Tag Archives: Saudi Arabia

I speak to historian Relli Shechter about smoking in Egypt, consumerism and why the Middle East still has a long way to go before it embraces sustainability

When we think of consumerism and the consumer society, the Middle East is not the first thing to come to mind. Wall St, Las Vegas, London, China – maybe. The Middle East? Not so much. Even so, over the last half a century the region has been transformed into a consumer society. It may not be at the scale witnessed in the Western world but nonetheless it has happened. Relli Shechter, a lecturer from Ben-Gurion University, has been studying this transition to consumerism in countries such as Egypt and Saudi Arabia for some time now. I caught up with him to talk about the influence of the oil boom of the 70s and 80s and whether the Arab world is ready to explore a more sustainable path.

Why does consumerism interest you and why did you decide to the explore the topic in the Middle East- a region not traditionally associated with consumerism (although the Gulf nations are giving the world a run for its money!)?

Well for my Phd I want to Harvard in the US and whilst I was there I noticed a huge difference in the US consumer world compared to the Middle East and even Israel. You’d go to any supermarket and there would be the choice of 15 cheeses or 15 types of bread and that really caught my attention. The reason I chose to focus on the example of tobacco later on was a bit of a surprise.

I went to Egypt to look at the advertising business and I quickly found out that it was a highly politicised sector because there are links to government funding. So I was looking for an alternative and I stumbled across the cigarette. It was the perfect example as it cut across various social classes and so it was a great example of the way that consumerism entered into Egyptian society.

You also explore the same issue in Saudi Arabia and the impact the oil boom had on the kind of consumer society that emerged across the Middle East? But are they the same?

I realise that there are great difference between Saudi Arabia and Egypt and I am not trying to level them but there are some distinct structural similarities. An age of mass consumption triggers issues and questions and opportunities and these play out differently in these different contexts… There are lots of difference between them. Although the oil affected Saudi Arabia more directly (think concrete villas, foreign maids, drivers and mega-malls), it did have a real impact on countries such as Egypt.

The oil boom is where it all started. Of course, it looks different now as we have moved on since then but socio-cultural perceptions of consumption and what it all means to be a consumer- such notions, especially on the mass level – I would argue developed during the oil boom period. Egyptian peasants going to work in Saudi Arabia and Iraq later on, came back with consumer goods, new aspirations, new ideas about how they want to build their homes and what they need to have a family. These were developed during the oil boom which was a linchpin of the consumer society. This commercialisation expressed itself in everything from cheap housing, the suburbanisation of the village to the commercialisation of religious holidays such as Ramadan. Continue reading →