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Les zabbâlîn sont célèbres et il convient de prendre cette célébrité en compte dans l’analyse de cette communauté d’éboueurs-recycleurs. Cet article propose de présenter les différents imaginaires qui ont été projetés sur les quartiers de chiffonniers ainsi que la façon dont ces derniers se les sont réappropriés en fonction d’enjeux locaux. Les visions projetées de l’extérieur sont soit extrêmement négatives, soit à l’inverse, elles versent dans une forme de romantisme. Ainsi le lieu de vie de zabbâlîn peut apparaitre comme une sorte d’hétérotopie, un lieu autre, tant les projections imaginaires semblent nous en dire plus sur ceux dont elles émanent que sur les chiffonniers eux-mêmes. The zabaleen are famous and this celebrity needs to be taken into account in the analysis of this community of garbage collectors and recyclers. This article presents the different imaginaries developed around those neighborhoods and the ways in which the garbage collectors themselves appropriated locally those discourses. The outsiders’ representations are either extremely negative or, on the contrary, they romanticize this community. For this reason, the place of living of the zabaleen could be described as a sort of heterotopia, as those imaginaries tell us more about those who formulate them than on the garbage collectors themselves.

This study aimed at understanding how a priest that one day felt pushed by God to go and preach among the zabbaleen (Arabic name of the garbage collectors), built his charisma. He is now pretty famous among the Copts, as his weekly sermons and exorcisms are broadcasted on Christian satellite channels. His “evangelical” style brought him a lot of criticism but father Samaan always managed to stay inside of the Church keeping, at the same time, his margin of autonomy regarding the Coptic hierarchy. He did it using a famous miracle legend pretending that the Muqattam mountain, the place where the zabbaleen live, was moved by the Coptic patriarch in the 10th century to convince the caliph that the Christian faith was the right one. He built a huge place of worship dedicated to this miracle containing 7 churches that are carved in the Muqattam cliff which has become a very well known site among the Copts. More pragmatically he also built a political network with local authorities that protected him from any external pressure. More broadly this case study open to a questioning about the way local networks and practices articulate with international trends like American Evangelicals movements. The foundation of a place of worship that pretend to be deeply rooted in tradition, but being used for Pentecostal inspired religious meetings, is a good site of observation to understand how the different levels of interactions interweave in a local context. Moreover this compromise built by Abuna Samaan to stay inside of the Coptic Church without renouncing to his spiritual project, highlights the tensions between traditional and globalized trends., (HIAR - Histoire, art et archéologie) -- UCL, 2014

The Arabic Multitude - A spectre is roaming the Middle Eastt. The spectre of the multitude. The beauty of the historical moment - th epeople in Egypt and elsewhere revolutionzing against the status quo - is that it has no leadership. It might also prove its fatal weakness, but that does not contradict its beauty and importance. It was the people rising up against the tyranny and the authoritarian governments. Of course youngsters and schooled people – doctors, engineers, etc. took the lead, but from the beginning in Tunisia it was the multitude at work. It is a revolution that stands for a series of social demands about work and life, not only to end dependency and poverty but to give power and autonomy to an intelligent, highly capable population, and not religion; as neo-conservatism want us to believe. In this phase of late-capitalism the whole metropolis becomes the arena of production and resistance. It is a system that is bio-political, with the whole of life as politics. New practices have to be developed in this bio-political context of what I call the Society of the And. Our task is to investigate the organizational framework of antagonistic subjectivities that arise from below, based on the indignation expressed by subjects in the face of unfreedoms, exploitation and expropriation. And there exists a communality of work characterized by the immateriality, cognitive contents, networking and communication implicit in all areas of work under capitalism. This requires a radical shift in how we conceive the organization of social change (as already indicated in the opening quotes above). It is – as already stated - a horizontal network that has no single leader. The multitude is able to organize itself without a centre. The swarm intelligence, of this Arabic Revolution consists of at least two interrelated logics of the informal: one being the virtual reality our global media allows to occur through Twitter, Facebook, Skype, YouTube and other digital media. Ano, Architecture in Effect