Paper short abstract:

Based on ethnographic experiences with youth groups in Cairo since 1999, the presentation is an anthropological-historical essay to understand, the power relations established in the Egyptian social structure. The aim is to reveal how coloniality founds an imposition of a social classification.

Paper long abstract:

This paper will offer an alternative approach to analyze social, political and cultural experiences located in historically constructed asymmetric power structures such as Mahragan, beyond the epistemologically dominant dichotomies that contrast between Islam and modernity. I therefore propose, based on ethnographic experiences with youth groups in the city of Cairo since 1999, an anthropological-historical essay that will allow us to understand, in addition to the marginalization of the Shabi cultural universe, the power relations established in the Egyptian social structure. These starting points make the Mahragan appear as a historical encounter, a response of young Egyptian who have roots in past musical traditions, to transcend what we identify as colonial modernity, within Islamic contexts. Through the analysis of Mahragan music, we will analyze the dynamics of the colonization-decolonization dialectic to deepen the understanding of the symbolic spaces of the border as those created in the Cairot peripheries.