The great social laboratory : subjects of knowledge in colonial and postcolonial Egypt / Omnia El Shakry.

Includes bibliographical references (pages [291]-318) and index.

Introduction: Colonialism, nationalism, and knowledge production -- The anthropology of the modern Egyptians : from the fin-de-siècle to the Second World War -- The ethnographic moment -- Anthropology's indigenous interlocutors : race and Egyptian nationalism -- From ethnographic realism to social engineering : the problem of the peasantry, 1925-1945 -- The painting of rural life -- Rural reconstruction : the "road to a new sanitary life" -- The problem of population, 1925-1945 -- Barren land and fecund bodies : the emergence of population discourse in interwar Egypt -- Body politics : gender, reproduction, and modernity -- The revolutionary moment -- Etatism : theorizing Egypt's 1952 revolution..