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Paper short abstract:

This paper examines fieldwork with men devising small business projects in Cairo to spotlight predicaments in a projectified anthropological field. Arguing that all project making entails speculation tamed by the project’s organizational form, it rethinks serendipity inside and outside anthropology.

Paper long abstract:

This paper examines ethnographic fieldwork with lower-middle class men in Cairo who devise and launch small businesses and investments glossed as “projects” (mashari‘). The ethnography underscores project making as inherently speculative, requiring constant movement, awareness of opportunities across urban space and social networks, and the skill to forge connections between people, materiality and capital. When discussing what makes a successful project, my interlocutors emphasize perseverance, an instinct for whom to trust and follow, and the ability to seize fortuitous moments while knowing when to let go.

The paper also notes that similar ideals animate contemporary anthropology. As funding structures designate the time-bound research project as the default format for anthropological research, we all turn into speculative projectors. My fieldwork too is premised on moving and establishing connections, on deciding which interlocutors to follow, and on grabbing insightful moments that suddenly occur. Indeed, the success of my whole three-year research project is contingent on speculative bets: which literary trends to adopt, which colleagues to collaborate with, which journals to submit to, when to leave fieldwork and start writing.

In conclusion, I reflect on these parallels to rethink anthropological serendipity. Serendipitous encounters might not only be invaluable as anthropologists move across inherently unforeseeable ethnographic fields (Rivoal & Salazar 2013). In an era when future-oriented projects entail speculation, when speculation is becoming projectified, and when projectification saturates anthropology, the success or failure of any anthropological career is predicated on multilayered practices of speculation tamed by the distinct temporalities of the project’s organizational form.