Reading advertisements in a colonial/development context: cigarette advertising and identity politics in Egypt, c1919-1939.

Introduction

How are we to make socio-cultural sense of advertising in colonial, later developing, settings? What differences exist between reading advertisements in the context of Western consumer societies and in less conspicuous consumer environments? More broadly, how do changing contexts interact with the content of ads? Looking for answers to such questions, this article explores how the messages in past advertisements may be utilized for a historical ethnography of their intended audiences.

At the risk of oversimplification, Western consumer societies have developed largely as a result of internal historical dynamics in which the first, and especially the second "Industrial Revolution," coupled with increase in demand, promoted acceleration in production and the creation of nation-wide markets. (1) In contrast, most novel commodities in non-Western countries initially arrived from abroad (or were inspired by commodities first produced in the West), (2) a process associated with the peripheralization of these countries in the European world economy. (3) Their consumption in such environments was more exclusive than in core countries--only small and relatively affluent groups of consumers could purchase imported commodities. The mass market in colonial/developing settings was slower to arrive, and commodities had to go through long processes of "trickle down," adoption, and adaptation, before a sizeable demand was established in the receiving countries. (4)

Advertising in Western countries, especially Britain and the US, developed in response to an expansion in markets, and manufacturers'/sellers' efforts to reach ever growing numbers of consumers, spread nation-wide; (5) technological innovation, better managerial skills, and intensification of work increased production capacity to levels that required a continuous rise in demand in order to keep the wheels of industry going. As Marx suggested, and as was later developed by Marxist/neo-Marxist writing, advertisements would play on the "exchange value" of commodities, their socio-cultural (sign) value, rather than their actual "use value," in promoting goods and services. (6) Advertisers "educated," tempted, and scared consumers into buying, by emphasizing the significance of doing so for their social and personal status and identity. Consumers, however, were not simply blind receivers of advertised messages. They actively participated in their reading by learning the evolving syntax of advertisement language. (7) Even more so, for ads' messages to echo successfully with buyers, the copy had to tap meaningfully into the cultural repertoire of potential consumers.

Ads in non-Western countries essentially worked in familiar ways. However, the medium itself was imported, and advertisements also often promoted imported novelties (or local substitutes), and played on the allure of the modern/foreign: (8) ads were situated in recently conceived private and public environments, presented alongside other modern consumer goods, and many times associated with the newly introduced notion of fashion. Their consumption was also associated with positive modernist values like progress, efficiency, and rationality. At the same time, the creation of exchange/sign values for such commodities entailed their "localization"--the use of indigenous systems of meaning to facilitate their familiarization and their integration into local consumption. When examining such ads the question is which aspects of the foreign/modern were locally accepted, which were renounced, and which were blended into earlier patterns of consumption. We should also consider different receptions of commodities among a variety of social groups--to be able to read ads effectively, we need to understand the particular contexts in which they were received. (9)

The article explores the belated emergence of a middle social stratum in Egyptian society through analysis of ads. It further explores contemporary politics of identity among the new effendiya, as this stratum is known in Egyptian historiography. (10) Many among the effendiya worked in white-collar, typically government paid positions, for example, as civil servants or teachers. But this stratum also comprised of people in the more traditional private sector services, including commerce. Although effendis supported the national cause in its broadest sense, for example, identifying with the call for full national independence, it is hard to ascribe to the effendiya a unified political outlook; effendis initiated and participated in a variety of political parties. (11)

An economic definition of class identity (the conventional notion of the middle class) or a political one misses the fluidity of this stratum's social boundaries and its constant negotiations of identity and action within and without (with other groups). Instead, we can learn much about the effendiya from the way advertisements, attuned to the social conventions among this group, attempted to advance sales by playing on the idea of "You are what you smoke." Still more, this cultural notion of the effendiya is flexible enough to capture its range of attitudes and reactions to contemporary challenges of fast paced transitions, yet concrete enough to play a role as a historical agent in transformations during this period and later, most notably after the 1952 Nasserist revolution. Before doing so, however, we need to contextualize the ads used in such an analysis.

The emergence of Egyptian advertising

In Egypt (and other non-Western nations) the large-scale impact of print capitalism had to await the development of a new, mass education system that fostered the spread of literacy after the First World War. This development took place only after partial independence; the colonial administration was too worried about costs and the potential harm of unemployment among educated youth to allow any significant increase in schooling. Yet it was only when this increase in literacy occurred that the establishment of a commercially viable press became possible. (12) This popular press would become the mainstay of early advertising.

Although it started before the First World War, the advertising business in Egypt really got going in the period after the war. Advertising agencies emerged then as extensions of the press. This was the main place of advertising even though literacy remained limited; there was an overlap of those who could read with those who could afford consumer goods. (13) Ads evolved with the press itself, especially new illustrated magazines, which became the hotbed of novel advertisements.

Initially, the larger publishers established advertising departments at their presses to manage the growing business. (14) In addition to selling space, these departments provided customers with copy-writing and graphic services. Later, journal publishers opened their own advertising agencies to save on commission paid to other agencies. (15) The larger agencies also had agents who represented them abroad. (16) With the lack of more concrete information on the business, and because advertising in the press was their main occupation, circulation of the press may indicate the expansion of the advertising business. In 1928-1929 the total circulation of the Arabic press was estimated at 180,000 issues daily. (17) By the second half of the 1940s the figure had risen to well over 500,000 daily, but the actual readership must have been much higher with unofficial circulation, institutional subscriptions, and various forms of public and private communal readership (reading aloud) elevating its numbers. In addition to the rapidly growing circulation, the Egyptian press of the period also expanded in the number of newspapers and magazines published; a 1937 survey counted 250 Arabic and 65 foreign-language papers. (18)

The development of the press was enhanced by a gradual increase in literacy, coupled with a rise in the absolute number of readers and a reduction of the costs of printing. In 1907, according to the second Egyptian decennial census, 8.5 percent of male and 0.3 percent of female Egyptians could read. (19) By 1947 literacy rates had increased to 35 percent for men and 16 percent for women. (20) To the rise in the percentage of literate Egyptians we should also add demographic growth, which further increased the absolute number of readers. During this period the price of newspapers was brought down by subsidies of all sorts, technological improvement, and expanding revenues from advertising. In fact, newspaper prices dropped significantly in real terms between the turn of the century and the outbreak of the Second World War. (21) This enabled people of scant financial means to buy and read newspapers.

One of the most important but least discussed additions to the press of the period was popular illustrated magazines, (22) especially those of Dar al-Hilal. This publishing house was the leader of this new trend and it became the largest press business of the period. (23) During the 1920s and 1930s, Dar al-Hilal introduced a chain of popular magazines in Arabic and French (24) (the common second language of the country), which discussed contemporary local and world events in a less serious tone than did the political press, and took a less highbrow approach to culture. Instead, the illustrated magazines introduced the concept of reading for leisure, and promoted a new style of journalism that highlighted fashion, sports, tourism, and local and international cinema. They featured attractive layouts and high-quality illustrations, caricatures, and photographs, which were refreshing additions to the press of the day. This allowed them to cater to larger audiences which, in contrast to the past, included semi-literate and even illiterate people who could enjoy the magazines simply by looking at the pictures. Moreover, such magazines advanced novel consumption patterns into Egypt by discussing novel lifestyles, which went well with the advertisements that promoted commodities and services related to such ways of life.

Inter-war press advertisements were more attractive than the classified ads that had dominated pre-war advertising. Their captions, and even more their recently added illustrations, better "framed" commodities in concrete socio-cultural contexts, which further allowed the creation of meaning in their consumption. (25) Captions were also used to associate commodities with desirable lifestyles. Most important, advertisements moved their focus from the commodity to the consumer, and employed status (stratification) and identity evoking elements of consumption to increase sales. This did not happen overnight, and some advertisements continued to praise the commodity itself or, in bulletin-board style, simply to draw attention to availability and price. Nevertheless, an increasing number of ads did begin promoting commodities by playing on the reader's sense of self and place in society.

Demand for advertising was greatly qualified by market size, for both high-end commodities and labour-saving devices (the latter not much in demand because of abundant cheap labour). Furthermore, in the local business culture personal connections still counted more than good copy. Advertising was also controlled by a few leading companies which had little incentive to introduce contemporary "scientific advertising" based on market research, which was the trend in some Western countries.

There are no reliable estimates of aggregate expenditures on advertising before the early 1950s; Sherbini and Sherif estimated aggregate advertising in those years at Egyptian pounds (LE) 1.1 million out of LE 856 million or 0.14 percent of the aggregate national income. (26) For 1955, Mahmud 'Assaf suggested that the sum was LE 1.93 of 943 million or 0.205 percent of the national income. (27) These estimates, while probably not entirely accurate, give some indication of the scope of the business, which even at this later period was not very welldeveloped. For comparison, in 1950, US expenditures on advertising amounted to 1.98 percent of the gross national product. (28)

Nevertheless, a small but significant group of advertisers sought to promote their businesses using sophisticated advertisements. In addition to the large department stores, which were probably the biggest advertisers of the period, advertisers were usually new (mostly foreign) entrants to markets or smaller local producers and sellers that competed against more established businesses and sought an entry for their brands. One important example of the latter was a group of small cigarette producers/sellers who struggled to gain some leverage in the highly monopolized Egyptian tobacco market.

In the period after the First World War the Egyptian cigarette industry experienced a rapid process of mechanization (earlier cigarettes were mostly hand-rolled) which significantly increased capacity and drove smaller producers out of the market. (29) In 1927 this process culminated in a merger between the largest local manufacturer, Matossian, and a multinational, the British American Tobacco Company (BAT). The company that they established, Eastern Tobacco Company (Eastern), now controlled some 80 percent of the market, with its competitor, Coutarelli, the second largest manufacturer, controlling much of the remainder. Under such conditions, and although before the Second World War Eastern's financial gains from its dominance in the market were disappointing, the new company did little by way of direct advertising to consumers. Instead, it was left to Coutarelli, and even more to smaller manufacturers, to employ advertising in an attempt to improve their lot when competing in such a tight market. Furthermore, unable compete by price reduction, such manufacturers wanted to forge a niche in the market by generating catching sign-values for their relatively expensive cigarettes. Their advertisements are particularly significant when we come to study local negotiations of social place and personal identity through the commercial images of the time.

Cigarette ads: inter-group distinctions and intra-group contradictions

There was a significant difference between promoting the export-oriented, Egyptian cigarettes, which in the decades before the First World War had become fashionable world-wide, and cigarettes sold to effendi smokers. The former were a luxury commodity, far beyond the reach of the majority of Egyptian consumers. Their glamour (and that of Eastern cigarettes more broadly) can still be sensed in Camel cigarettes, which uses oriental icons--the camel, palm trees, and Islamic architecture--in an attempt to impart an eastern aura to this more humble American brand. In the period under discussion advertisements referred to effendi aspirations rather than on those of potential cosmopolitan consumers as in the past.

Earlier, when promoting the luxurious Egyptian cigarette, advertisers played on the oriental art and tourist imagery of Egypt--its "natives" set in a Pharaonic past, Islamic present, the Nile, and the desert. Such voyeuristic scenes went down well with the international crowd and the local, Western-oriented affluent (upper class Egyptians, local minorities, colonial officials, and foreign businessmen). This iconography was still used sparsely in advertising for the effendis. However, ads for such an audience looked for more modern, rather than past-oriented, images, and for authentic themes taken mostly from contemporary urban life, to cater better to local sensibilities

In a country like Egypt, where many smoked, a person's preferences in tobacco consumption would reflect his/her social place. Smoking marked the boundaries of three social categories: ahl al-balad ("sons of the country"), a lower urban stratum; effendiya ("the educated"), a middle stratum; and ahl al-dhawat or bashawiya ("the rich and aristocratic"), an upper stratum. (30) In contemporary culture, for example literature and cinema, each group was represented as having its own corresponding smoking preference: the shisha (water-pipe) for ibn al-balad, the cigarette for the effendi, and the cigar for ibn al-dhawat. (31) These metaphors were at the core of inclusion in and exclusion (through consumption) from each social group, especially regarding the effendiya, whose members gradually came to dominate the Egyptian cultural (and advertising) scene.

The press carried no advertisements for shisha, even though manufacturers who produced tobacco for the water-pipe advertised their cigarettes. Their decision not to advertise had much to do with the fact that consumers of such a well-established commodity would not be persuaded by an advertisement in the press; only a few producers/sellers of repetitive purchase commodities already in circulation bothered with advertising during that time. Even more important, readers were mostly of the effendis, and advertisers saw no point in promoting the shisha for such an audience. On the rare occasion when the shisha appeared in advertisements these were for other products; the shisha served to enforce the popular image of the advertised commodity and the claim that it was intended for all.

While the shisha and its tobacco were too familiar to be promoted by advertisements in the press, the cigar would not have appeared out of place in the context of contemporary advertised goods, which were mostly modern, imported, and luxury commodities (by local standards). Nevertheless, the cigar stayed aloof and was never broadly advertised in the press. This had much to do with the size of the market, which was even smaller than that of the advertised cigarette. Moreover, the imagery associated with the cigar was that of an "art object," and its appearance in advertisements might have damaged this impression. Rather than promoting it via advertising and risking jeopardizing its non-commercialized image, retailers avoided its promotion in such a manner altogether.

Unlike the shisha and the cigar, ads for the cigarette were quite abundant during the period under discussion. The following investigation of such ads attempts to reconstruct intra-group effendi gender and age sensitivities by examining their use of contemporary cultural repertoire in promoting cigarettes.

Male effendi smoking etiquette in ads well demonstrated the middle ground between a desire to appear modern and a strong need for authenticity and be longing. Although the cigarette was a novel commodity, and quite different from the shisha, the etiquette of public cigarette smoking was not unlike that of the more "traditional" smoking vehicle. The cigarette was often represented as a means to keep company, to connect, rather than as a way to portray individualism (individual identity), the mainstay of British and American cigarette advertising. In ads, smokers offered a cigarette to a friend, or lit a cigarette for a companion as a token of camaraderie and respect. Men were portrayed smoking in the course of a conversation, watching a show, or drinking coffee with others. Advertised cigarette smoking thereby expressed the same sense of social familiarity earlier associated with the habit of the water-pipe.

While smokers in ads offered cigarettes to their companions, they at the same time competed over social status, which they represented by such generosity. Competition, like generosity, was not new; expressed in the consumption of modern commodity it manifested an older scheme of social stratification. Furthermore, advertisers often played on the cigarette as a socializer because it meant that one's smoke was there for all to see, so one's cigarette brand was an important status symbol. We should note that these advertised cigarettes were expensive and exclusive; contemporary advertising did not cater to mass consumption but to limited groups of upwardly mobile effendis. Advertisements of cigarettes focussed on their public consumption as representing one's social status, equating the smoker with the brand he smoked.

Advertisers used the snob effect to persuade up and coming effendi smokers to buy their brands. This is well illustrated in a 1931 Kiriazi Freres advertising campaign in Ruz al-Yusuf that promoted their Zenith brand [fig. 1]. In this campaign the advertisers portrayed Zenith smokers as upper class Egyptians (al-dhawat) and suggested that this was the cigarette of that class. (32) The ad showed the office of a senior government official (public sector positions were more coveted than private sector ones during this period). The three-piece suits of both the official and his guest also point to their upper class origins. This was further demonstrated in the following conversation:

  Visitor: I see that you too have fallen in love with Zenith
  cigarettes. Senior official: I am madly in love with it and I can't
  smoke anything else but this cigarette. I [also] noticed that the
  basha [upper-class rank] and many of our friends and colleagues here
  and in the club smoke it as well.

Such story-telling was not a-typical during that period. It may seem naive today, but during a period of initial engagement in reading advertisements, the association between the brand and its socio-cultural meaning had to be spelled out (rather than intimated) to be fully grasped by the contemporary readership. The testimony of the senior official in the ad (his love for Zenith) is further enforced by the practice of the basha and other persons of quality at the social club whose name is not mentioned, presumably being common knowledge. The legend "The cigarette of al-dhawat" at the bottom of the advertisement further drives the message home--if it was still not clear; this is the brand of the Egyptian upper strata. Although it portrays upper class Egyptians, and the cigarette seemingly most suitable for smokers from this social group, the ad is obviously targeted at outsiders rather than members of this stratum; the latter surely did not need an ad to tell them what cigarette was popular in their immediate social circle.

The cigarette stood for real changes in public spheres of interaction, both at work and at play. This quick and dynamic smoke, unlike the time-consuming and stationary shisha, better suited the modern, liminal temporality, in which smoking bestrode free time and work. (33) The ad above (and many others) well demonstrates this notion. It was set in an office, the novel-turned-quintessential working space of the effendi, where cigarette smoking was integrated into short breaks from work.

The same liminal temporality, but in reverse, was produced in representations of male cigarette smokers in new-fashioned leisure environments such as the European-style coffeehouse, bar, and hotel. Here the presence of the cigarette transformed leisure spaces into more structured and business-like modern environments, which were also less communal and more segregated. Such an ambience indicated a different kind of social interaction, more hectic--a quick chat rather than spending time together--and formal, time dedicated to build new social networks but also establishing connections with the opposite sex (see below). The advertised cigarette blended well into this novel milieu with its particular social practice because it was small, easily carried, but also authentic and sociable.

Images employed in advertisements were those of modern men but not necessarily young; success and celebrity status were still largely associated with age. This was well exemplified in endorsements by often elderly celebrities in advertising campaigns. These endorsements came still more from a variety of professionals, in addition to the usual players/sportsmen to whom we are accustomed today. Al-Bustani's Nabil cigarettes showed 'Abd al-Rahman 'Abd al-Hamid (a pilot: al-Musawwar, 12 May 1933). The Mahmud Fahmi cigarette company advertised an endorsement from the poet Ahmad Shawqi (Ruz al-Yusuf, 24 Apr. 1933). Kiriazi's advertisements for the Alf Layla cigarette featured Husayn Higazi (a sportsman: Ruz al-Yusuf, 15 Aug. 1932), 'Abbas Hafiz (a journalist: Ruz al-Yusuf, 22 Aug. 1932), Dr. Zaki Mubarak (a philosopher: Ruz al-Yusuf, 5 Sep. 1932; see fig. 2), and Mahmud al-Falaki (an astrologer--quite an exceptional profession compared with the foregoing: Ruz al-Yusuf, 10 Oct. 1932).

[FIGURE 1 OMITTED]

[FIGURE 2 OMITTED]

Although ads did not particularly target a specific age group, some of the themes used in promoting cigarettes--social mobility, a new lifestyle, novel white-collar professions, and romance--were certainly more appealing to a younger crowd. We have no statistics on the spread of the cigarette among age groups, but judging from representations of smoking in other media such as literature and cinema, one suspects that its reception had something to do with a generation gap: where the fathers smoked the shisha the younger generation preferred the cigarette. Such a trend was no doubt enforced by the long established role of smoking as signifier of power: to smoke a cigarette was to confront the father (and his generation) twice, first by smoking and second by preferring a different smoking vehicle to do so. Nevertheless, the generation gap was too thorny an issue to be publicly flaunted in ads; initiation into manhood through smoking was still a clandestine rite of passage.

Elsewhere I have discussed the promotion of cigarettes through an appeal to national sentiment and a call to consumers to translate their national loyalty into buying power--to support local industry and the Egyptian worker. (34) As Armbrust showed, identification with the national cause and "national sentiments" were part of the local masculine self. (35) Moreover, fascination with industry per se was deeply rooted in the desire to be considered progressive. One striking example, perhaps contrary to the better judgement of most people today, was an ad where cigarette smoking itself was associated with factory production, the cigarette being portrayed as a factory's chimneys [fig. 3]. This image of the cigarette further accorded with its "industrious" nature, discussed above in the context of new notions of leisure in work and play in this period. To enforce the patriotic message in the ad, to create familiarity, and to boost the cigarette's status symbol, the legend below the image was a quote from a senior national politician, Makram 'Ubayd:, "I smoke only this Egyptian cigarette."

Fashion, both the symbol of modern life and the heartbeat of modern industry, was also closely related to consumption of cigarettes. Cigarette smokers in ads were often smart dressers, but elegant smokers were also used in promoting other commodities, especially male attire; cigarette smoking and a European style of clothing created the right modern "look" of the period [see fig. 4]. As suggested in the ad (and many alike), the consumer's relaxed smoking further stood for product satisfaction.

Cigarette ads associated conspicuous consumption of the latest fashion with the purchaser's socio-economic prosperity. Ads do this everywhere, but such messages were amplified against the background of an "inconspicuous" Egyptian consumer society in which only a few could actually buy such commodities. Still more they highlighted the importance of display in a society undergoing rapid transitions. In such an environment the individual found himself or herself in new public settings in which older status symbols and identities, and the familiarity associated with village or neighbourhood life, were eroding and were being replaced to some extent by the consumption of commodities.

[FIGURE 3 OMITTED]

[FIGURE 4 OMITTED]

[FIGURE 5 OMITTED]

While male smoking was public--for all to see and share--representations of female smoking in ads was very different. The ensuing discussion on women in advertisements for cigarettes is inspired by recent literature on women, veiling, and gender politics in the Middle East. (36) I examine the extension of contemporary gender conventions into advertising and explore representations of women smokers that carried such conventions. Women's smoking was a "veiled" activity, so women (like other categories of subordinates such as youth) were not supposed to smoke in the presence of people who had authority over them. Women, furthermore, as a social group generally shied away or were excluded from the public spheres discussed above, which for the majority of the effendiya remained the men's domain. The analysis below shows that although advertising might have offered a different outlook on female smokers when catering to women consumers, the potential of equality through the market was largely subdued as advertisements engaged the male gaze when portraying female smokers.

From the ads showing women smoking it is evident that the only acceptable, albeit still conspicuous, way for them to do so in public was in the company and under the patronage of men. In advertisements this was often translated into courtship scenes: young and modern in outlook, the female smoker is nevertheless always accompanied by a male (or males). When smoking, the man would offer a cigarette to the woman or light it for her. This gentlemanly act was also a disguised measure of control: a woman depended for her smoke on the good manners (and goodwill) of her male companion [fig. 5]. In more sexually explicit advertising scenes, the couple would smoke together, their union expressed in their sharing a puff.

Advertisements where women smoked alone were usually devoid of any social context: the image of the smoking woman, while formally dressed, appears with no background, in a private sitting room, and especially next to the cigarette box [fig. 6]. Such an abstraction of human interaction makes it unclear whether the advertisement was meant to promote smoking among women by using female images of smokers or to sell cigarettes to men by using a pretty face. Nevertheless, it followed the underlying convention according to which female smoking would not be associated with consumption in public.

In the early 1930s the cigarette companies of al-Bustani and Kiriazi employed women celebrities, as they did with men, to endorse their brands. (37) Such females were artists (actresses, singers) rather than modern professionals described above. Female celebrities endorsed smoking the advertised brands for all readers, male and female alike. But their position in doing so was compromising or at least unique. Contemporary norms did not allow other women simply to treat them as fashion leaders and to take up smoking, as happened in Britain or the United States. (38) This difference is especially telling because the sanctioning of women's public smoking was quite similar in the three countries roughly until the First World War. Women began to appear in cigarette advertisements in much the same way in Egypt, Britain, and the US. However, the war-impelled entry of women in Britain and the US into working life outside the home, together with political and legal rights, which women won over time, were manifested in the increasing visibility of Western women smoking in public. This was also well indexed by cigarette advertisements, which attempted to benefit from their growing demand. In Egypt comparable shifts were later, and some never materialized; women's smoking would remain largely "veiled." (39)

[FIGURE 6 OMITTED]

Most significant in contemporary cigarette advertising was what it did not show; advertisements lacked depictions of women smokers in the company of other women, or in private spaces, especially at home. These were the "natural" environments for women to smoke, but self-censorship, which prevented such an affront to contemporary standards, well demonstrated the limits of advertising in face of well established socio-cultural norms.

Conclusion

After the First World War the consumption of new commodities was increasingly associated with the lifestyle of the emerging "middle"/effendi stratum in Egyptian society. From the study of cigarette ads, at the heart of this lifestyle there was a constant dilemma: how to "progress," develop, and be modern, yet maintain tradition, localism, and authenticity. The effendiya as a stratum was negotiating an identity for itself based on creating binary oppositions between "modern" and "traditional" (distinction from below), and "Egyptian" and "Western/foreign" (distinction from above), when seeking a place within the nation as modern but authentic. (40) In this, it differentiated itself from the ibn al-balad, who was authentic but backward, and the ibn al-dhawat, who was modern but foreign. The effendiya struggled to incorporate the best of the two--to keep the authentic/Egyptian identity of ibn al-balad and to assume the modernity associated with ibn al-dhawat at the same time. Walking this thin line, advertisements promoted the cigarette as a familiar but modern male smoking habit; afraid to cross it, ads remained on the conservative side in matters such as age gaps and the place of women in society.

Localization of modern/foreign commodities through the creation of indigenous sign values for goods centred on attempts to reconcile "old" and "new" through assigning indigenous meanings to their consumption. Perusal of contemporary ads shows how male smoking etiquette preserved much of an older one, emphasizing smoking as a social act and the cigarette as a socializing tool, rather than a manifestation of individuality, its common epithet in the West. At the same time, the cigarette was portrayed as a modern socializer, which better fitted new forms of leisure in play and work and the new spaces such as the European-style coffeehouse and the office, in which such leisure was taken.

While playing on the contemporary modernization discourse in presenting the cigarette as modern (Western and new) but social (familiar and traditional), ads were reluctant to pick up on contested issues that might have alienated consumers, especially matters of family and social relations within the effendiya. Youth as a particular consumerist age group was one such issue: in ads accomplishment was still dependent on age, and the elderly rather than the young largely remained the role model. When the cigarette was promoted as a novelty, youth culture, and the attraction of its consumption as a revolt against the fathers' generation, were never openly discussed, although they were implicit.

The same is true for advertisements with (rather than for) women. The seclusion of women smokers from an identifiable social environment, the sexuality expressed at times in smoking, the absence of women smokers as fashion setters, and especially the male tutelage under which females smoked in public--all hinted at a qualified attempt to attract women smokers. Still less would advertisements enter the private sphere, the home, in which women spent most of their lives and where they smoked. All this showed clearly a reluctance to promote a commodity whose consumption was socially and culturally "veiled."

Modernity rooted in tradition, which lay at the core of contemporary advertising strategies, testified to the cautious nature of the business and the majority of consumers alike. Advertisements played on the feeling of being up-to-date and future oriented, while reassuring smokers that cigarette consumption did not contradict the familiar smoking etiquette of the past. This was not unique to advertisers in Egypt and their local crowd. Hilton has demonstrated that the same mechanism worked in British ads. But in the British case the familiarity and attraction of the past were different, represented by images such as Empire and the countryside. (41)

Close reading of cigarette advertisements first requires placing ads in several contexts: the local economic trajectory and the place of advertised, often novel commodities, within the Egyptian world of goods; the late development of print capitalism, especially popular magazines, whose publishers were also responsible for the establishment of advertising agencies of the period; the nature of competition within the cigarette industry, which not only explained the motivation of producers to advertise but helped to identify the market and the marketing strategies they would take. Only an intensive analysis of advertisements in particular settings allows a grasp of the impact of common, large-scale transitions on distinct socio-cultural environments.

Most important, to make ethnographic sense of advertisements, and to be able to read them historically, we must pay attention to the cultural repertoire in which contemporary social change is negotiated. In our case study this was the struggling development of a new stratum, whose cultural luggage (examined through the reading of advertisements), was soon to dominate the emerging nation.

Department of Middle East Studies

Beer-Sheva 84105

Israel

ENDNOTES

The author thanks Matthew Hilton, Dror Wahrman, and two anonymous reviewers for their very useful comments on an earlier version of this article.

1. I am less interested here in the debate on whether the coming of the mass market was mainly the result of transitions in supply, as argued, for example, by Joel Mokyr in chapter one of his edited volume The Economics of the Industrial Revolution (London, 1985) or demand, as maintained by N. McKendrick, J. Brewer, and J. H. Plumb (eds.), The Birth of a Consumer Society: The Commercialization of Eighteenth-Century England (Bloomington, IN, 1982). Either way, while inspired by growth in international trade, British and other European and later American consumer societies were largely the product of internal change.

2. There were, off course, exceptions to this, including the cigarette itself whose spread around the world was initially associated with Egyptian/Turkish/Eastern brands. See: Relli Shechter, "Selling Luxury: The Rise of the Egyptian Cigarette and the Transformation of the Egyptian Tobacco Market, 1850-1914," International Journal of Middle East Studies, 35, 1 (February, 2003), 51-75.

The term commodities in this article refers to ready-made consumer goods, whose exchange value was influenced by ads. Import of semi-finished goods, especially textiles, was brisk, but little advertised.

3. For the incorporation of the Ottoman Empire into the European world economy in comparison with other parts of the world see Sevket Pamuk, The Ottoman Empire and European Capitalism, 1820-1913: Trade, Investment, and Production (Cambridge, 1987) chapters one and seven. See also Angus Maddison, Monitoring the World Economy, 1820-1992 (Paris, 1995).

4. The recent scholarship on consumption in the latter decades of the Ottoman Empire (including Egypt) indeed focuses mostly on upper-strata consumption. See articles in: Donald Quataert (ed.), Consumption Studies and the History of the Ottoman Empire, 1550-1922: An Introduction (Albany, NY, 2000); Relli Shechter (ed.), Transitions in Domestic Consumption and Family Life in the Modern Middle East: Houses in Motion (New York, 2003).

Mass markets in the Middle East emerged much later; the "democratization" of colonial, later developing markets, a state when most consumers could purchase similar commodities, albeit with distinct difference in quality, happened only after the Second World War, and perhaps even later, during the oil-boom starting in 1974. However, more research is needed to establish this matter. For a discussion on the same complexity in determining the coming of the mass market in Western contexts see: Carol Shammas, "Explaining Past Changes in Consumption and Consumer Behavior," Historical Methods, 22, 2 (1989), 61-67.

5. For the development of late capitalism and contemporary ads in Britain and the US see: Alfred D. Chandler, The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Businesses (Cambridge, MA, 1995 [1977]); Jackson Lears, Fables of Abundance: A Cultural History of Advertising in America (New York, 1994); Lori Anne Loeb, Consuming Angels: Advertising and Victorian Women (New York, 1994); T. R. Nevett, Advertising in Britain: A History (London, 1982); James D. Norris, Advertising and the Transformation of American Society, 1865-1920 (New York, 1990); Thomas Richards, The Commodity Culture of Victorian England: Advertising and Spectacle, 1851-1914 (Stanford, CA, 1991); Susan Strasser, Satisfaction Guaranteed: The Making of the American Mass Market (New York, 1989); Vincent Vinikas, Soft Soap, Hard Sell: American Hygiene in an Age of Advertisement (Ames, IA, 1992).

6. See the original Marxist notion of "commodity fetishism" in Robert Tucker, The Marx-Engels Reader (New York, 1972), 215-225. In this notion's French variant, in the writings of Debord and more so Baudrillard, the emergence of such novel signs, the evolution of the commercial spectacle they created, and a hyper-reality in which commodities' sign-value completely replaced their use meaning, stood at the core of modern Western culture. For analysis of the respective contribution of both writers see Steven Best, "The Commodification of Reality and the Reality of Commodification: Baudrillard, Debord, and Postmodern Theory," in Douglas Kellner (ed.), Baudrillard: a Critical Reader (Oxford, 1994), 41-67.

7. Robert Goldman, Reading Ads Socially (London, 1992), introduction and chapter two.

8. I have adopted the notion "allure" from Benjamin Orlove and Arnold Bauer, The Allure of the Foreign: Imported Goods in Postcolonial Latin America (Ann Arbor, 1997). Their comparison, in chapter one, of different forms of reception of imported commodities around the globe also exemplifies how localization changed according to time and place.

9. For a good example of a more contemporary context-sensitive analysis see Daniel Miller, "The Content and Consumption of Advertisements," in his Capitalism: An Ethnographic Approach (Oxford, 1997), 195-242.

10. The term effendi designated, from early nineteenth century, a modern/Western educated person who usually belonged to the Egyptian-Ottoman elite of the period. It became associated with a growing literate "middle group" only after the First World War, hence the term new effendiya. For the sake of simplicity I use the term effendiya hereafter, but the reader should keep in mind the difference stated above. On the new effendiya in Egypt see Israel Gershoni and James P. Jankowski, Redefining the Egyptian Nation, 1930-1945 (Cambridge, 1995), 7-22.

The gradual development of a middle stratum was not unique to Egypt. With local variants, the effendiya developed throughout the Arab Middle East during the same period. See: Morroe Berger, "The Middle Class in the Arab World," in Walter Z. Laquer (ed.), The Middle East in Transition (London, 1958), 61-71; Michael Eppel, "The Elite, the Effendiya, and the Growth of Nationalism and Pan-Arabism in Hashamite Iraq, 1921-1958," International Journal of Middle East Studies 30 (1998), 228-235.

11. For different manifestations of Effendi political activity see Marius Deeb, Party Politics in Egypt, the Wafd and Its Rivals 1919-1939 (London, 1979); James Jankowski, Egypt's Young Rebels: "Young Egypt," 1933-1952 (Stanford, 1975).

12. For a detailed history of this development and of contemporary Egyptian press see Relli Shechter, "Press Advertising in Egypt: Business Realities and Local Culture, 1882-1956," Arab Studies Journal 10, 2-11, 1 (2003), 44-61.

13. With no aggregate statistics regarding poverty and income distribution available during this period, Hansen even used illiteracy as proxy for poverty. See: Bent Hansen, Egypt and Turkey (Oxford, 1991), table 1-6, p. 25.

14. 'Abd al-Latif Hamza, Qissat al-sahafa al-'arabiyya fi Misr mundhu nash' atiha ila muntasaf al-qarn al-'ishrin (Cairo, 1985), 173.

15. Tal'at al-Zuhayri, Al-I'lan bayn al-'ilm wa-al-tatbiq (Cairo, 1975), 155-156.

16. See, for example, an advertisement in al-Ithnayn, 27 May 1935, directing advertisers to the agents of Dar al-Hilal in Britain (London) and France (Paris).

17. Ami Ayalon, The Press in the Arab Middle East: A History (New York, 1995), 81.

18. Ibid. 75.

19. The Census of Egypt Taken in 1907 (Cairo, 1909), 97.

20. Atef M. Khalifa, assisted by Hoda Rachad, The Population of the Arab Republic of Egypt (Paris, 1973), 33.

21. Ayalon, Press, 193.

22. "Jara'idna wa-jara'idhum," in Majallat Misr al-Haditha al-Musawwara, 25 Dec. 1927.

23. Ayalon, Press, 78.

24. Dar al-Hilal publications include al-Dunya al-Musawwara, al-Fukaha, Image (in French), Kull Sha'y, al-Musawwar, and al-Lata'if al-Musawwara. Advertisement in Taqwim al-Hilal (1932); Hamza, Qissat, 167.

25. On framing and other mechanisms by which advertisers encode ads see Goldman, Reading, chapter three.

26. Abdel Aziz El-Sherbini and Ahmed Fouad Sherif, "Marketing Problems in an Underdeveloped Country--Egypt," L'Egypte contemporaine XLVII, 285 (July 1956), 70, according to A. A. Sherbini, Some Research on Advertising in Egypt (Alexandria, 1956?) [Arabic].

27. Mahmud 'Assaf, Usul al-i'lan fil-mujtama' al-ishtiraki (Cairo, 1965), 38.

28. George Bittlingmayer "Advertising," table one. The Concise Encyclopaedia of Economics, http://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/Advertising.html.

29. For the business history of the Egyptian cigarette industry see Relli Shechter, Smoking, Culture and Economy in the Middle East: The Egyptian Tobacco Market 1850-2000 (London: I.B. Tauris, forthcoming), chapters five and six.

30. Sawsan el-Messiri, Ibn al-Balad: A Concept of Egyptian Identity (Leiden, 1978); Marilyn Booth further used these categories in her Bayram Tunsi's Egypt: Social Criticism and Narrative Strategies (Exeter, 1990). For a study of the Egyptian upper class during this period see Magda Baraka, The Egyptian Upper Class between Revolutions, 1919-1952 (Reading, 1998).

31. For a more elaborated discussion of group distinctions in Egypt of the period see Shechter, Smoking, chapter seven.

32. See the same theme in an advertisement for al-Bustani's Nabil cigarettes (Ruz al-Yusuf, 11 Apr. 1932): "The aristocratic class smokes Nabil, the excellent and esteemed cigarette." Nabil was one of the manufacturer's sons, but the name also means "noble" in Arabic.

33. I use the term liminal here in a Turnerian sense to denote a temporary transgression of socio-cultural boundaries between free time and work caused by smoking. See Victor Turner, Dramas, Fields, and Metaphors: Symbolic Action in Human Society (Ithaca, 1974).

34. Shechter, "Press Advertising," 56-57.

35. Walter Armbrust, "Manly Men on a National Stage (and the Women Who Make Them Stars)," in Israel Gershoni, Hakan Erdem, and Ursula Wokock (eds.), Histories of the Modern Middle East: New Directions (Boulder, 2002), 247-278.

36. The following books exemplify the literature that has influenced my understanding of this field: Lila Abu-Lughod (ed.), Remaking Women: Feminism and Modernity in the Middle East (Princeton, NJ, 1998); Amira el-Azhari Sonbol (ed.), Women, the Family, and Divorce Laws in Islamic History (Syracuse, NY, 1996); Suad Joseph and Susan Slymovics (eds.), Women and Power in the Middle East (Philadelphia, PA, 2001); Nikki Keddie and Beth Baron (eds.), Women in Middle Eastern History: Shifting Boundaries in Sex and Gender (New Haven, 1991).

37. For the promotion of al-Bustani cigarettes see al-Musawwar, 25 Dec. 1931. For Kiriazi see Ruz al-Yusuf, 19 Sep. 1932. For images of foreign actresses, whose photographs promoted Coutarelli's Atlas brand, see al-Ahram, 7 Nov. 1939, 4 Dec. 1939, 3 Jan. 1940, 8 Jan. 1940 (all on the front page).

38. On women's smoking in Britain the and US see: Matthew Hilton, Smoking in British Popular Culture, 1800-2000 (Manchester, 2000), chapter six; Nancy Bowman, "Questionable Beauty, the Dangers and Delights of the Cigarette in American Society, 1880-1930," in Philip Scranton (ed.), Beauty and Business: Commerce, Gender, and Culture in Modern America (New York, 2000).

39. In 1963 the American University in Cairo conducted the first survey on cigarette consumption in Cairo and Alexandria. The following quotation from the survey suggests much continuity with the "veiled" smoking trend discussed above: "Over 95 per cent of the cigarette smokers [in the survey] were males. The small percentage of female smokers (4.4 per cent) might present certain biases. Because smoking has not as yet been socially accepted for women in Egypt, not only unawareness, but intentional withholding of information concerning this habit would be expected from male household heads in certain cases." The American University in Cairo, Social Research Center, Tobacco Smoking in Cairo and Alexandria (Cairo, 1964), 19.

40. My conclusion here correlates well with Walter Armbrust's discussion on modernity and nationalism in his Mass Culture and Modernism in Egypt (Cambridge, 1996), 7-8.

41. Matthew Hilton, "Advertising, the Modernist Aesthetic of the Marketplace? The Cultural Relationship between the Tobacco Manufacturer and the 'Mass' of Consumers in Britain, 1870-1940," in Martin Daunton and Bernhard Rieger (eds.), Meanings of Modernity: Britain from the Late-Victorian Era to World War II (Oxford, 2001), 45-70.

By Relli Shechter

Ben-Gurion University