For members of Cairo\'s upper classes, cosmopolitanism is a form of social capital, deployed whenever they acquire or consume transnational commodities, or goods that are linked in the popular imagination to other, more Modern places.
He is author of Anthropology and Mass Communication: Media and Myth in the New Millennium and co-author of International Studies: An Interdisciplinary Approach to Global Issues..
About author(s): Mark Allen Peterson is Associate Professor of Anthropology and International Studies at Miami University.
Peterson reveals how uneasy many Cosmopolitan Cairenes are with their new global identities, and describes their efforts to root themselves in the local through religious, nationalist, or linguistic practices.
He traces these processes from childhood into adulthood, examining how taste and style intersect with a changing educational system and economic liberalization.
In a series of thickly described and carefully contextualized case studies--of Arabic children\'s magazines, Pokémon, private schools and popular films, coffee shops and fast-food restaurants-- Mark Allen Peterson describes the social practices that create class identities.
For members of Cairo\'s upper classes, cosmopolitanism is a form of social capital, deployed whenever they acquire or consume transnational commodities, or goods that are linked in the popular imagination to other, more Modern places