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Paper short abstract:

This paper offers an ethnographic account of the Egyptian government's response to the H1N1 Influenza (so-called 'swine flu') pandemic, or supposed such, in 2009, which was to slaughter all the country's pigs.

Paper long abstract:

Notwithstanding the pleas of the WHO, since it spread from human-to-human rather than from animal-to-human, the Egyptian government's response to the H1N1 Influenza (so-called 'swine flu') pandemic, or supposed such, in 2009, was to slaughter all the country's pigs. This measure mainly affected Cairo's Zabbaleen (informal sector garbage collectors), who until then had raised pigs for slaughter on organic waste, which explains why most of them are Christian: for them, the animal is not taboo.

Through the Arabic-language media discourse and other sources collected as part of 18-months' fieldwork on the Zabbaleen, I attempt in this paper to provide an ethnographic account of the pig-slaughter decision, emphasizing two points. First, this unusual 'public health' measure (no other country in the world apart from Egypt took this route) must be understood as part of the public authorities' longstanding efforts to beautify, develop, and bring order to the city: the Zabbaleen are regarded as uncivilized, un-modern and, ironically, as sources rather than removers of Cairo's infamous 'dirt and disorder.' Pigs constitute an especially sore point in this discourse, which the frenzied emergency of the pandemic threat provided a pretext for dealing with once and for all. Second, Coptic church leadership and political classes surprisingly clambered to beat their Muslim counterparts and be the first to request the pigs' slaughter. The sacrifice of their garbage-collecting coreligionists was aimed at solidifying the appearance of 'national' (rather than communitarian) commitment at at time when it is becoming harder to be at once Christian and a citizen of Egypt.