"Markets of Dispossession is a brilliant study of contemporary forms of market ideology and practice. Exploring central questions about value and social resources, debt and dispossession, culture and power, it offers an original and outstanding contribution to the anthropological analysis of the economic."--Timothy Mitchell, author of Rule of Experts: Egypt, Techno-Politics, Modernity "Ethnographically rich and analytically powerful, Markets of Dispossession fundamentally reshapes the debate over the informal economy, microenterprise, and economic development and points to the complex and many-layered world-conjuring work of that which we have come to call neoliberalism. Based on evocative accounts of craftsmen's workshops in Cairo, Julia Elyachar shows how the market expansion promoted by the World Bank, NGOs, and others poses critical challenges to both everyday lives and contemporary social analysis."--Bill Maurer, author of Mutual Life, Limited: Islamic Banking, Alternative Currencies, Lateral Reason "Markets of Dispossession is an important contribution to the study of development, informal economy, and neoliberalism in Europe. Elyachar's treatment of these intricate subjects is intellectually stimulating and compelling."--ANthropological Notebooks, XII/1, 2006 "[A] masterful description and sophisticated interpretation of the transformation of the social, cultural, and political economy of urban Egypt since the early 1990s. Elyachar has written a book that is essential reading for anyone concerned with development, Egypt and the Arab World, and the dangers of ideologically motivated interference by foreign social scientists and other experts in local economies and societies.
"--Donald (Abdallah) Cole, American Ethnologist "Markets of Dispossession is an engaging book from the first page. It embodies keen academic analysis with a humanistic touch."--Heidi Morrison, Digest of Middle East Studies "[A] hard-hitting, iconoclastic, and deeply engaged work of scholarship." --Jeremy Rayner, European Journal of Sociology (forthcoming) "Julia Elyachar's ethnography.offers a refreshingly critical and historically situated account of microloans and the neopopulist ideologies that have swept the international development industry.Markets of Dispossession should interest anthropologists, historians, sociologists, and geographers concerned with post-socialism, development, urban studies, and the Middle East." --Marina Welker, Comparative Studies in Society and History (forthcoming).