Working for Pleasure, Not Money: Cairo’s Associative Literary Scene and Its Alternative Value System

In Egypt, as in many other places, literary stardom is rare. For most writers, literature serves as a “second profession” (Lahire 2015), pursued out of passion alongside their primary jobs, which offer financial stability. The tradition of literary symposiums – where book launches, poetry evenings, and honoring ceremonies take place – helps the amateur literary scene to flourish. Centered around literary clubs, self-publishing, and restricted readership circles, Cairo’s associative literary scene is entirely sustained by the voluntary work of writers who invest their personal resources, such as time, finances and social connections, to help this world thrive. Based on a long-term ethnographic study of literary clubs in Cairo, this presentation explores the motivations of writers to invest significant resources into their literary hobby. Drawing on the anthropology of value (Graeber 2001) and the notion of literature as the product of imaginative and material “surplus” (Schielke, 2021), this paper argues that amateur literary practices create an entire literary ecosystem outside the mainstream commercial market, driven by the economy of literary fame and the ability to “live by one’s pen.” This presentation contends that this alternative literary ecosystem operates under a unique set of values derived from Egypt's cultural bureaucracy shaped by socialist welfare objectives. Unlike the commercial market, these values perceive literary work as driven by the goals of community activism, knowledge transmission, social improvement, and the power to dream and aspire.