This book was a dizzying read, leaving me with almost as many complicated and contradictory emotions as did the Egyptian revolution itself. I was excited to see a scholar of modern Egyptian popular culture take on the task of explaining how “Egyptians moved from unprecedented exhilaration to confusion and massacre” (backmatter). I was hopeful that Armbrust set out to “write about the revolution directly,” and in a way that “can be read equally well from any disciplinary perspective” (p. 12). Yet Armbrust also begins his book with some trepidation, stating that anthropologists are not trained to study political events; and that “Revolution is not necessarily easy to frame anthropologically” (p. 11).

This brought to mind Orin Starn's now famous 1991 essay “Missing the Revolution” (Cultural Anthropology 6, no.1: 63–91), in which he critiques Andeanist anthropologists for being too busy detailing highland ceremonial to apprehend the rage that was fomenting among Peru’s marginalized indigenous communities, which became manifest in the terror of the Shining Path. Andean Anthropologists were utterly ill-equipped to anticipate the ensuing guerilla-government war that claimed 15,000 lives in the 1980s. Starn offers fellow anthropologists a clear prescription for this problem: stop obsessing about the continuities to Andeans’ pre-colonial past; quit Othering them; and engage politically to support them in their quest for human rights.

Writing nearly three decades after Starn's piece, Armbrust's vision of anthropology is one that has shifted away from the insular fetishization of timeless Others. Armbrust even stresses that anthropology is especially attuned to questions of power. And while Starn pointed to how out of touch Andean anthropologists were, Armbrust demonstrates keen insight into the feelings of indignity and humiliation that everyday Egyptians have endured in the face of the last few decades’ economic liberalization and incredible global concentration of wealth and power. Writing an ethnography of the Egyptian revolution was not a project he intended, but Armbrust certainly did not “miss” the revolution or have any trouble understanding why it was happening.

Still, Armbrust plainly states his dilemma in assessing how to anthropologically research a revolution. Despite the discipline's significant changes, Armbrust evokes the same feeling of inadequacy that Starn described in 1991: that anthropologists are ill-equipped for the task. For Armbrust, this is not because of their (non)engagement with politics, but because revolutions are extraordinary and anthropologists are trained to study the mundane. While some other anthropologists might be tempted to follow the people involved in the revolution, Armbrust quickly dismisses this tactic as an option: “This is an ethnography of revolution, but not of revolutionaries. I knew and met many people who participated in the revolution, but I was not in any way ‘embedded’ within a revolutionary moment” (p. 3).

Armbrust's ambivalence about his capabilities as an anthropologist in taking on the subject material largely shapes the three objectives he outlines for himself: one, to establish Victor Turner's notion of “liminality” as a productive concept for understanding revolutions; two, to understand the Egyptian revolution through its spatial dimension at a variety of scales; and three, to introduce the concept of political Tricksters to understand authoritarianism and populism.

For his first objective, Armbrust revisits Turner's notion of liminality in order to connect revolution to a wide range of phenomena; shed light on the performative aspects of revolution; and lend insight into the “potentially schismogenetic aspects of revolution” (p. 1). Interestingly, his discussion of the theories of ritual espoused by Turner, Gregory Bateson, and the lesser known French anthropologist Arnold van Gennep insist on the utility of reproducing older boundaries of anthropological inquiry. The argument is not: “Let's stop studying rituals and turn to contemporary political events!”—as one might read Starn's 1991 intervention—but rather, “The anthropological study of rituals is a great way to understand contemporary political events!”

Armburst proceeds to map a classificatory schema of aspects of ritual, borrowing from Turner, Bateson, and folklorists, onto the events of the Egyptian revolution: the euphoria of the 18 days occupation of Tahrir Square (communitas), the aftermath of the revolution (liminality, potential schismogenesis), the counter revolution and militarization (liminality, potential schismogenesis), and the rise of authoritarian demagogues (the trickster). While I enjoyed this well-written discussion, I was left uncertain if it actually shed light on how or why the counterrevolution prevailed, or simply assigned anthropological descriptors to the events that took place.

Armbrust's second objective, to study the spatial dimensions of the revolution, is less beholden to particular theorists, and more attuned to the material and political economic aspects of the uprisings. My favorite part of the book is Armbrust's compelling description of the material space surrounding the iconic Tahrir Square (in Chapter 2), and the asymmetry that frustrates everyday life for inhabitants of the poor neighborhood of Bulaq, at the northern border of Tahrir Square, which has been essentially sealed off and made impassable to the surrounding city. Only 11% of people in Egypt own cars, and yet there are few safe spaces for pedestrians to navigate. The state's strategy has been to vacate Bulaq of its poor residents to allow for exclusive developments, making their everyday lives barely tenable. Further, Bulaq residents are surrounded by steel fences that prevent their movement downtown, and they are completely segregated from the wealthy area of Garden City (at the southern border of Tahrir Square) where the U.S. embassy and other diplomatic missions are based. After 9/11, the US government effectively closed off the north end of Garden City in the name of “security,” further impeding movement downtown. Armbrust makes clear how the environs of Tahrir Square have been transformed into an “antihuman space” dedicated to development, foreign diplomats, and finance capital, to the detriment of the inhabitants of the surrounding areas. Further, Armbrust notes the Egyptian intelligentsia's discursive construction of Garden City as evidence for the state's illegitimacy (symbolic of American occupation in the region) and their relative silence about Bulaq, when in fact the state's extreme marginalization of Bulaq's poor residents has more devastating humanitarian effects: “Bulaq…was slated for extinction, cut off from both pedestrian and vehicular communication from its surroundings, whereas Garden City, though unpleasantly besieged by traffic, remained one of the most exclusive districts in Cairo” (p. 50–51). This is an example of Armbrust at his best, when he focuses less on reinscribing the boundaries of anthropology as a discipline, and more on the task of illuminating the lived experiences of Egyptians and the constructions (and omissions) of discourses that circulate throughout Egypt via mass media.

Armbrust then shifts his attention to contestations over social media and within the Square itself over who of the slain revolutionaries should be celebrated as martyrs. Many people's lives and deaths were coopted for movements that bore little resemblance to their political stances during life. Here and in many other instances, Armbrust reminds us of the important fact that most Egyptians were not supportive of the revolution, and that broad portions of the middle-class were growing less and less tolerant of the “unsightliness of endless sit-ins” (p. 101). How fragile was the middle-class revolutionary solidarity with the poor, and at what costs could it be sustained? How could the revolutionary movement persist beyond the “liberal incitement to individual autonomy” (Asad 2015 cited in Armbrust, p. 138)? Armbrust grapples here with the overdeterminism of critics who evaluate the failure of the revolution to shift political-economic realities in terms of utter neoliberal subjectivization: “The January 25 Revolution as both a revolution against neoliberalism and a neoliberal revolution are hard to tease apart. This was by no means an Egyptian paradox. One encountered it equally in the American Occupy Movement and in European protest votes for leftist politicians…It is hard to stake an effective position outside of it. Neoliberalism is like quicksand: the harder one struggles to extricate oneself from it, the more one gets sucked down into it” (p. 139).

His chapter on Copts and Salafis is a particularly admirable model for analysis intertwined with intertextual citations of uploaded YouTube videos. Through this analysis he illuminates how divergent narratives of political events fracture and divide political movements: the twenty-eight mostly Christian unarmed protestors massacred at Maspero (a neighborhood northwest of Tahrir Square) by the military police and security force in October 2011 were construed by the state media as aggressors who killed and wounded the soldiers. Armbrust analyzes which YouTube videos circulated and to what effects in fracturing people's understandings of the events. In this way, Armbrust draws on the “texts” of YouTube videos as “social ‘actants’” in the Latourian sense, which not only reflect and construct narratives, but also act directly upon people's ability to reason, frame, and comprehend them.

The final part of the book turns to Armbrust's third objective, which is to engage with the notion of the “political trickster.” His discussion of the Egyptian pro-military television host Tawfiq ‘Ukasha is certainly reminiscent of other authoritarian figures’ use of chaos and distraction politics to consolidate power. Yet like with his earlier discussion of liminality, I am unconvinced if naming right-wing authoritarian buffoons “tricksters” because they engage in mis-information actually illuminates or extends our political analyses of them. I found Armbrust's use of Laleh Khalili's theorization in her 2012 Time in the Shadows (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press) of the “permanentization of crisis” within the “War of Terror” to be more insightful for understanding the authoritarian strategies employed by the Egyptian military (p. 222). I would have loved to see Armbrust elevating Khalili's contributions to the status of the white male scholars he solemnly pays homage to, such as Turner, von Gennep, and Bateson.

In conclusion, Armbrust's Martyrs and Tricksters is an impressive record of the events of the Egyptian revolution and the mass-mediated narratives that spiraled out during and afterward. In these extraordinary times, when victims of massacres are presented as aggressors, and absolute frauds wield tremendous media power, Armbrust is right to take up unconventional tools of anthropological analyses, illuminating the spaces and places of events at different scales, and conceptualizing YouTube videos, memes, and other forms of viral media as social actants in and of themselves. I would have liked to have seen Armbrust assert this unconventionality more boldly, resting assured that the old white anthropological “fathers” have enjoyed their time in the sun. Had Armbrust embraced a more capacious appreciation of the multiple genres and experimentation his fellow contemporary anthropologists are engaged in, he might not have felt so ill-equipped to take on an ethnography of a political revolution. The future utility of anthropology, I believe, is not in finding novel ways to engage with old anthropological categories, but rather in offering the most nuanced and humane accounts of the wide diversity of lives—in all their mundane extraordinariness.