POWER, RESISTANCE, AND THE CULT OF MUSLIM SAINTS IN A NORTHERN EGYPTIAN TOWN

Practice theory is employed to analyze the cult of Muslim saints. Unli ke much of the previous work by anthropologists on this topic, the pre sent study has an urban, rather than rural and tribal, ethnographic lo cus. A major finding is that privileged as well as nonprivileged indiv iduals use the cult for ideological discourse and dramaturgy. This has seminal implications for understanding the relation of power to resis tance. An unobtrusive form of power that does not inspire resistance a ppears to match Bourdieu's concept of ''symbolic power.'' In contrast with the Weberian and Marxist zero-sum views of power, symbolic power appears to be a positive-sum phenomenon.