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Fung Program Public Book Talk | Julia Elyachar - On the Semicivilized: Coloniality, Finance, and Embodied Sovereignty in Cairo
by
Wed, Dec 9, 2026
4:30 PM – 6 PM EST (GMT-5)
Louis A. Simpson International Building, Room 144
Princeton, NJ 08544, United States
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On the Semicivilized by Julia Elyachar is a sweeping analysis of the coloniality that shaped—and blocked—sovereign futures for those dubbed barbarian and semicivilized in the former Ottoman Empire. Drawing on thirty years of ethnographic research in Cairo, family archives from Palestine and Egypt, and research on Ottoman debt and finance to rethink catastrophe and potentiality in Cairo and the world today, Elyachar theorizes a global condition of the “semicivilized” marked by nonsovereign futures, crippling debts, and the constant specter of violence exercised by those who call themselves civilized. Originally used to describe the Ottoman Empire, whose perceived “civilizational differences” rendered it incompatible with a Western-dominated global order, semicivilized came to denote lands where unitary territorial sovereignty was stymied at the end of WWI. Elyachar’s theorizing offers a new analytic vocabulary for thinking beyond territoriality, postcolonialism, and the “civilized"/"primitive” divide. Looking at the world from the perspective of the semicivilized, Elyachar argues, allows us to shift attention to embodied infrastructures, collective lives, and practices of moving and acting in common that bypass lingering assumptions of territorialism and unitary sovereign rule.
Food Provided (Coffee and refreshments will be provided.)
Where
Louis A. Simpson International Building, Room 144
Princeton, NJ 08544, United States
Speakers
Julia Elyachar
Professor of Anthropology and the Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies (PIIRS)
Princeton University
Julia Elyachar is an author, anthropologist, and political economist.
Elyachar is trained in anthropology, economics, history of political and economic thought, political economy, social theory, Middle Eastern Studies, and Arabic language. She is associate professor of anthropology at Princeton University, and associate professor at the Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies. She is also a Faculty Researcher with the Dignity and Debt network and serves on the Executive Boards of the Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies, and the Center for Iran and Persian Gulf Studies.
Elyachar received her Ph.D. from Harvard University in Anthropology and Middle Eastern Studies. Her M.A. (Harvard University) is in Anthropology, and her B.A. (Barnard College, Columbia University) is in Economics. She was trained in advanced Arabic language at Middlebury College and the Center for Arabic Studies Abroad at the American University of Cairo, in Hebrew at Hebrew University, Jerusalem, in French at Aix Marseille University in Aix-en-Provence, France and in Slovenian at the University of Ljubljana, Slovenia. Before moving to Princeton University, she was Associate Professor of Anthropology and Economics and Director of the Center for Global Peace and Conflict Studies at UC Irvine. She has also taught and held research positions in Near Eastern Studies and at the International Center for Advanced Studies at New York University and at the Research Center of the Slovene Academy of Sciences and Arts in Ljubljana, Slovenia.
Hosted By
Co-hosted with: Princeton Institute for International & Regional Studies, Anthropology Department