Birth of the ‘Secular’ Individual: Medical and Legal Methods of Identification in Nineteenth-Century Egypt
Birth of the ‘Secular’ Individual: Medical and Legal Methods of Identification in Nineteenth-Century Egypt
This chapter describes a number of medico-administrative and legal changes that were introduced in nineteenth-century Egypt and that gave rise to an individualized conception of identity. Prompted by the recruitment needs of a new conscript army, an administrative apparatus was put in place that gave rise to novel techniques of identifying peasants, monitoring their movements, and controlling their bodies. A wide-ranging public hygiene programme aimed at serving the army resulted in a statistical regime whose crowning achievement was a nation-wide census. Concurrently, legal reforms replaced the reputational and oral witnesses that the shari'a relied on with named and written forms of identification. The chapter concludes with a discussion about the implications of this rise of a free-floating individual for conceptions of legal equality.
Keywords: Egypt, conscript army, public hygiene, census, legal reforms, shari'a, legal equality
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