Farah Hallaba: Anthropology for all

Even outside the SWANA region, anthropology is a discipline that often feels sequestered for scholars and specialists; one that requires a certain academic privilege to access. Farah Hallaba, a Cairo-based anthropologist and visual ethnographer, has set out to change that. In 2019, Hallaba launched Anthropology Bel3araby with a mission: to make anthropology as accessible, engaging, and relevant as possible—and to do all of it in Arabic. Since then, she’s been systematically dismantling the field’s traditional elitism, giving it an inclusive platform where complex anthropological ideas are brought to life through short videos, collaborative workshops and community-driven projects.

Her journey began during her studies at the University of Kent, where Farah quickly became frustrated by the lack of Arabic language resources in anthropology. Rather than accept this gap, she decided to take matters into her own hands. “It made me rethink my learning process,” Farah shares with Dazed MENA. “I started taking notes during lectures as if I were preparing to craft them into video episodes to share later. This was my way of digesting the knowledge and sharing it with a wider audience, making it more accessible.”

Concepts like ‘ethnography’, ‘liminality’, and ‘participant observation’ had long been staples of the discipline, yet they remained largely out of reach for those outside academic circles, particularly in non-English-speaking communities. Farah’s first step in addressing this was launching her YouTube channel, where she broke down these foundational principles into short, digestible episodes. As the channel grew, the topics she tackled deepened, moving from introductory notions to intricate discussions on subjects like the denial of death and ideas of temporality. The videos allowed a space for Arabic speakers to engage with anthropology in a way that made sense to them.

But Anthropology Bel3araby soon evolved into something far more experimental. Farah’s project eventually became an interdisciplinary lab where anthropology intersects with artistic practice. “After doing regular YouTube episodes, I was prone to create spaces where the learning process can be collective, critical and creative, so I started to design workshops, courses and programs,” Farah explains. 

The lab—part think tank, part creative hub—offers a training program that encourages participants to approach anthropological questions with their imaginations, emphasising the community-based aspect of research and personal inquiry. Years later, what began as an online platform generated a series of collective art projects, workshops and exhibitions that push the boundaries of how people in the Arab world can examine culture and identity.

In 2022, Anthropology Bel3araby organised a multimedia exhibition titled Being Borrowed. The project excavated the topic of migration—focusing especially on Egyptian migration to the Gulf. Despite millions of Egyptians making the trek since the 1970s, their stories have largely been neglected in pop culture and academic discourse. Being Borrowed set out to fill that void, by congregating and discussing the lived, personal tales of migration, tinged with feelings of temporariness and their repercussions on family dynamics and social class. The exhibition mined the sensory and visual memories of those involved, giving the broader narrative a personal texture. The result was a nuanced meditation on belonging, alienation and the emotional undercurrents that migration stirs up, too often overlooked in favour of cold facts. 

“It was my first attempt in exhibition-making, and our first iteration in Cairo received 4,000 visitors,” Farah tells Dazed. “Our publication quickly sold out and inspired many others in their research and art practices and projects.”

Farah’s workshops are distinct in that they eliminate the usual distance of scholar and subject that is traditional in anthropological study. Her workshops are designed to facilitate discussion about lived experience in the Arab world, engaging participants both critically and personally in their explorations. One such workshop, Collaborative Anthropology: Middle Class Identity, Family History and Liminality, gives participants the space to journey through their own family archives and histories. But this is not a mere exercise in nostalgia; it’s an evaluative analysis of how social performances and family dynamics shape our sense of identity. Farah equips her participants with the anthropological tools and lens through which to deconstruct these narratives, encouraging them to express their findings through creative media. 

Looking ahead, Farah is set to expand the scope of her work with the Anthropology Bel3araby Lab, a long-term project that will culminate in a publication capturing the knowledge and emotional depth garnered in her workshops. “Our programme was very much burdened by emotions that led many of these knowledge engagements and productions,” Farah clarifies. “So I am trying to work on emotion-led publishing.”

The lab forges partnerships between local anthropologists, curators and artists—and this collaborative aspect is central to Farah’s mission. “I aspire to contribute and find rather more economically sustainable ways that can help us work together in the cultural and art scenes,” Farah explains. “The infrastructure in Egypt is dire, and I hope we can collectively find ways to produce knowledge, curate projects and programmes in ways that can create an ecosystem that is more independent.”

Farah’s lab is especially pertinent in that originally, the academic focus in anthropology meant that it was largely inaccessible to communities that the discipline sought to study. But thinkers like Farah are narrowing these divides, both in the reflective nature of their practices—with Anthropology Bel3araby mostly looking inward at its own community—and the democratisation of theory by inviting Arabic listeners. In making anthropology accessible, Farah is empowering Arabs everywhere to critically explore and reclaim their own histories, cultures and identities, allowing them to tend to a deeper understanding of their place in the world.