Avenues of Participation, Diane Singerman

James Scott’s goal in his magnificent text, Weapons of the Weak, is to understand everyday forms of peasant resistance, the “ordinary weapons of relatively powerless groups: foot dragging, dissimulation, desertion, false compliance, pilfering, feigned ignorance, slander, arson, sabotage and so on.” These common forms of resistance do not depend on the state nor on formal social movements, rather, they, “require little or no coordination or planning; they make use of implicit understandings and informal networks; they often represent a form of individual self-help; they typically avoid any direct, symbolic confrontation with authority.” (Scott 1985:xvi, italics mine)
Singerman relies heavily on Scott in arguing that political participation, like peasant resistance, takes many forms. Subaltern communities (those of lower status) are neither apathetic toward repressive political regimes nor are they depoliticized into silence. Despite Egyptian efforts to exclude the bulk of the populace from formal politics, the regime cannot prevent the lower classes from creating their own economic and social networks. In mapping out this space through the use of ethnography and social network analysis, Singerman attempts to accomplish four theoretical goals.
First, she blurs the line between state and society by extending the zone of politics into the private sphere, even into the family. Second, she expands our understanding of political expression. Political expression resides in more forms than rallies, demonstrations or coups. Third, she diversifies the notion of political power by detailing the role that women’s extrasystemic, informal pressure plays in these networks. Building on the work of feminist scholars, she argues for revising notions of political power to incorporate seemingly apolitical activities.
Fourth, she attempts to show how this all matters for Egyptian politics and scholarship. She argues that it matters for two reasons. The first is descriptive and compelling. Understanding life in Cairo is indeed incomplete without an understanding of the sha’b. The second is in my opinion unpersuasive, that we need to understand the sha’d in order to “construct any dynamic and comprehensive analysis of national politics.” (271) She argues that informal political institutions enable the sha’bi communities to preserve some measure of autonomy otherwise denied by the state. They must thus be incorporated as a force in Egyptian politics just like the elites, social movements, or the military. The sha’b also uses informal political institutions to negotiate, or undermine the state without risking the consequences of confrontation. This erodes the tax base of the state and has implications for economic development.
I am not convinced that this matters for political analysis, economic change, or even understanding power. I think all social networks establish some measure of autonomy from the state. Bureaucracies maintain independence through institutional contestation, the military through fear-mongering, social movements through claims to moral superiority. That some autonomy exists is insufficient evidence for causal influence. That the sha’b erodes the tax base of the state has less to do with informal networks and more to do with low infrastructural power, low levels of legitimacy and the broader issue of state capacity. I suspect that if state capacity increased, the tax base would as well.
In conclusion, it is worth noting that this text was published under the auspices of Princeton University’s Studies of Muslim Politics, and I think it succeeds as a descriptive account of one Muslim community’s politics. Theorectically however, it depends almost entirely on Scott’s framework and thus feels shallow on its own.