At the turn of the millennium, Pokémon was perhaps the commodity phenomenon, dominating global children’s markets. Universalist explanations for Pokémon tend to ignore the myriad ways people actually encounter Pokémon in concrete situations, ways that include not only the purchasing and playing of games and collecting of objects but everyday social performances with and around these toys, games and activities. In this article, I will compare and contrast Pokémon’s reception in three upper middle class Egyptian families whose appropriations of Pokémon were shaped by Pokémon’s global indexicality, yet also shaped by forms of transnational Islam, through which people resist and seek to establish limits to Westernization. I argue that these processes are mediated by metadiscourses about Pokémon through which people articulated the meanings of their appropriations of Pokémon and integrated them into local systems of social relations.
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