Amuletic Archives: Writing Magico-Material Histories of the Middle East

Hello, um, I'm Jim Gelvin. I'm a Professor of History uh here at UCLA.

Uh today, as part of the historiography series, we have Taylor M. Moore.

Ms. Moore is, Moore. DR. Moore. Dr. Moore is University of California President's Post-doctoral Fellow, which is quite something in the

History Department at UC Santa Barbara. Her research lies at the intersections of critical race studies,

decolonial/post-colonial histories, histories of science, and decolonial materiality studies with a geographical

focus on Egypt and the late Ottoman world. Her manuscript-in-preparation uh, is called uh, Superstitious Women:

Race, Magic, and Medicine in Egypt. And it uses modern Egyptian amulets as an archive to reconstruct the

magical and vernacular medical medical life-worlds of peasant women

healers and a critical role developing medical anthropological expertise in Egypt from 1875 to 1950.

Today she's going to be talking to us about uh the Amuletic Archives:

Writing Magico-material Histories of the Middle East. So thank you very much for coming. Dr. Moore.

First, before I begin I just want to thank the UCLA Center for Near Eastern Studies

for the opportunity to share my work. I want to thank everyone who's coming out today to listen.

Um, I would also like to thank um Professor Gelvin for the invitation to be a part of his historiography in the

Middle East series um, and to Christian and Johanna for all the labor to organize and advertise the event.

Um, the kind of important and sometimes thankless work that often goes unseen. And

it is about the realm of the unseen that I would like to speak with you today, um, that of invisible entities like jinn,

angels, and demons and how their power is manifested or repelled by certain objects,

as well as the kinds of human labor and historical actors that grappling with the unseen entails.

These are the stories that the amuletic archives have the possibility to unveil to us. So

the main question I want to think through today with you all is how can we use amulets as archives for Middle

Eastern history um and particularly for histories of the so-called modern Middle East.

When we usually talk about amulets and talismans, some people might think of

jewelry, decorative ornaments to be placed over doors and windows.

Others might think of four leaf clovers, rabbits' feet, things like this. Um, and all these instances,

the objects we think about have functional

cultural, aesthetic, and sometimes even sentimental value.

They come with layers of meaning in history. And today I want to explore what objects like these can tell us

about the past and how their presence challenges us to reimagine histories of

the modern Middle East.

Um and how to write history of the modern buildings differently, especially with regard to questions of

science and technology, medicine and health, history of science, and political economy.

My talk today will have three main parts. First, I'll give you a sense of what amulets

are and how we usually encounter them in histories of the modern Middle East if at all. This will initially be

brief since, as we move through the presentation you'll get a better sense

of the variety of shapes and forms an amulet can take as well as the multiplicity of their uses.

Second, we'll move to two amulet archives that were collected in the Middle East during the interwar period.

The Tawfik Canaan Amulet Archive in Palestine and the Winifred Blackman Archive

that is housed in Britain but was collected in Egypt.

Here, we will get an idea of what these archives look like, how they are curated, and the kinds of materials they contain.

Once we've done this, I'll provide a brief case study using my work on wise women and their

amulets in interwar Egypt to give an example of the kinds of histories that thinking with amulets and their archives can produce.

First things first, what is an amulet? And I just want to say that I'm using amulet here as a shorthand for magical

objects that can include amulets, talismans, and charms. Um, if there's anyone in the audience who knows

all the differences and intricacies.

Um, amulets were remedies for a variety of physical ailments from

colds, hemorrhoids, infertility, and eye disease to more spiritual ailments such as bad luck from the evil eye and

spirit possessions.

An interwar period list of amulets and charms collected in Egypt for instance depicts the capacious character of the term.

It included things like Turkish mastic gum which was mixed with egg and butter to help a woman

help a woman during difficult labor, iron anklets forged by Cairene blacksmiths to protect children from jealous spirits,

fruit seeds to induce abortion, rhinoceros horns to counteract poison and sulfur from a local perfumer

to protect against the evil eye.

Uh oops. This category could also include things like clothing, jewelry, weapons, and have uh weapons, that have been

inscribed with protective text and purely text-based amulets like this one here. And I'm showing

this now because I'm going to try and uh focus on less of these kinds of paper amulets in the talk.

Normally when we encounter amulets in writings in the Middle East, we usually

find them in the works of anthropologists, museum curators, and art historians.

When we find amulets as subjects or archival sources and historical writings,

they're generally a part of discussions of magic, science, and Islam in the

medieval and early modern worlds.

In fact, it is only very recently that critical histories of what is now being called

the Islamic and occult sciences are

being written.

However, explorations of amulets and as such magic in the modern Middle Eastern Islamic world

is largely a project that has been taken on by anthropologists um and usually historians of medicine

and knowledge in places like West Africa and South Asia um, where they're trying to look beyond

more traditional paper-based archives and records to methods such as object histories and oral histories.

Yet modern amulets have much to tell us about the social, economic, cultural and scientific lives of historical actors in the modern

Middle East. These objects were bought and sold in open markets and traded under the cover of night sometimes.

They were the means by which many people made their living, sought to heal themselves and loved ones, or even

sought to harm an enemy or an ex-lover.

They were used alongside and paired with modern or so-called modern technologies and medicines.

Most importantly though, many amulets are archives of the labor and knowledge production of generations of occult

practitioners and their customers, figures whose lives may not have always left great marks on

historical record.

On a more timely or depressing note, the field of Middle Eastern history has been plagued

with what has been called an archive problem, particularly in light of the Arab Spring and U.S. incursions into the region and

resulting civil wars.

Um, scholars are no longer gaining access to once open archives whether for security purposes

or because those archives have been destroyed forever. Um, the issue of access has obviously gotten much worse uh under

coronavirus right, with this restriction of movement and people not being able to travel in certain ways. Um, writing

histories of the modern Middle East using objects, magical or otherwise, um that we can find in museum

collections and university libraries, not to mention collections that are available online can be very useful for

students and teachers alike to tell grounded social histories of the Middle East in fun

and novel ways. Um, so now that I've given just a very broad overview of what

amulets are and the general sense of the wider historiographical and methodological possibilities for

using analysts' archival sources, I want to give you a sense of what amulet archives can look like.

Let's turn to two of the largest collections of modern day amulets collected in the Arab world,

the Tawfik Canaan collection and the Winifred Blackman collection.

Both of these archives are interesting because they are located, sorry, because they were collected for um

the Welcome Historical Medical Museum in London. Henry Welcome,

um the man who opened this museum, who established this museum, was a

pharmaceutical tycoon who established a museum of mankind, which opened its doors to the world in 1913.

He used displays of amulets and charms in contrast to what he believed for a more modern scientific and medical

instruments to chart the history of humankind and the medicine of early civilizations.

The Welcome Collection and its archives are mostly digitized and available online so it's a great resource

for remote research projects and teaching.

The first collection I want to explore with you today is Tawfik Canaan's

amulet archive at Birzeit University. Canaan was a Palestinian physician who

served as a medical officer in the Ottoman army during World War I.

In 1912, he opened the first Arab clinic in Jerusalem and apparently it is in this clinic where he began to

collect some of his first amulet specimens from his patients.

Canaan also wrote numerous articles on Palestinian folklore and the supernatural,

which led to his critical acclaim as one of the first Arab ethnographers of the modern period.

Currently held in Birzeit University's museum,

the Canaan amulet collection contains roughly 14,000 amulets. Sorry, 1400 amulets, all of which were acquired

between 1912 and 1942. This is a particularly useful collection for researchers since Canaan was very

meticulous in his marking and labelings of the items he acquired.

He also provided information about the provenance of the item,

who he purchased it from, and how much it cost him.

This kind of information gives much insight into the larger political and

spiritual economies appealing at play in the late Ottoman Palestine.

In late Ottoman Palestine. As well as the actors who sold and used these items.

Um and here on the slide we can see a selection of some of the objects in his

collection.

We have this uh, Kabbas bead. There's a palm shaped stamp with Quranic inscriptions on it and a bell meant to

keep away jinn and the evil eye from unsuspecting sheep.

Already, just from this uh, these objects, we can start to tease out the stories that the individual,

that individual animals can tell. So amulets for sheep can lead to questions about

environmental history, histories of agriculture and animal husbandry.

How many shepherds in Palestine had similar charms to protect their flock

from the unseen?

Did they manufacture the charms themselves or did they purchase them from local [...] or vendors in the

marketplace? Handwritten lists by Canaan helped to answer questions like these while also providing physical

descriptions of the objects he collected.

This is useful because even when you might not get access to the physical object, um, I'm talking for researchers,

you might be interested, uh sorry, just because you might not get access to the physical object,

whether it's lost, in storage, not circulating, things like this, um, there are sometimes paper trails

around objects that can help us rebuild the world in which they circulated and give us a

glimpse of the hands that exchanged them.

Now let's move on to our next collection, that of British anthropologists

Winifred Blackman.

This is the primary collection that I use for my own research um, which I will hear about more in a

second, sorry, which we'll hear more about in a second.

Um, like Canaan's collection, Blackman's amulet collection is outstanding in its sheer size

boasting hundreds if not over a thousand amulets.

However, the Blackman collection far surpasses Canaan's in the scope of the

items it contains. While Canaan's collection, as far as I've seen,

has a more polished touch to it. And by this, I mean there's lots of stones, metal

items, and kind of finished amulets and charms, Blackman's collection is raw with objects,

ranging from mummified cat vaginas and human bones, to some of the magical items we have

come to know well like evil eyes, fear cups, amulet pouches etc..

This is likely because she worked closely with peasant women and working class urban women as a part

of her ethnographic research.

In 1919, Winifred left her work at the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford and

traveled to the province of Beni Suef to study the manners and customs of the upper Egyptian peasantry,

especially those practices she believed to be survivals from ancient times.

Modern Egyptian magicians and wise women captured her interest and she collected objects like amulets

and animal and plant substances that made up these women's healing repertoire.

To make extra money to continue her research in Egypt, Blackman procured amulets and other ethnographic specimens

that depicted Egyptian cultural life for the Welcome Historical Medical Museum from 1927-1933.

Winifred could not have accomplished her field work if it were not for the labor

of Egyptian and Sudanese women, the one that I study in my own work.

They allowed her into their extensive spiritual and political economic networks

which is how she was able to create such a robust collection.

In fact, her research was going poorly until she stumbled onto a healer in old Cairo

who offered to treat her twisted ankle.

Although Winifred refused, she invited the woman to her home and befriended her.

This relationship eventually connected her with other practitioners working in Cairo.

Six to eight wise women would gather in Winifred's home at a time, working half past 11 in the morning and

this is a quote from her, until three in the afternoon without pause, end quote.

In Blackman's collection, we are presented with a rich archive that presents us with vast implications and

possibilities for how we imagine women's and gender history, political economy, histories of medicine and healing,

and more, all through the lens of this occult economy that she gives us access to.

Take for instance this flimsy note card archive that detailed where uh and and when the amulets were procured and

who they are procured from and sometimes the value of the item. From them, we can get information not

only about the physical description of the amulet but sometimes how it is used and its frequency in the occult market.

And so as you see here, here's a charm card about a charm. You got the

description.

You have its use. Um she tells you where she got it from, made by a wise woman and she got it from

Beni Suef province.

Um, we also get a glimpse of economic actors like peasant women,

street magicians, formerly enslaved black Africans, um like likely like the woman who um provided the charm in this flimsy note

card.

Folks who rarely make an appearance in modern Middle East history as it is written today,

mostly because of the limitations of our traditional paper archive. I'd like to stress that I focused on two

ethnographic collections of modern amulets here but if we widen our scope to art and science museums and amulets and other

magical objects, you really get a taste of the sheer volume

of magical material produced and circulated in the region, as well as the numerous aspects of

everyday life that they can give us insight into.

In the same vein, once we start thinking with magical objects, we are able to find them in more traditional places

or documents that we usually think of as archives.

Um, many libraries around the world for

instance contain occult text from the Islamic world like grimoires or how-to manuals on summoning

and containing jinn to do your bidding.

Some might even argue that certain texts are magical in and of themselves, which is why some archivists and staff

in certain archives especially in certain places in the Middle East might be hesitant

to allow research access to the frightening power held in these tombs.

I've also found amulets or in some cases the material used to manufacture an amulet or conduct a magical rite in

places like medical texts, um the papers of anthropologists

archaeologists and art historians, as well as in places like police and court records.

So before I get to my own research to show you the possibilities for thinking

with amulets and archives, to reimagine the history and historiography of the Middle East,

I just want to show you all a very cool find from the Ottoman Archives.

This source is a part of a collection of documents from the Ministry of Police in Istanbul.

And it describes uh Syrian families' attempts to use magic to seek revenge on the esteemed

Ottoman General Ahmed Izzet Pasha who they blamed for not giving them job posts and causing their destitution after they

moved from the [...] region to Istanbul.

Um and Ahmed Izzet Pasha at the time was the newly minted chief of Ottoman general staff. So to make a long

story short, the family hires a Bektasi Sheikh to magically induce sickness and

misfortune on the Pasha's family.

Their plan was then to use the same Sheikh to rid the Pasha's family of this misfortune in hopes that the Pasha would owe them a huge favor

and as a result give them staff positions in a government office.

This does not happen. They ultimately get caught and the sheikh is arrested in his hotel

room before anything can go down.

And this document that I have on the screen is a list of the items that they found on him.

Um and like it's it's very cool and I just want to put this up here to illustrate you know, that finding magical items or items

associated with magic in documents even if they're not physical can still be useful to you. And just thinking about the economies of

you know sperm whale fat candles or the kinds of things you could use a

Raki glass for the outside of drinking right.

Um it becomes very interesting when you think about these items within the context of a larger occult economy as

opposed to just thinking about conspicuous consumption. Um, so now let's move uh onto the case study of my work

so that I can give you all a sense of what an amulet-based history can potentially look like.

My book project um, and since we've been jumping around to various places, I just want to ground us kind of

in Egypt at this moment. Um and I also have a map of the governorate of Asyut which is one of the many

places that Blackman did her uh ethnographic research and where some of these amulets

that I'll be talking about are coming from and the women who use them are coming from.

So my book project "Superstitious Women: Race, Magic, and Medicine" in Egypt uses amulets as archival sources to show

how upper Egyptians and black African women healers along with the amulets that they wielded shaped robust spiritual and political

economies of healing in Egypt's long 19th century.

These women stood at the center of a contest over power, expertise, and scientific authority as

Egypt shifted from an imperial capital that subjugated the regions of upper Egypt,

which starts around here um Sudan and Nilotic East Africa to a province of overlapping and competing imperial

projects at the hands of Ottomans, French, and British.

Peasant women healers, or wise women as they were known, shaped magical and vernacular medical life worlds essential

to medical and anthropological expertise from the reign of Khedive Ismail, which is in the 1860s to the interwar period.

Despite persistent imperial, colonial, and national attempts to discredit their labor,

wise women controlled a widespread market in occult objects and services that were crucial to everyday life.

By the 1920s, the production of the cult knowledge became intimately entangled with the internationalization of the social sciences.

Wise women reveal how new understandings of how vernacular healing knowledge and the occult sciences became gendered

and racialized in this period.

Egyptologists and anthropologists like Winifred Blackman designated women healers and their magical medical practices

as survivals of ancient Egypt.

But these women were not simply objects

of scientific inquiry, they were critical producers of medical and anthropological knowledge.

Their story and their labor tested, hidden in plain sight, or relegated to dark corners of modernist nightmares that rendered

the occult irrational, primitive, and in the case of Egypt, a distinctly African endeavor.

The project is situated at the temporal crossroads of the empire of khedive or viceroy Ismail,

the grandson of Muhammad Ali, an Ottoman-Albanian soldier who established a fledgling semi-autonomous empire in 1801

through the British occupation of 1822, sorry 1882, and up until the interwar era.

Through the ideas and practices of wise women and the object tales of their amulets, I

recast histories of magic, medicine, markets, and museum anthropology to show the occultic underpinnings of

the Egyptian modernity project. I use textual and amuletic archives of the urban poor and rural peasantry's spiritual and political economies of

healing to explore their understandings of the world.

These understandings did not simply haunt Egyptian modernity, they shaped it. In doing so, I demonstrate

how wise women provide new lenses from which to use science, technology, gender,

and race, and specifically Africanity in the Middle East North Africa.

Building off of work of the work of scholars of race and enslavement in Egypt, my work illustrates how and why magic

and the occult sciences became a means for the Ottoman Egyptian and British

colonial governments to racialize and oppress formally enslaved black Africans and

upper Egyptian populations living in Egypt. As both as both non-literate and lacking access to social mobility,

these women pose a methodological puzzle.

How can we access the story of these healers whose influence continues into the present but whose

traces are difficult to find outside of the colonial archive?

To answer this question my work embraces feminist theorist

Sarah Ahmed's notion of the political economy of attention to investigate how

objects will become archives of intimate encounters between actors and witnesses to the everyday end quote

in ways that traditional archival sources may not. Taking her lead, I critically engage the

simultaneously colonial and indigenous, if you will, orientation of the amulet archive to fully understand historically race and gender

geographies of healing and knowledge they both produce

and occlude. Superstitious Women intervenes in global histories of science and medicine and particularly those on science and

medicine in the modern Middle East. Centering wise women

opens up space for rationalities not anchored in white western capitalist thought um and bodies right um to come to the

the forefront of fields like global science studies that have largely ignored them.

So amulets are but a sampling of the array of magical objects that could heal or inflict corporal and spiritual pain.

These objects loomed large in the history of science in Egypt and late Ottoman world and the global networks they took part

in in the first half of the 20th century.

As such, these amulet tales have much to teach us about the working-class women, formerly enslaved black africans and

other Egyptian migrants who colonizers and nationalist reformers alike condemned

as charlatan business women that peddled their wares to foolish and gullible customers.

These wise women played a pivotal role in producing scientific knowledge.

Scholarship on the production of scientific medical knowledge in the modern Middle East

generally depicts a struggle between mostly literate male experts whether indigenous or European.

In spite of a robust tradition of women's and gender history, Egyptian women appear in such histories

as agents of state power or as problems to be solved.

Amulets, as sources, tell a story that complicates the social depictions and oversights,

not to mention our conventional understandings of regional and global markets and economies.

Beyond the factory floor and the cotton plantations that dominate political histories of the Middle East,

amulets and the women who bought and sold them provide new ways to view value, commodification, collection,

and exchange.

Rummaging through museum holdings and presumed forgotten spaces of assumed

historical refuge, uh sorry refuse,

I found a rich and hitherto understudied amulet archive. Egyptian and European anthropologists medical officials,

hospital staff, and private collectors collected magical medical and occult objects between 1900

and 1930. These amulets serve as an agent of uh sorry as agentive of technological conduits that blur what

envirotech historians call the illusory boundary between humanity and nature, and that between the material world and

the realm of the unseen.

Blending insights from critical race STS and new materialist theory, I develop a

material, sorry a methodological approach I call decolonial materialism which uses these amuletic archives to

highlight precarious figures likewise women as producers and transformers of scientific knowledge.

Despite triumphant announcements from colonial officials, medical doctors, and national reformers,

these objects and the practices they narrate did not die in the wake of a modern state and the scientific

production, sorry, the scientific knowledge it claimed to produce.

They shaped both.

The occult was everywhere, from Ottoman-Egyptian homes to hospitals, markets, museums, um to the Cairene living

room where our anthropologist Winifred conducted much of her ethnographic field work

on ancient wise women. It transgressed the divides of public and private home and work,

formal and informal. In other words, the occult was alive and well.

Given this ubiquity, what can account for magic's absence and our understandings of the modern

Middle East? Scholarly disinterest and hostility to magic was to some to some extent a result of an effort to banish orientalist

stereotypes of cultural and scientific stagnation. Examinations of occult practitioners like jinn

and the socioeconomic world in which they created, sorry in which they participated and created, continue to trouble historians

who seek to challenge eurocentric notions of the rational and the civilized.

But magic has much more to tell us that we can expect about markets, value, medicine, and science.

British and American nurses like Mabel Wolff and the Infant Welfare Center at [...] hospital collected or more accurately confiscated

uh charms wrapped in lever pouches in rating rooms from peasant women as they navigated multiple medical worlds.

And if you remember, if you remember, this is exactly how Tawfik Canaan was able to collect

some of his first amulets as well.

Um, Silversmith sold amulets to women wishing to appease our spirits.

Druggists and pharmacists invoked the teaching of [...] while selling herbs collected in India and China, sorry

um, for healing poultices and magic rituals.

Throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries,

Egypt was a major exporter of occult texts, amulets, and other magical items. Egyptian publishing houses

printed the most commonly used prayer booklets for written talismans and incantations

exported throughout the Middle East, Africa, and South and East Asia.

Amulets were easy to acquire in large marketplaces,

in public squares, or local shops in major cities.

Similarly, the environs of Al-Azhar mosque and university, the most renowned place of learning

for sunni Islam, boasted numerous merchants selling amulets in occult texts on astrology, herbalism,

and geomancy, indicating the overlaps between the world of the occult

and the world of religion. Despite its ubiquity,

the occult economy was a thorn in the side of doctors and

government officials. A nuisance to sorry a nuisance to religious authorities and petty male magicians

and a supposed danger to elite and middle class men and women.

It was decidedly un-Islamic, non-modern,

and irrational. These invectives against the occult

were just as plentiful as the talismans and amulets that circulated throughout the city,

the country, and beyond.

Egyptian medical doctor Abd al-Rahman Ismail was one of uh sorry was at once the most vocal

detractor and most faithful ethnographer of the occult and specifically wise women.

His 1892 study Tibb al-Rukka or Old Wives' Medicine provides thick

descriptions of over 50 different treatments.

In his detailed study, Ismail is preoccupied with Egyptians persistent faith and

vernacular healers.

He reasoned that women's weak mental and bodily constitutions made them prone to superstition and

resulted in their dominance in this production, sorry in the production of this type, sorry in the production of this type of

knowledge.

In fact, most women were excluded from the few hospitals and clinics that were available.

And these institutions were neither neutral nor safe spaces for most.

Ismail's main task was to legitimate the medical state school [...] where he trained as a medical

doctor, or as he thought, the premier and sole authority on all matters of healing.

Like many professional Egyptian doctors, he spoke out against practitioners that did not

fall under its purview.

The occult economy also reveals a multiplicity of racial logics.

Um, just grounding us back here again, especially so you can see

uh, how Egypt relates to Sudan et cetera.

Um, beginning in the 1870s, the Khedival dynasties failed imperial pursuits in East Africa resulted in the state's

confiscation of the southern region of upper Egypt.

At the same time, Egyptian fears of black African superstition escalated following the gradual abolition of slavery

from the 1870s to the 1890s.

Many formerly enslaved people turned to occult professions and spiritual collectives for their livelihoods and

social lives.

If returning home was impossible as it

often was, and domestic or agricultural work unavailable, black Africans from Sudan,

Abyssinia, and parts of West Africa found their futures in the magical trades such as zar,

fortune telling, and geomancy.

These patterns did not pass unnoticed and the Khedival government was quick to respond.

In 1880, a new legislation titled Legal Procedures and Jurisdictions

of Court of Police Station Commissioners tasked the urban police with maintaining public order

and specifically safeguarding the welfare of quote, gullible women like widowers

and pregnant women as well as the weak and the unruly sorry the weak and the elderly from unruly elements.

The law named four distinct groups of people as threatening charlatans: Sudanese, West Africans, and upper Egyptian

Bedouins.

These people, the Khedival law warned, loiter in the streets performing geomancy, shell divination, bibliomancy, and

advising unsuspecting passers-by on spiritual matters.

It also described quote trickster, Sudanese, and other Egyptian women including practitioners of war who

stole the silver Dirham of innocent citizens.

The threat of the occult was not confined to city squares and markets however. Turco-Egyptian and European

households lived the occult through their black servants and enslaved workers. This intimacy was a source

of fear.

As occult practices and possession rituals like zar spread from uh the Black African community into

Turco-egyptian homes, employers, medieval officials, and later British colonial officials

sought to curtail the influence of zar

priestesses on their devotees. Such officials feared that wise women could manipulate enslaved persons and

servants into stealing their owner's money or worse killing them.

In other examples, the occult was a site of patriarchal anxieties.

Egyptian novelist Mohammad Hilmi Zayn al-Din in his 1903 story

The Harmfulness of Zar warned men of the dangerous powers zar could give

manipulative wives to con their husbands out of money and silver as an excuse to

appease the ornery spirits that possessed them.

In each of these instances and many more, the occult stood for

the fragility of power in the face of potential resistance.

And yet zar persisted in spite of the elite scorn

and governmental attempts to eradicate it.

Black Africans were not the only individuals engaged in occult work nor were they the only perceived

superstitious menaces to Egyptian society.

Experts and elites viewed upper Egyptians as charlatans.

Following Egypt's failed attempts to colonize Nilotic East Africa in the 1860s

and 1870s and the British occupation in 1882, the semi-autonomous region of upper Egypt became Egypt's new southern

hinterland.

By the turn of the 20th century, elites and social reformers defined the region as a space of backwardness,

ignorance, and superstition.

The fuzzy cartographic border separating upper Egypt and quote-unquote Africa led early British

anthropometric scientists um to argue that upper Egyptian stock

was contaminated by African migrants through the area.

This in turn made up Egyptian inhabitants more susceptible to superstition.

Egyptian scientists enthusiasts sorry enthusiastically endorsed these findings.

At the same time anthropological theories of the late 19th and early 20th century

posited upper Egyptians as living fossils of Aaronic Egypt.

Egyptian and European scientists used the data gathered from hundreds of bodies exhumed

during archaeological digs to argue that Upper Egyptian bodies were exact replicas of their glorious ancient forebears.

The so-called anachronistic pharonicism made them embodiments of a precious lineage by which

modern Egypt could lay claim to being the cradle of civilization, but it came with a liability. Mentally,

they carried with them the ancients predilection for magic.

During the interwar period, Egyptian public health officials and proponents

of agricultural and social reform targeted the upper Egyptian peasant woman in particular

as a central figure in the growing nationalist concern around the country's

problem of population.

The peasant woman was simultaneously the quintessential problem and the solution to Egypt's future.

Officials in the 1920s and 1930s argued that as a degenerate woman and a landless peasant, two categories

deemed in dire need of, quote, moral and material improvement, end quote.

The peasant woman and her superstitious beliefs and practices especially around

birthing and child care demanded the utmost regulation and reform. Decreasing infant mortality

was an issue that elite Egyptians and particularly Egyptian women took to heart. Led by

esteemed feminist Huda Sha'arawi the Egyptian delegation in 1923 uh sorry,

to the 1923 Congress of the International Women's Suffrage Alliance in Rome

presented nine reform points which included raising the moral and intellectual level of women in Egypt, engaging in

active propaganda for public hygiene, particularly with regard to child

welfare and quote, to fight against superstition

and certain customs that do not accord with reason.

Sha'arawi who would ascend to the status of national feminist hero

supported the continued colonization of the Sudan.

In her support of both reform and colonization, Sha'arawi reveals elite Egyptian women's vexed

relationships with race and the racialized healing practices of women healers.

Elite women and men alike identified wise women's healing powers as dangerous vestiges of the past that needed to be eradicated. At the same

time, they mobilized racialized logics to define and dominate a new and modern civilization, one in which superstitious women and

their amulets did not exist. It is this very movie erasure that led salvaged

anthropologists like Canaan and Blackman to collect amulets and charms

in hopes of archiving the moment uh in time, sorry a moment in time and

belief that would be no more.

But they couldn't have been more wrong. Many of the practices that their

collections captured still exist in some form today. Yet if it

were not for these colonial and nationalistic or proto-nationalistic

impulses of collecting, we would not have the rich

archive of modern magical objects that I have shared with you today.

To briefly conclude, amulets provide new lenses to view the gendered, race, and class character of social life

as well as the formation of global economies of science,

healing, and spiritualism in the late

Ottoman and interwar periods.

They can be read along with and against more conventional archival sources

to help us rethink the history of the modern middle

east at the stands while also um it can help us to embolden

students and researchers to write new kinds of histories that hold the magical and the supposedly disenchanted modern

together.

Finally and most importantly, amulets provide an opportunity to tell the

histories of the humans that have been neglected in Middle Eastern history. The unnamed upper Egyptian peasants,

um and Palestinians who made Winifred and Tawfik collections possible.

These are the types of people who theorist Sylvia Winter suggests have yet

to be fully actualized in historical accounts as human enough. The history I have conjured today

is a testament to their labor and their knowledge, a testament only preserved on the

tongues of the old wives and in the stories their amulets can be coaxed

to tell. Thank you.

That was wonderful.

Thank you very much. Thank you.