Epilogue

The epilogue examines the persistence of the term ‘achievements’ in Egyptian governmental media today, which is indicative of the concept’s resilience. This persistence raises an important question around the social and historical reasons undergirding the continuity of achievement praxis. Why are cultural and media institutions reproducing the achievement state in Egypt? The answer would seem to be that the current bureaucratic apparatus inherited, via institutional means, certain ways of thinking and working established after the 1952 revolution. This simple answer belies my ethnographic experience, because contemporary bureaucrats – with few exceptions – have a very faint sense of the history of the bureaucratic apparatus prior to their own entry into the workforce. A more likely answer, I suggest, is that the institutional context within which bureaucrats work did not change in some identifiable ways since 1952. The continuity of achievement praxis is tied to the institutional environment in which it thrives, rather than a conscious will among state officials transmitted across generations.