Noha Ezz El-Din Fikry Ismail

NOHA ISMAIL, then a graduate student at University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario, was awarded a grant in October 2023 to aid research on “On Rooftops and in Courtyards: Home-rearing Practices among Women Farmers in Rural Egypt,” supervised by Dr. Naisargi Dave. This ethnographic project explores the practice of rearing food animals on rooftops in Egypt. Through ethnographic fieldwork, the project shows that tarbiyya as an essential process of care, nurturance, and discipline elucidates the way in which women navigate their relationships with animals that they later slaughter into meat. Alongside tarbiyya, the project has also illustrated the centrality of religion in these human-animal relations. It is only through invoking God’s name upon slaughter, and reflecting on God’s understanding of the world and the respective place of animals, humans, and meat that this project’s interlocutors are able to put caring and killing together in these relations of animals. On a final level, the project has exposed new categories for describing the taste of meat that push beyond existing categories that are based on class or breeds. In these human-animal relations, what makes meat flavorful is the feed. And on rooftops, feed comes predominantly from the household leftovers that families keep to feed the birds that they later eat. By focusing on these leftovers and how families navigate rising prices of poultry feed, new understandings of food, flavor, and taste emerge.