Adolescencia y Juventud:

The Revolution was a catalyst for people to open up and break their fears, but also for the Egyptian government, particularity the Supreme Council of Armed Forces (SCAF) to grow cautious of my presence in my final stages of fieldwork in Lower Egypt, as mentioned earlier. Women landholders in Lower Egypt, who met me after the Revolution, were

particularly cautious too. One woman landholder called the red line to report me as a spy of the Revolution. During and after the Revolution there were no police in the country and people feeling threatened or subjected to criminal actions are asked to call the red line to request help. Also because of the Revolution, the engineers and local Head of the Sa’yda settlement were under increased attack from the settlers both physically and through lawsuits and complaints to SCAF, and as a result most engineers and the Head of Sa’yda refused to participate in the local workshops that I planned to conduct but managed to do only one, as mentioned earlier, probably in fear of being attacked or rebuked by the settlers.

Because I was able to access sensitive data related to settlers’ relations with their government, the Revolution introduced new concerns into my research, specifically taking drastic measures to protect my informants beyond the usual protection of confidentiality and anonymity. The latter, in this research, is sometimes difficult to accomplish because many officials knew where I was working and with whom I spoke. Kovats-Bernat (2002: 216) argues that data provided by informants in conflict-stricken and politically unstable areas might lead to the harassment, exile, imprisonment, torture, or even death of the informants. I am aware of such dangers. Although I use pseudonyms, many high ranking officials know my research sites and, in fact, helped me work in those places, as mentioned previously, and are aware of the identities of my informants. As a result, when deemed appropriate, and with

the help of my supervisors, I choose not to disclose what I was told by some informants to protect them.

Perhaps the most limiting impact of the Revolution was on my mobility. I was not able to leave the New Lands to the Old Lands as much as I wanted. For my final couple of weeks in Egypt, I had plans to follow women landholders to their original hometowns by conducting some fieldwork in some of the original villages and compare the status of the landless women there to the women landholders I interacted with in Sa’yda. The security situation in Upper Egypt’s Old Lands, however, where the government and police absence led to an increased incidences of theft, inter-tribal kidnapping, revival of blood feuds, and crime, forced me to leave Upper Egypt to conduct research in the relatively safe New Lands of the Intilaq settlement. I also had heat stress complications in Upper Egypt and Lower Egypt is at least 10 •C cooler. I had no intentions of staying in an air-conditioned room for the final two months of my fieldwork.

The Revolution’s impacts became particularly problematic during my return visit in January 2013. My research permit ended in August 2011, and I was denied a new one by national security forces, citing the “deteriorating security situation” as the reason.

Nonetheless, luckily, I was able to use my former permit to hold a policy seminar and conduct interviews and focus group discussions with policy makers in Cairo. As I have expected, and even more so, during my stay in Cairo protests were common place

throughout, most notably in front of government offices. The protests were carried out by both affected citizens and staff often resulting in road blockage. As a result, I relied on my feet to visit offices. These never-ending protests made it also problematic sometimes to meet officials and increased suspicion of officials towards my intentions for research. This chaotic situation also resulted in frequent change in big officials due to protests, which might mean that my policy recommendations might be discarded because they were given to officials who could lose their positions.

Three other limitations, not related to the Revolution, impeded my research. First, people misrepresented their economical conditions and benefits from the land in fear of being denied potential foreign aid coming out from the current research. Women often denied that they owned their cows and small ruminants or made up numbers for what the farming

revenue was for a certain crop. As the women landholders that I worked with understood that I will not be distributing aid or credit, they revealed their real economic conditions. I did validation by asking the neighbors whether the cow or ruminants are ownership or partnership, as partnerships are quite common too, or about the economic conditions of certain women landholders. I often got, especially in Upper Egypt, shocking data from the neighbors. Om Nizam, for example, who denied buying land to me, I was told, has bought two, not one, pieces of land and three houses.

The second limitation that arose in my research is related to my inability to stay with the women landholder informants during the nighttime. I left between 5:00 and 8:00 pm daily. I wanted to stay with the local women landholders, and I tried for four days. I was overwhelmed with how many rats there were in local settlers’ houses and by the swarms of mosquitoes that would come in through cracks in the windows and walls no matter what kind of repellent was used. I was not able to sleep and was also told that wolves attack cattle and goats at night and so I was scared of the wolves. Women exclusive villages, especially in Upper Egypt, where I spent most of my time were also particularly vulnerable to theft. As a result of all of these factors, I ended up staying in the relatively luxurious government housing and commuting to the sites.

The third limitation is related to government’s control over who I can speak with and what can I do. The LDU in Upper Egypt had opponents, especially after the Revolution but even before, who sent faxes and complaints to SCAF. I conducted interviews with two such notorious opponents. When the Head of the local Settlement knew, he got quite upset with the driver who took me there. I was asked not to visit these people again. Also, I was asked by the Head of the settlement not to publish the article that I wrote with women until it is edited and read by him. He was also upset that I took such an initiative. Sometimes, the Head of the Say’da settlement forbade me to speak with settlers not because he was afraid of what they might tell me but because I am an Arab woman, and I was supposed to behave decently.

Because I am a researcher, my expectation was that I would be perceived as a sociological male, but this was not the case. I was, rather, perceived as a woman who is brave, who should get married soon (with lots of marriage proposals and match-making), and is expected to behave well. I was not allowed to visit women with ‘bad reputations’. They

were called by the Head to come visit me, and they did. Nonetheless, I did not have as many interactions with these women as I wanted because I was not allowed to visit them in their own homes. I was also not allowed to stay up late chatting with the male Professors from the MRS Training and Research Unit. The Head of the Sa’yda settlement felt responsible for me. He thought of me as ‘an educated woman from a good family’. My parents, brother, sister, and brother-in-law all spoke on the phone with the Head of the Sa’yda settlement and his wife on several occasions during and even before the Revolution.

On several occasions, he commented, ‘what will people say about me now?’, when I unintentionally defied the local norms by, for example, requesting a bike when riding a bike turned out to be inappropriate for women, or when he saw me with a woman landholder riding a donkey, which a well off woman never does. Except for riding on donkeys with my main informants and teachers, the women landholders, I did not want to defy the Head of Sa’yda, as he was akin to a brother and a protector, nor did I want to tarnish my reputation as it was important for my acceptance into the offices of the officials and the homes of settlers.

As to inherent biases, I acknowledge that the power imbalances between me and my informants could have affected my findings. Participants could have told me what I wanted to hear and not what their true experiences were with the land. As mentioned earlier, however, I used triangulation (interviewing other groups, such as neighbors, officials, and family members) and persistent participant observation to help overcome these barriers. Another bias was persistent throughout my research, namely the nature of my research topic being threatening to husbands of women landholders. When some husbands, especially those who assumed high levels of control over land, learned about my research topic, they were reluctant to allow their wives to participate in my research. I believe that these husbands felt threatened that their wives’ participation would emphasize their exclusive ownership over the land. One Graduate Woman Landholder in Intilaq, for example, explicitly told me that

talking to me was creating problems between her and her husband, and she could not talk to me anymore. I respected her decision, of course.

Furthermore, as mentioned earlier, due to my gender, I was limited in my ability to interact with men or to gain entry into their gathering places, such as mosques and cafes. On the other hand, due to my gender, I was able to connect perhaps better than a male researcher

would be able to with women settlers on the basis of shared or perceived interests, such as cooking, washing clothes, and advocacy for women’s land rights. It is also not appropriate, especially in Upper Egypt, for unrelated men to befriend women and spend many hours in their company on a weekly basis.

2.8 Conclusion

The methods used in this research broadly draw from the interpretivist feminist methodology to an approach that uses narratives, by building on particular cases, life histories, rumours, interviews, and focus groups, as well as document analysis to examine how and whether women advance their lives through access to land. Diverse groups of women, chosen on the basis of differences in socio-economic status, were considered in both settlements of Intilaq and Sa’yda. Intilaq and Sa’yda represented two settlements with

contrasting gender roles and values, agricultural systems, marketing strategies, and

availability of services. In addition to a representative sample of women, the informants also consisted of drivers, officials (policy makers and field personnel), family members, and other local men and women. While the Revolution led to open discussions about informal (or illegal) strategies for both officials and settlers, it also led to heightened caution towards the researcher from officials and settlers alike.

Chapter 3

3

Introducing the Villages: Settlers, Officials, Services,

and Agriculture

In this chapter, I take the reader to the two settlements and seven villages I worked in. I focus on socio-economic characteristics as well as type of irrigation used, crops cultivated, markets, social relations, services available, development agency and government

involvement, and type of associations.