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AUC has a long winter break, from mid-December until the beginning of February, and a short intermediate session between the semesters, so I decided to take one of the classes being offered, not having much opportunity to travel anyway. That class is a course through the Middle East Studies department on the River Nile. It is an interdisciplinary class, weaving together perspectives from anthropology, political science, Egyptology, history, geology, development studies and even a bit of engineering. One of the requirements of the course is keeping a daily journal related to the class and the various field trips we go on. I’ll be keeping that journal on this blog. I hope you all will indulge me.

The instructor, Professor Richard Tutwiler, who also serves as the director of AUC’s Desert Development Center, on the first day gave us the final exam question from the beginning: “Should the Aswan High Dam have been built?” That’s a doosey of a question, the US$270 million question, as it were. My answer will most likely be no, but for quite different reasons than those given (or not given) by the US and Britain when they withdrew funding in the midst of the Cold War. I am very much curious to learn more of the particulars around the building of the High Dam and people’s relationships with the Nile through history in general, but I’m guessing that little of this will impact my primary reason for believing that the dam should not have been built. Much like the question of nuclear power, among the myriad negative impacts of the dam (and they are many), seldom is discussed the role of such mega-projects in the concentration of power and control over resources to the exclusion of those who are most affected by it. President Hosni Mubarak’s pronouncements over the past year about the pursuit of nuclear power (the most globally evident of Egypt’s mega-projects) should be viewed with the same skepticism and for the same reasons.

But more on that later. For the time being, let this serve as a brief introduction to a slew of posts that will follow in the next several weeks in the “Nile” category, below.