What those speakers’ projects have in common is that they are online, collective platforms. Other forms of knowledge production and criticism are also largely digital and often ephemeral these days: podcasts, YouTube channels, and forums on social media where people swap photographs, recordings and historical anecdotes. Collaboration helps these projects sustain themselves, but fragmentation is still a problem. “We’re all on our own little islands,” said Qualey.

Another challenge is that popular culture is generally understood to be “low” culture, and the discourse surrounding it needs to avoid being condescending or proscriptive, said Elshahed. Foreign scholars also should be careful not to be “parasitical,” he added—that is, not to produce knowledge in and on Egypt that is never made available here.

Rethinking Museums

Local authorities, meanwhile, are often tempted to turn cultural heritage into a folkloric version of itself, for commercial and touristic purposes. That particular dynamic was discussed at some length in a panel dedicated to museums.

The conversation featured Elshahed, who has organized an exhibition of everyday modern objects from Egypt at the British Museum; Yasmin El Shazly, an Egyptologist who is deputy director for research at the American Research Center in Cairo and previously worked at the Egyptian Museum; and Karim Shaboury, who has designed a number of small new museums in Cairo, including the Gamal Abdel Nasser museum and the recently opened Naguib Mahfouz museum.

El Shazly argued that young Egyptian curators have more opportunities for training and for travel abroad and that this leads them to want to try out new ideas. She noted that every museum consecrates a few objects as iconic (such as King Tut’s mask in the future Grand Egyptian Museum) but that many more objects in the collection could have the spotlight turned on them.

Meanwhile Shaboury and Elshahed both deplored the extent to which museums are generally linked to tourism rather than to patrimony.

“Museums should be liberated from the focus on antiquities,” argued Elshahed, and be made into active spaces with exhibitions and programs. Shaboury explained that even when museums are designed to be dynamic spaces, they can turn into little more than “depots” because museum directors do not generally have the resources or the flexibility to initiate activities.

“Each museum should have a mission, a definite audience, a sense of how it will serve a community,” said Shaboury.