:28,590 --> 00:28:39,340 Yet all of them share the sense of precarity that comes with the implicit dealmaking of enduring values with an inherently unstable economic system. 267 00:28:39,340 --> 00:28:43,930 A second way of mitigating capitalism's inherent instabilities was through protection 268 00:28:43,930 --> 00:28:49,420 afforded by the state protections nominally given to all citizens of the nation state. 269 00:28:49,420 --> 00:28:54,460 But in practise, often given differentially to certain citizens and not to others. 270 00:28:54,460 --> 00:28:59,740 But since the 1970s, the protective umbrella of most states has steadily shrunk. 271 00:28:59,740 --> 00:29:05,860 Structural explanations of revolutions in the Arab world almost always focus on neo liberalism, 272 00:29:05,860 --> 00:29:12,640 liberal in the sense of a liberalised, privatised economy, and neo in the sense that prior to the 1970s, 273 00:29:12,640 --> 00:29:18,820 states were assumed to have a rightful role in organising economies for the benefit of all citizens 274 00:29:18,820 --> 00:29:24,730 rather than for the benefit of those who controlled the greatest proportion of capital and property. 275 00:29:24,730 --> 00:29:31,750 The withdrawal of protection to an increasing proportion of citizens within a given nation state feeds into the erosion of the 276 00:29:31,750 --> 00:29:40,450 hegemony that long made capitalism seem like a thing of solidity rather than a continual melting of material certainties into the air. 277 00:29:40,450 --> 00:29:47,770 Hence, we may feel plunged into revolutionary limbo even when no revolution has taken place. 278 00:29:47,770 --> 00:29:54,850 I won't elaborate at greater length. My goal is more to provoke questions than to give answers in such a brief presentation. 279 00:29:54,850 --> 00:30:00,910 But I do want to return to the Arab world to crisis as a driver of authoritarianism that extends far 280 00:30:00,910 --> 00:30:08,380 beyond the region and which helps to deal exceptionals the dictatorship syndrome that alive A proposes. 281 00:30:08,380 --> 00:30:16,520 And to the pandemic that I see as a kind of half crisis which deepens the limbo in which we've all been living for some time. 282 00:30:16,520 --> 00:30:23,630 Our initial passage into lockdown last March was, for me, a transition accompanied at first by a sense of community tasks. 283 00:30:23,630 --> 00:30:28,910 I can only speak for myself. I know that for others, the experience was simply one of dread. 284 00:30:28,910 --> 00:30:35,930 For me, it was dreadful. And yet it wasn't. My neighbourhood swiftly set up support networks for those who had to self isolate. 285 00:30:35,930 --> 00:30:39,890 There was a sense of camaraderie of we're all in this together, even though, 286 00:30:39,890 --> 00:30:45,560 of course the actual experience was utterly different for those who could seamlessly move work online 287 00:30:45,560 --> 00:30:51,750 and others who had to continue staffing stores and other essential services or making deliveries. 288 00:30:51,750 --> 00:30:56,220 All sorts of people stayed in touch to see how it was doing. I did the same. 289 00:30:56,220 --> 00:30:58,650 Friends sent me clever jokes, Meems, 290 00:30:58,650 --> 00:31:05,940 and videos of ballet dancers performing magical feats in their apartments or at least in someone's palatial apartments. 291 00:31:05,940 --> 00:31:09,960 I baked banana bread and discovered that half the world was doing the same. 292 00:31:09,960 --> 00:31:14,400 Friends in Egypt sent me similar reports and lots more funny lockdown jokes. 293 00:31:14,400 --> 00:31:21,180 And Meems. I've heard that there were suspicions that Egypt's coded statistics were artificially suppressed and 294 00:31:21,180 --> 00:31:27,660 that there may have been and may still be lots more infections than the official statistics suggest. 295 00:31:27,660 --> 00:31:33,210 But other friends had friends who were doctors, and they reported that indeed there didn't seem to be that much. 296 00:31:33,210 --> 00:31:38,160 Koven There was no crisis in Egypt because of Cauvin. Still other friends, however, 297 00:31:38,160 --> 00:31:47,980 indicated that Cauvin Lockdown's were exacerbating economic woes for unskilled workers who had no access to inflation resistent hard currency. 298 00:31:47,980 --> 00:31:56,650 The government and prison doctors who question the official statistics and continued imprisoning anyone else suspected of antigovernment thoughts. 299 00:31:56,650 --> 00:32:03,880 But there was nothing startlingly new in any of this. The same thing seemed to be happening approximately throughout the region. 300 00:32:03,880 --> 00:32:09,250 Iran has a KOVA disaster to the east, to the north. Italy has a COVA disaster. 301 00:32:09,250 --> 00:32:18,710 But thus far, the Arab world has either dodged the Kovik bullet or denied reality at an official level and done it collectively. 302 00:32:18,710 --> 00:32:26,030 Possibly the Kovik crisis was too small to make much of a dent in a region that has been in far worse crises for years. 303 00:32:26,030 --> 00:32:30,650 These crises continue to sustain authoritarians in both illiberal democracies 304 00:32:30,650 --> 00:32:35,580 and in states that barely pretended that elections and parliaments mattered. 305 00:32:35,580 --> 00:32:40,810 And Europe and the U.S., the pattern was more reminiscent of Egypt's revolutionary experience. 306 00:32:40,810 --> 00:32:43,300 First came the exuberance of communities. 307 00:32:43,300 --> 00:32:51,220 As I've already mentioned, along with the communities, I encountered many speculative thoughts about how to benefit from the crisis, 308 00:32:51,220 --> 00:32:59,290 with the streets suddenly devoid of traffic and the smog clearing. It was said to be an ideal time to reboot environmental initiatives. 309 00:32:59,290 --> 00:33:08,870 The pandemic would compel a fairer society like the Black Death had in the 14th century, killing so many people that Labour became more valuable. 310 00:33:08,870 --> 00:33:12,920 Covered would increase the legitimacy of investments in public health care and 311 00:33:12,920 --> 00:33:19,220 tipps society towards a form of participatory socialism or for Slovo Jack. 312 00:33:19,220 --> 00:33:22,700 It would give humanity the beneficial effect of communism. 313 00:33:22,700 --> 00:33:31,180 The pandemic would be Europe's Chernobyl disaster that revealed the decadence of the system, thereby hastening its downfall. 314 00:33:31,180 --> 00:33:36,660 All such speculation was in the mould of. We can never go back to the way it was before him. 315 00:33:36,660 --> 00:33:44,370 A phrase I heard often in Egypt in 2012 when the revolution was suffering one setback after another postrevolutionary future. 316 00:33:44,370 --> 00:33:54,270 That was far worse than the pre revolution status quo had been. The effects of the pandemic in the U.K. and in Europe are still unfolding. 317 00:33:54,270 --> 00:33:59,610 But one thing is very clear. The beautiful bond of communities is long gone. 318 00:33:59,610 --> 00:34:03,750 We entered into coronavirus limbo some time ago. 319 00:34:03,750 --> 00:34:09,330 Only a crisis, actual, actual or perceived produces real change. 320 00:34:09,330 --> 00:34:18,090 It remains to be seen whether the magnitude of the crisis is sufficient for anyone to introduce a new reality that had been previously unthinkable. 321 00:34:18,090 --> 00:34:20,550 Way back in 2019, 322 00:34:20,550 --> 00:34:29,690 when we were in the throes of a structured limbo that was already fertile ground for all manner of populists and their trickster tales. 323 00:34:29,690 --> 00:34:34,600 That's it. That's my presentation. Thank you very much indeed, Walter. 324 00:34:34,600 --> 00:34:44,020 And thank you very much, sir. In less than half an hour, linking in what's been going on in Egypt with a much not only political structures, 325 00:34:44,020 --> 00:34:49,780 but actually the current Koven situation we're hearing that may need begin to think in different ways. 326 00:34:49,780 --> 00:34:56,800 But actually about liminality, I'm also struck our member you talking to me 15 years ago about this figure called Healthy Compassion. 327 00:34:56,800 --> 00:34:58,570 And I thought he was quite a colourful, 328 00:34:58,570 --> 00:35:05,460 quite quirky figure and imagined he was just some sort of product of the sort of peripheries of Egyptian politics. 329 00:35:05,460 --> 00:35:13,060 But as you said, suddenly Tawfiq Okasha seems much more familiar 15 years on in all sorts of alarming ways. 330 00:35:13,060 --> 00:35:18,070 But then you've got tenure. So why been 10 years, Michael? Oh, you talked about him before the revolution. 331 00:35:18,070 --> 00:35:22,430 I remember you telling me. Well, you know, I only discovered him in late 2001. 332 00:35:22,430 --> 00:35:28,990 Right. I thought it was done. They were back when they all covered him and he was a nobody before them. 333 00:35:28,990 --> 00:35:33,290 Well, thank you. My memory, certainly it based on me very early on before he became known. 334 00:35:33,290 --> 00:35:41,110 But thank you. We have some time for questions. You have the opportunity to ask questions if you notice in your. 335 00:35:41,110 --> 00:35:47,200 If you look on Zoom, there's a Q and A button on your bazooms screen. 336 00:35:47,200 --> 00:35:52,030 If you have a question for Wolter, please press that button and type it in. 337 00:35:52,030 --> 00:35:59,670 And my colleague Eugene Rogan is there collating those questions. And I see what we've got already have a number coming in. 338 00:35:59,670 --> 00:36:06,670 So we have about just over 20 minutes for questions before we have to finish at six o'clock sharp. 339 00:36:06,670 --> 00:36:10,420 So I'm going to hand over to Eugene for some questions for Walter. 340 00:36:10,420 --> 00:36:18,660 Eugene, thank you very much, Michael. And it's kind of fun watching on Zoome as the crowd comes in to catch up with the middle, etc. 341 00:36:18,660 --> 00:36:22,960 It's fun to see some of our alumni. I'd like to reach out, say hi to Leonard Wood and Martin Bunton. 342 00:36:22,960 --> 00:36:27,770 I notice you guys have been regulars. It's good to have you back, along with all of our other alumni. 343 00:36:27,770 --> 00:36:31,510 And the questions are pouring in fast and furiously. 344 00:36:31,510 --> 00:36:40,840 I'm gonna start with our colleague Osama al-Hasani and Frank Domani both converge around the relationship between Trickster's and their audience. 345 00:36:40,840 --> 00:36:49,450 Walter, a Summers question is, does the view that figures like Trump RACC are Trickster's risk writing off the significant 346 00:36:49,450 --> 00:36:55,240 sectors of society that actually support these figures as naive or unintelligent? 347 00:36:55,240 --> 00:36:58,900 We think of our fellow citizens in more respectable terms. 348 00:36:58,900 --> 00:37:05,620 Or is there actually something to be said about the ancient Greek antipathy for democracy as ruled by the mob? 349 00:37:05,620 --> 00:37:12,400 Yet democratic accountability seems to be so obviously more desirable than the forms of dictatorship down to the Middle East at the moment. 350 00:37:12,400 --> 00:37:17,620 How might we aspire to a level headed assessment of democracy while engendering 351 00:37:17,620 --> 00:37:23,590 for it the sort of enthusiasm necessary to help unseat dictatorship in the region? 352 00:37:23,590 --> 00:37:34,090 So very not a mind just to bring Frankin A asks does the anarchic access to gullible audiences via social media enable trickster politicians? 353 00:37:34,090 --> 00:37:38,980 So a whole host of issues around the trickster and the citizen trying to pick that force? 354 00:37:38,980 --> 00:37:44,970 Walter. I'll try. No, that's a very long question, first one. 355 00:37:44,970 --> 00:37:51,570 I certainly don't mean to right off audiences or people who follow Trickster's or to suggest that they're stupid. 356 00:37:51,570 --> 00:37:58,470 What I'm trying to ask is why people pay attention to them sometimes and other times they're always there. 357 00:37:58,470 --> 00:38:05,850 But people don't necessarily care about them. So I don't think it's a matter of the audience somehow being gullible. 358 00:38:05,850 --> 00:38:10,740 I do think that social media plays a role in amplifying trickster politics. 359 00:38:10,740 --> 00:38:18,790 But I think that the kind of structured insecurity that so many people feel is more important than they 360 00:38:18,790 --> 00:38:24,690 than there are the technical aspects of the way social media kind of reproduce these trickster tales, 361 00:38:24,690 --> 00:38:33,420 which which are conspiracy theories. And it's not just politicians who are playing the role of tricksters in this case. 362 00:38:33,420 --> 00:38:41,580 I think that the conspiracy theory itself also should be looked at as as a kind of product of a kind of trickster environment. 363 00:38:41,580 --> 00:38:50,490 And I want to what I want to do is talk about a trickster environment and not talk about know sort of evil clowns who are duping people. 364 00:38:50,490 --> 00:38:54,120 I don't see the problem is necessarily that people are being duped. 365 00:38:54,120 --> 00:39:04,740 And yet it's clear that people are more susceptible to listening to these kinds of narratives at certain times than they are at others. 366 00:39:04,740 --> 00:39:07,230 And so if you want to bring back democratic norms, 367 00:39:07,230 --> 00:39:16,430 then perhaps one of the things that has to happen is to stabilise the sense of limbo that people feel that they're living in. 368 00:39:16,430 --> 00:39:25,370 Thanks, Walter. Another attendee puts the question, how do you see the ambivalent group who neither opposes the regime nor supports 369 00:39:25,370 --> 00:39:29,510 it during the revolution and their attitudes towards political tricksters? 370 00:39:29,510 --> 00:39:36,920 Maybe from the perspective of the banality. Well, in Egypt, they used to refer it to the Hezbollah Khanabad. 371 00:39:36,920 --> 00:39:42,780 And sort of the, you know, the broad middle class, which was. At first. 372 00:39:42,780 --> 00:39:48,150 Grudgingly in favour of the revolution, or at least not openly against it. 373 00:39:48,150 --> 00:40:00,550 But as the period of instability went on and the feeling of insecurity grew, eventually solidified very much against it and ended up being. 374 00:40:00,550 --> 00:40:08,560 In many cases, actually active supporters of the coup, not just passive supporters, but at least passive supporters. 375 00:40:08,560 --> 00:40:15,330 But yes, of course, there are people who just sit and watch. And in any case, in any revolution and in any political system, 376 00:40:15,330 --> 00:40:23,820 it's always a minority of people who are activists who are actually out there in the streets or are actively participating in political parties. 377 00:40:23,820 --> 00:40:27,570 I don't think there's any such thing as a fully mobilised society. 378 00:40:27,570 --> 00:40:33,670 So, of course, there are always people who are somewhere in the middle waiting to see which way to go. 379 00:40:33,670 --> 00:40:40,290 Our student, Frederica, broke Hovan, obviously inspired by you, talking about baking banana bread during lockdown. 380 00:40:40,290 --> 00:40:44,660 Wanted to know whether you'd identified any Trickster's during the pandemic in the Middle East and 381 00:40:44,660 --> 00:40:50,730 North Africa during the past few months as the pandemic given rise to a new trickster phenomenon. 382 00:40:50,730 --> 00:40:56,400 Not no, as far as I can tell. I mean, the effect of the pandemic to the best of my knowledge, 383 00:40:56,400 --> 00:41:03,030 and it's not as if I spent an extensive amount of time travelling in the region during the pandemic. 384 00:41:03,030 --> 00:41:11,790 And in fact, travel is quite difficult. And, you know, all I know is what friends are telling me via social media or e-mail messages. 385 00:41:11,790 --> 00:41:14,130 And so, you know, the answer is, is no. 386 00:41:14,130 --> 00:41:21,680 I mean, in Egypt, which is the place that I follow more than other places, the effect of the pandemic seems to be quite small. 387 00:41:21,680 --> 00:41:21,900 You know, 388 00:41:21,900 --> 00:41:35,430 the notion that Egypt doesn't actually seem to be suffering a kind of hidden or unacknowledged covered crisis seems to me to be fairly credible, 389 00:41:35,430 --> 00:41:38,520 because I keep hearing from people saying that, you know, 390 00:41:38,520 --> 00:41:43,050 I have a friend who's a doctor and they say, no, in fact, the hospitals are not being overwhelmed. 391 00:41:43,050 --> 00:41:51,050 And, you know, there aren't all sorts of people who are getting sick and dying from it that the state is trying to somehow cover up. 392 00:41:51,050 --> 00:41:54,730 There may be something going on somewhere else that I am unaware of. 393 00:41:54,730 --> 00:42:00,550 But in Egypt, I mean, know the problem is Egypt was already in a state of crisis. 394 00:42:00,550 --> 00:42:04,890 And as I was trying to hint at the end of my lecture. 395 00:42:04,890 --> 00:42:17,530 It may be that it is not a larger crisis than places that were already happening in places like Syria and Lebanon and Iraq, the Sudan, Algeria. 396 00:42:17,530 --> 00:42:21,580 Another attendee clearly latching on to your and wait for Michael, 397 00:42:21,580 --> 00:42:29,110 I'm going to pronounce this correctly title Apocalypto, just I just wanted to know whether it's possible for citizens, 398 00:42:29,110 --> 00:42:37,810 particularly in countries in the Middle East, to become used to a state of limbo if it's a new normal emerging in this convenient 399 00:42:37,810 --> 00:42:43,120 interim or what is stopping it from becoming a new normal and this convenient interim? 400 00:42:43,120 --> 00:42:46,480 Well, I think it's possible for limbo to become durable. 401 00:42:46,480 --> 00:42:52,120 And, you know, I guess if it becomes durable, then people have to cope with it, which is what people have been doing. 402 00:42:52,120 --> 00:42:59,080 I mean, you know, in my view, the you know, the reason the trickster politicians have become so successful and that conspiracy 403 00:42:59,080 --> 00:43:03,940 theories are threading is precisely that people are already living in a durable, 404 00:43:03,940 --> 00:43:15,970 structured sense of limbo. For it to be limbo, I think people can never become fully comfortable in it, but they can become habituated to it. 405 00:43:15,970 --> 00:43:20,770 They can be living in a state in which they have no choice but to deal with it. 406 00:43:20,770 --> 00:43:26,900 Two, to a substantial extent, people all over the world have been doing just that. 407 00:43:26,900 --> 00:43:31,970 Your reflection on conspiracy theories, Segway is very nice to Richard make pieces question. 408 00:43:31,970 --> 00:43:39,320 He writes of his own recollections of Egypt in the 1990s that there was always a deep attachment to conspiracy theories. 409 00:43:39,320 --> 00:43:47,620 The question was always, who benefits? And it led to bizarre answers, including at a time when the Mubarak regime was entirely secure. 410 00:43:47,620 --> 00:43:56,450 It seemed practically to a fixed characteristic of Egyptian society, along with political jokes and mistrust of the newspaper. 411 00:43:56,450 --> 00:44:04,120 So how is that to be explained? I mean, it doesn't seem like it's necessarily a little a phenomenon that can actually happen in times of fixity. 412 00:44:04,120 --> 00:44:09,340 Well, then there is a small literature on conspiracy theories in the Middle East. 413 00:44:09,340 --> 00:44:17,530 And one way that conspiracy theories that the prevalence of conspiracy theories in the Arab world has been explained is 414 00:44:17,530 --> 00:44:26,290 that people who lack access to information are more likely to ask those kinds of questions of who benefits from something. 415 00:44:26,290 --> 00:44:33,340 And, you know, that was the kind of argument that was being made in the early 1990s by there's an article by John Anderson, 416 00:44:33,340 --> 00:44:40,750 an anthropologist at Catholic University in Washington, who wrote a quite interesting article about conspiracy theory. 417 00:44:40,750 --> 00:44:44,280 And he said he was interested in social media. 418 00:44:44,280 --> 00:44:54,760 And in his view, social media suddenly made access to real information more possible for the Middle East than had been during the 1970s, 1980s. 419 00:44:54,760 --> 00:44:57,280 Of course, now we look at social media quite differently now. 420 00:44:57,280 --> 00:45:03,490 I mean, when when the revolution happened in Egypt, social media was supposed to be mighty engine of truth. 421 00:45:03,490 --> 00:45:10,180 And the lies of the regime could no longer be successful because people could get access to other information from outside. 422 00:45:10,180 --> 00:45:14,590 And so we had all this nonsense about Facebook and Twitter revolutions. 423 00:45:14,590 --> 00:45:20,060 Of course, now it's it's turned 180 degrees the other way. You know, it's all fake news. 424 00:45:20,060 --> 00:45:29,090 But again, I don't think people are as as likely to believe an outlandish fake news when they feel that they're living in a solid, predictable world. 425 00:45:29,090 --> 00:45:37,240 And I say, again, I think people are susceptible precisely because they don't feel they feel in some way precarious, 426 00:45:37,240 --> 00:45:42,970 not necessarily always in ways that they can express. The other thing I want to say about conspiracy theories in the Middle East is I don't 427 00:45:42,970 --> 00:45:50,380 think we should exotic size them as being strictly a feature of the Middle East. 428 00:45:50,380 --> 00:45:57,130 We're trying to make this point by bringing up Richard Hofstadter's book and is kind of tour back in American history 429 00:45:57,130 --> 00:46:03,200 all the way to the 18th century suggests that conspiracy theories were a consistent part of American culture. 430 00:46:03,200 --> 00:46:06,830 But again, the question is, why are they important sometimes and not important? 431 00:46:06,830 --> 00:46:12,710 At other times, and they are more important now than there have been any other time in history. 432 00:46:12,710 --> 00:46:19,340 And so, you know, that's what we need to be looking at. Enough, yeah, known as you invoked. 433 00:46:19,340 --> 00:46:25,250 Q And on, you know, I think the relevance and the pertinence of conspiracy theory as a more generalised 434 00:46:25,250 --> 00:46:29,480 phenomenon as those who might have said this was a feature of Middle Eastern politics, 435 00:46:29,480 --> 00:46:37,460 a little humbled now and aware that our own societies are all too susceptible to that easier way of being manipulated. 436 00:46:37,460 --> 00:46:40,910 But let me go back to the questions, Walter. An audience. 437 00:46:40,910 --> 00:46:46,130 Do you recall if you don't if you don't wish to add your name, said that just Mark Anonymous. 438 00:46:46,130 --> 00:46:50,600 And I've got a number of people who mark this is anonymous. If I see your name next, your question, then I will. 439 00:46:50,600 --> 00:46:57,800 I will mention you by name. So one of our other attendees has said one quality of trickster politicians would seem to be, 440 00:46:57,800 --> 00:47:02,390 please correct me if I'm wrong to at least appear to be the underdog. 441 00:47:02,390 --> 00:47:10,370 An element of rebelliousness and a position ality, regardless of how tightly connected to Jimani Power they really are. 442 00:47:10,370 --> 00:47:18,110 Do you think being in power as opposed to being part of the opposition affects the way trickster politicians operate? 443 00:47:18,110 --> 00:47:29,180 That's a good question. And as I wrote. I suspect that the phenomenon of Trickster's in politics is actually older than we think. 444 00:47:29,180 --> 00:47:38,240 And I said in other forms of this lecture that we should look at trickster politics as as one form of authoritarianism, but not, of course. 445 00:47:38,240 --> 00:47:47,690 The point is not that all authoritarians need to be looked at as Trickster's. But it may be a point of entry into political power, 446 00:47:47,690 --> 00:47:53,300 which then becomes consolidated and turns into something else, essentially becomes institutionalised. 447 00:47:53,300 --> 00:48:00,230 It's difficult for Trickster's to institutionalise. Their politics. 448 00:48:00,230 --> 00:48:04,110 Well, because they're making it up as they go there, they're outsiders, a trickster is an outsider. 449 00:48:04,110 --> 00:48:08,520 Somebody comes into the system who is not necessarily a creature of the system. 450 00:48:08,520 --> 00:48:16,570 But, of course, it's entirely possible that a trickster could could become would become the system, become institutionalised. 451 00:48:16,570 --> 00:48:22,740 And so, yes, I think that that's a that's a good question. There could be an evolution of a person who begins as a trickster, 452 00:48:22,740 --> 00:48:29,310 introduces a kind of sea change in the nature of a political system that then becomes durable. 453 00:48:29,310 --> 00:48:37,380 And I'll just call this schism agenesis. As you know, it's it's the introduction of a new cultural form that had been considered monstrous before, 454 00:48:37,380 --> 00:48:44,390 which then becomes permanent part of culture. We have a question now from Hannah, SCC and Hannah, it's wonderful to see you. 455 00:48:44,390 --> 00:48:48,600 She starts the question so nice. I could read the whole thing, Walter. Walter, that was brilliant. 456 00:48:48,600 --> 00:48:52,760 Thank you, Eugene. It's absolutely wonderful to see you. Great to see you, too, Hannah. 457 00:48:52,760 --> 00:48:56,780 And by the way, congratulations on the Malcolm Kurr. You've done us all proud. 458 00:48:56,780 --> 00:49:02,570 My question says, Hannah, how do you understand the relationship between Liminality Alec Goffman or Van 459 00:49:02,570 --> 00:49:08,900 Ganna grinding down initiations to naked newborn or even a kind of ground zero? 460 00:49:08,900 --> 00:49:18,230 You describe to Graham she's inventory of traces and essentially the idea that our personality and experience are always historical, 461 00:49:18,230 --> 00:49:22,490 always socially and historically constituted. Well, my question. 462 00:49:22,490 --> 00:49:28,830 Yeah, no, that's a great question, although I don't know very much about the Grampian side of it. 463 00:49:28,830 --> 00:49:36,860 But I understand the point about the cultural archives, the political archives that people have is necessarily going to disappear. 464 00:49:36,860 --> 00:49:42,230 It's at the point of entry into Liminality that the kind of level process happens. 465 00:49:42,230 --> 00:49:50,450 And if there isn't a conventionalised way of getting out of it and the condition of liminality becomes protracted, 466 00:49:50,450 --> 00:49:53,660 that's when people rediscover their archive. 467 00:49:53,660 --> 00:50:02,090 It may be an archive that is smashed bits and sort of lying around in unfamiliar locations, but it doesn't. 468 00:50:02,090 --> 00:50:11,180 Of course, it doesn't disappear. And what happens when people get in this extended period of liminality, which I referred to, is as limbo. 469 00:50:11,180 --> 00:50:16,190 Limbo is different than the initial entry into Liminality as they start to take sides. 470 00:50:16,190 --> 00:50:23,390 That's what happened in the revolution. And you take you take sides. By reaching back into stuff that you already know and the stuff that you 471 00:50:23,390 --> 00:50:27,140 already knew might be presented to you in a different form than it was before. 472 00:50:27,140 --> 00:50:34,100 But you still have a degree of familiarity with it and the ability to to act in 473 00:50:34,100 --> 00:50:41,220 ways that can hopefully bring about an end to this intolerable state of limbo. 474 00:50:41,220 --> 00:50:46,380 One from our student future sulcus, who asks who's more important or powerful, 475 00:50:46,380 --> 00:50:53,100 the government or the Trickster's keeping the insanity or dysfunction of the government palatable to the population? 476 00:50:53,100 --> 00:51:00,270 Who needs who in this case? Yeah. That's also a good question. And the Trickster's don't act on their own. 477 00:51:00,270 --> 00:51:04,920 I mean, they may act as kind of loose cannons. Duffy Okasha was a loose cannon. 478 00:51:04,920 --> 00:51:13,670 I mean, he was working for military intelligence, but I think he was the they probably regarded him with some wariness because he was in it. 479 00:51:13,670 --> 00:51:18,120 He also obviously ended for himself as well. And then, you know, this is the case with Donald Trump as well. 480 00:51:18,120 --> 00:51:25,410 But, of course, they're coming into and are sometimes used by people in the background to institutions, 481 00:51:25,410 --> 00:51:33,270 wealthy, powerful forces that are trying to ride the wave of trickster ism for their own ends. 482 00:51:33,270 --> 00:51:37,860 I mean, in the case of the United States, the Republican Party, you don't have to look any further. 483 00:51:37,860 --> 00:51:45,180 I mean, you know, this is a longstanding institution that initially said all of the things you would expect about Donald Trump was a oh, 484 00:51:45,180 --> 00:51:51,000 my God, he's vulgar. Pottuvil, you know, we can't possibly allow this man to become president. 485 00:51:51,000 --> 00:51:56,250 And yet, you know, they ended up using each other. Of course, most of the stuff that Donald Trump did when he was president. 486 00:51:56,250 --> 00:51:59,490 He could never possibly have dreamed up himself. It was the Republican Party. 487 00:51:59,490 --> 00:52:07,400 It was very solid institution with people who understood the way the government worked in ways that Donald Trump never could have. 488 00:52:07,400 --> 00:52:12,880 They took advantage of him. The trickster doesn't make institutions go away. 489 00:52:12,880 --> 00:52:18,330 That's for sure. But that leads to Delila Hood, Ben's question concerning Egypt. 490 00:52:18,330 --> 00:52:24,920 How do you interpret the later dismissal of Towfiq Akasha? Well, good to hear from you. 491 00:52:24,920 --> 00:52:28,850 It's been a while, but, well, it's because I mean, 492 00:52:28,850 --> 00:52:35,930 my view is because this is a trickster and you couldn't have another trickster around on the scene making trouble for him. 493 00:52:35,930 --> 00:52:41,060 My understanding of Sisi is that he also is a kind of trickster politician and he 494 00:52:41,060 --> 00:52:46,460 may be a good example of a trickster politician who manages to become durable. 495 00:52:46,460 --> 00:52:56,620 He's still there and perhaps developing alliances and birder's to actually want the government in ways that haven't been running before. 496 00:52:56,620 --> 00:53:02,170 But that would be my answer to your question, is that Sisi was a bigger trickster than our Cash-in. 497 00:53:02,170 --> 00:53:12,340 And when the time came, they threw him overboard. Some are current show, he is weighing in with a couple of questions with regards to Walter and says, 498 00:53:12,340 --> 00:53:18,550 While I'm weary of the very broad sweep of the comparison of different waves of populist tricksters, 499 00:53:18,550 --> 00:53:26,410 doesn't a history of authoritarianism make a difference? Think of Egypt and Turkey and also of Russia. 500 00:53:26,410 --> 00:53:29,900 Look, I'm not sure I understand the question. Good to hear from you, Sam. 501 00:53:29,900 --> 00:53:40,700 So does a history of authoritarianism make a difference in the ways in which populists or tricksters emerge onto the historical stage? 502 00:53:40,700 --> 00:53:44,810 Well, I mean, authoritarianism is one kind of government. 503 00:53:44,810 --> 00:53:50,570 As I said earlier, it you know, you can't say that every authoritarian is a trickster. 504 00:53:50,570 --> 00:53:59,480 And so you could very easily have an authoritarian system, which, of course, Egypt had throughout its post-colonial history, 505 00:53:59,480 --> 00:54:06,170 which could be taken over and taken in different directions by a trickster politician. 506 00:54:06,170 --> 00:54:16,010 Coming into an already existing authoritarian system and introducing ways of operating that would have been considered Devean before, 507 00:54:16,010 --> 00:54:20,390 but possibly those becoming durable as well. 508 00:54:20,390 --> 00:54:27,110 We have time for one last question, if I can get a brief answer from you, and then we'll hand over to Michael to bring the evening to a close. 509 00:54:27,110 --> 00:54:31,390 But the last question goes to Nate George, who thanks you for a great talk. 510 00:54:31,390 --> 00:54:38,540 It says, Walter, you make clear the relationship between structural crises and Trickster's, which is very helpful. 511 00:54:38,540 --> 00:54:45,800 But do you have any thoughts about the relationship between Trickster's and counter-revolutionary politics? 512 00:54:45,800 --> 00:54:53,750 One thing that's clear about those you mentioned is that all these figures explicitly advocated against are perhaps more rational, 513 00:54:53,750 --> 00:55:01,880 revolutionary alternative. So is there a link to be drawn between Trickster's and counter-revolutionary politics? 514 00:55:01,880 --> 00:55:08,120 Well, I would say it's a link between Trickster's and the far right. 515 00:55:08,120 --> 00:55:13,310 I mean, when I've given lectures on this and past May, people say, what could you have a left wing trickster? 516 00:55:13,310 --> 00:55:23,970 And my answer is, in theory, yes. But in the current world that we live in, no, there's no such thing as a trickster of the left that I know of. 517 00:55:23,970 --> 00:55:30,330 This doesn't mean that there never has been or that they never could be. But if a revolution begins, I mean, 518 00:55:30,330 --> 00:55:39,400 if what you mean by revolution is a revolution that begins with progressive intense coming from the left, basically. 519 00:55:39,400 --> 00:55:48,960 Which I think most revolutions, more or less are, then naturally the opposition to the kind of revolution is going to be a backlash from the right. 520 00:55:48,960 --> 00:55:57,630 But I think that looking over at the larger and the longer trickster scape, these are creatures of the right. 521 00:55:57,630 --> 00:56:03,600 At this particular moment in history, I think it's entirely possible that they're learning from each other. 522 00:56:03,600 --> 00:56:10,500 And of course, they add they all the authoritarian potential tricksters in the world had Donald Trump for four years to 523 00:56:10,500 --> 00:56:18,840 to look at and get inspiration and perhaps learn some new ways to operate in their own political terrain. 524 00:56:18,840 --> 00:56:22,650 Revolutionary do the same thing. And, you know, they they learn from each other. 525 00:56:22,650 --> 00:56:27,860 From what I've heard about the situation in Algeria from Michael, they had their eye on Egypt. 526 00:56:27,860 --> 00:56:33,570 They were determined to not make the same kinds of mistakes that had been made in the Egyptian revolution. 527 00:56:33,570 --> 00:56:38,390 I think I have heard the same things about the Sudan. I don't. It's been quite successful. 528 00:56:38,390 --> 00:56:49,060 So everybody who's involved in politics. Naturally always has their eyes on other people's political experiences and are trying to learn from them. 529 00:56:49,060 --> 00:56:55,960 Thank you, Walter. Unfortunately, our hour is now up and I apologise to those people who still wanted to ask questions. 530 00:56:55,960 --> 00:57:05,000 There was a lot of interest in this topic. But before I send you out to the liminality, that is the coveted weekend in lockdown. 531 00:57:05,000 --> 00:57:13,870 I just wanted to thank Walter again for a wonderful lecture that's taken us from Egypt to Trump to Kove it to banana bread. 532 00:57:13,870 --> 00:57:17,570 In less than an hour. Thank you very much for some fascinating observations. 533 00:57:17,570 --> 00:57:21,580 It's made me think about a lot of different things in a connected way. 534 00:57:21,580 --> 00:57:25,420 So thank you very much, Walter. Thank you very much to all of you attended. 535 00:57:25,420 --> 00:57:30,880 And I invite you to join us all next weekend at five o'clock on Friday for the next in the series of our lecture. 536 00:57:30,880 --> 00:57:34,443 Thank you very much and good night and have a lovely weekend. Thanks to everyone.