Julia Elyachar is an associate professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of California, Irvine. She is the author of Markets of Dispossession: NGOs, Economic Development, and the State in Cairo (2005), which was a cowinner of the Sharon Stephens First Book Prize of the American Ethnological Society. Her most recent articles are “The Political Economy of Movement and Gesture in Cairo” (Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 2011) and “Before (and After) Neoliberalism: Tacit Knowledge, Secrets of the Trade, and the Public Sector in Egypt” (Cultural Anthropology, 2012).