Noha Fikry | University of Toronto (original) (raw)
Videos by Noha Fikry
Rooftop cultivation can play an important role in feeding communities, but what is the place of ... more Rooftop cultivation can play an important role in feeding communities, but what is the place of animals in elevated urban rooftops? In this episode, Gastronomica Editorial Collective member Lisa Haushofer talks with anthropologist Noha Fikry about the uses of home rooftops for feeding one’s family. Drawing on her ethnographic research in some of Egypt’s biggest cities, Noha explores rooftop rearing as a gendered practice of caregiving -- what she calls “bread-nurturing” -- and shows how it plays an important role in Egypt’s culinary infrastructure.
Please check the full episode here: https://heritageradionetwork.org/episode/noha-fikry-rooftop-rearing-and-human-animal-relations
18 views
Papers by Noha Fikry
Anthropology Now , 2023
-- Please contact me for the full text of this article (n.fikry@mail.utoronto.ca) -- This articl... more -- Please contact me for the full text of this article (n.fikry@mail.utoronto.ca) --
This article explores women farmers who rear animals in their courtyards or on their rooftops in rural Egypt. In these home-rearing practices, caring for animals begins with the inevitability of killing in mind. Rather than regarding caring and killing as unrelated, dichotomous or contradictory, I argue that caring and killing are co-constitutive in some human–animal relations. In caring for animals, women farmers in rural Egypt rendered these animals knowable and controllable, a process that made killing easier and more manageable. The act of killing animals, then, was part of a broader relation of care for humans. In the broader quest of caring for and feeding families well, caring for animals involved killing animals to make meat, and the promise of a wholesome meal drew caring and killing as everyday bedfellows.
Gastronomica: The Journal for Food Studies, 2022
Based on ethnographic fieldwork, this research explores rooftops as gendered spaces where women p... more Based on ethnographic fieldwork, this research explores rooftops as gendered spaces where women practice what I propose calling ''bread-nurturing,'' a gendered labor through which women secure and provide nutritious and delicious food for the family. Much of this food is cultivated on rooftops in a long-standing social practice of raising chickens, ducks, goats, and other animals on the roofs of family dwellings. I argue that rooftops are extensions of kitchens in which women practice their intimate knowledge of household food. Rather than simply pushing for an understanding of rooftops as gendered spaces, however, I regard rooftops as a pivotal resource for understanding values and relations of food and taste in Egypt.
Changing Theory: Concepts from the Global South, 2022
Based in urban rooftops in Cairo, Egypt, this essay asks what does it mean if one invokes tarbiyy... more Based in urban rooftops in Cairo, Egypt, this essay asks what does it mean if one invokes tarbiyya as a descriptor of one’s food? On a number of rooftops in Egypt, working and middle-class families raise animals for
nutritional sustenance. Throughout one-year of fieldwork on rooftops, my interlocutors always invoked tarbiyya to describe their relations to rooftop animals. Etymologically traced to “r b a” in Arabic, tarbiyya refers to acts
of rearing, nurturing, raising, and educating both humans and nonhuman animals. In using tarbiyya, my interlocutors refer to both a human-animal relation and, more importantly and primarily, delicious meals. Through various ethnographic encounters, I argue that tarbiyya refers to a particular value/understanding of food, one that is rooted in an intimate human-animal relation of nurturance, feeding, discipline, and reciprocity.
Graduate Journal of Food Studies , 2021
This essay is an invitation to take food as thought in our fieldwork engagements. In this short c... more This essay is an invitation to take food as thought in our fieldwork engagements. In this short commentary, I think through fieldwork meals by paying close attention to the values associated with food as it relates to my positionality as an upper-middle class researcher among working and lower-middle class families. The essay can be accessed here: https://gradfoodstudies.org/2021/10/04/food-as-thought/
Anthropology & Humanism, 2021
Guided by Ruth Behar's provocation to explore how ethnography was born out of the writings of nov... more Guided by Ruth Behar's provocation to explore how ethnography was born out of the writings of novelists and poets and building on a special issue of Anthropology and Humanism on the art of ethnography published in 2007, I explore the histories, potentials, and boundaries of ethnography as a genre and craft. Relying on narrative theory as a resource that can enrich ethnography, I provide a close reading of several ethnographies, focusing on issues of character, time, and plot. I argue that a focus on narrative helps ethnographers put in conversation multiple selves' shifting roles in ethnography. Narrative provides tools to put in dynamic dialogue these different selves, animate our texts, and write more accessible and enjoyable ethnographies. On another level, consulting with narrative theory is a reminder to claim all our ancestors and take pride in ethnography as a queer genre whose strength lies in its openings and porous boundaries.
The Wiley Blackwell Encyclopedia of Gender and Sexuality Studies, 2016
Society for Cultural Anthropology, 2021
Typically floor-length, black, and loose, abayas are dresses worn by women of working, middle, an... more Typically floor-length, black, and loose, abayas are dresses worn by women of working, middle, and upper classes in Egypt and other regions in the world. Convenient and usually affordable, abayas are a popular choice of dress for many women. Far from being a one-size-fits-all staple, however, abayas are worn for reasons that vary along the textures of social class and age: some wear abayas out of ideological resistance, others out of convenience, and, for a few, out of patriarchal transgression. Read and woven in conversation, this essay features the biographies of three Egyptian women in order to question the homogeneity of discourses about abayas as a form of modest Islamic dress.
COVID-19, Volume I: Global Pandemic, Societal Responses, Ideological Solutions , 2021
Based on an introductory anthropology/sociology course titled “Arab Society”, this chapter explor... more Based on an introductory anthropology/sociology course titled “Arab Society”, this chapter explores COVID-19 through the memes shared and circulated on social media, especially Facebook. The course professor as well as a group of her inspiring students collaboratively wrote this piece to better understand their changing Arab worlds. This pandemic has created a rich ethnographic ground for our cultural analyses. Relying on our own social circles and networks, we explore the cultural patterns of the use of Facebook as a news outlet but we also argue as a classic “Arab family salon” in which gossip, rumors, and classist/racist self-definitions are maintained. Social media in this instance works through sustaining, maintaining, and cementing an understanding of Arab society that is based on difference, classism, racism, exclusivity, and othering in all shapes and forms. Arab society, as such, is always produced in contrast to, or in comparison with, other Arab or non-Arab societies for that matter — always in process, in potential, in contradiction, and in changing conditions.
Society for Cultural Anthropology, 2020
In this short commentary, I summarize the main arguments of my MA thesis on rooftops in Egypt. I ... more In this short commentary, I summarize the main arguments of my MA thesis on rooftops in Egypt. I also use the word 'recipes' in the title to evoke a particular disciplinary, theoretical, and ethnographic stance vis-a-vis fieldwork and anthropology.
Anthropology of the Middle East, 2019
The article explores the particularly lively rooftops of Cairo through which interspecies intimac... more The article explores the particularly lively rooftops of Cairo through which interspecies intimacies unfold. On these rooftops, various animals (such as chickens, ducks, geese, turkeys, goats and rabbits) are raised to be later eaten and consumed for sustenance. I expose the various patterned modalities, terms and codes bringing these different species together in their sustained long-term relationships. I follow these interspecies relations as they narrate wonders of life and death, collaborations, various instantiations of home, social gift exchanges, marital rituals and grieving patterns. Rooftop recipes for relating slowly cook these human-non-human relations as uniquely embedded in a socioecological intricate awareness of surrounding environments of neighbours and families, but also of trees, waste, changing seasons, aging species and growing parents.
The paper looks conversations with the abaya through its wearers. The conversations entangle us i... more The paper looks conversations with the abaya through its wearers. The conversations entangle us in stories about class, Islamic piety, and patriarchy. The paper relies only upon the conversations of the author with herself (auto-ethnographically), with her interlocutors, and with the abaya as a material object spanning the everyday of contemporary Egypt. No external sources are included, as an attempt to give priority to people's stories rather than theoretical baggage/s that nevertheless crowd our minds in reading the paper anyway.
Rooftop cultivation can play an important role in feeding communities, but what is the place of ... more Rooftop cultivation can play an important role in feeding communities, but what is the place of animals in elevated urban rooftops? In this episode, Gastronomica Editorial Collective member Lisa Haushofer talks with anthropologist Noha Fikry about the uses of home rooftops for feeding one’s family. Drawing on her ethnographic research in some of Egypt’s biggest cities, Noha explores rooftop rearing as a gendered practice of caregiving -- what she calls “bread-nurturing” -- and shows how it plays an important role in Egypt’s culinary infrastructure.
Please check the full episode here: https://heritageradionetwork.org/episode/noha-fikry-rooftop-rearing-and-human-animal-relations
18 views
Anthropology Now , 2023
-- Please contact me for the full text of this article (n.fikry@mail.utoronto.ca) -- This articl... more -- Please contact me for the full text of this article (n.fikry@mail.utoronto.ca) --
This article explores women farmers who rear animals in their courtyards or on their rooftops in rural Egypt. In these home-rearing practices, caring for animals begins with the inevitability of killing in mind. Rather than regarding caring and killing as unrelated, dichotomous or contradictory, I argue that caring and killing are co-constitutive in some human–animal relations. In caring for animals, women farmers in rural Egypt rendered these animals knowable and controllable, a process that made killing easier and more manageable. The act of killing animals, then, was part of a broader relation of care for humans. In the broader quest of caring for and feeding families well, caring for animals involved killing animals to make meat, and the promise of a wholesome meal drew caring and killing as everyday bedfellows.
Gastronomica: The Journal for Food Studies, 2022
Based on ethnographic fieldwork, this research explores rooftops as gendered spaces where women p... more Based on ethnographic fieldwork, this research explores rooftops as gendered spaces where women practice what I propose calling ''bread-nurturing,'' a gendered labor through which women secure and provide nutritious and delicious food for the family. Much of this food is cultivated on rooftops in a long-standing social practice of raising chickens, ducks, goats, and other animals on the roofs of family dwellings. I argue that rooftops are extensions of kitchens in which women practice their intimate knowledge of household food. Rather than simply pushing for an understanding of rooftops as gendered spaces, however, I regard rooftops as a pivotal resource for understanding values and relations of food and taste in Egypt.
Changing Theory: Concepts from the Global South, 2022
Based in urban rooftops in Cairo, Egypt, this essay asks what does it mean if one invokes tarbiyy... more Based in urban rooftops in Cairo, Egypt, this essay asks what does it mean if one invokes tarbiyya as a descriptor of one’s food? On a number of rooftops in Egypt, working and middle-class families raise animals for
nutritional sustenance. Throughout one-year of fieldwork on rooftops, my interlocutors always invoked tarbiyya to describe their relations to rooftop animals. Etymologically traced to “r b a” in Arabic, tarbiyya refers to acts
of rearing, nurturing, raising, and educating both humans and nonhuman animals. In using tarbiyya, my interlocutors refer to both a human-animal relation and, more importantly and primarily, delicious meals. Through various ethnographic encounters, I argue that tarbiyya refers to a particular value/understanding of food, one that is rooted in an intimate human-animal relation of nurturance, feeding, discipline, and reciprocity.
Graduate Journal of Food Studies , 2021
This essay is an invitation to take food as thought in our fieldwork engagements. In this short c... more This essay is an invitation to take food as thought in our fieldwork engagements. In this short commentary, I think through fieldwork meals by paying close attention to the values associated with food as it relates to my positionality as an upper-middle class researcher among working and lower-middle class families. The essay can be accessed here: https://gradfoodstudies.org/2021/10/04/food-as-thought/
Anthropology & Humanism, 2021
Guided by Ruth Behar's provocation to explore how ethnography was born out of the writings of nov... more Guided by Ruth Behar's provocation to explore how ethnography was born out of the writings of novelists and poets and building on a special issue of Anthropology and Humanism on the art of ethnography published in 2007, I explore the histories, potentials, and boundaries of ethnography as a genre and craft. Relying on narrative theory as a resource that can enrich ethnography, I provide a close reading of several ethnographies, focusing on issues of character, time, and plot. I argue that a focus on narrative helps ethnographers put in conversation multiple selves' shifting roles in ethnography. Narrative provides tools to put in dynamic dialogue these different selves, animate our texts, and write more accessible and enjoyable ethnographies. On another level, consulting with narrative theory is a reminder to claim all our ancestors and take pride in ethnography as a queer genre whose strength lies in its openings and porous boundaries.
The Wiley Blackwell Encyclopedia of Gender and Sexuality Studies, 2016
Society for Cultural Anthropology, 2021
Typically floor-length, black, and loose, abayas are dresses worn by women of working, middle, an... more Typically floor-length, black, and loose, abayas are dresses worn by women of working, middle, and upper classes in Egypt and other regions in the world. Convenient and usually affordable, abayas are a popular choice of dress for many women. Far from being a one-size-fits-all staple, however, abayas are worn for reasons that vary along the textures of social class and age: some wear abayas out of ideological resistance, others out of convenience, and, for a few, out of patriarchal transgression. Read and woven in conversation, this essay features the biographies of three Egyptian women in order to question the homogeneity of discourses about abayas as a form of modest Islamic dress.
COVID-19, Volume I: Global Pandemic, Societal Responses, Ideological Solutions , 2021
Based on an introductory anthropology/sociology course titled “Arab Society”, this chapter explor... more Based on an introductory anthropology/sociology course titled “Arab Society”, this chapter explores COVID-19 through the memes shared and circulated on social media, especially Facebook. The course professor as well as a group of her inspiring students collaboratively wrote this piece to better understand their changing Arab worlds. This pandemic has created a rich ethnographic ground for our cultural analyses. Relying on our own social circles and networks, we explore the cultural patterns of the use of Facebook as a news outlet but we also argue as a classic “Arab family salon” in which gossip, rumors, and classist/racist self-definitions are maintained. Social media in this instance works through sustaining, maintaining, and cementing an understanding of Arab society that is based on difference, classism, racism, exclusivity, and othering in all shapes and forms. Arab society, as such, is always produced in contrast to, or in comparison with, other Arab or non-Arab societies for that matter — always in process, in potential, in contradiction, and in changing conditions.
Society for Cultural Anthropology, 2020
In this short commentary, I summarize the main arguments of my MA thesis on rooftops in Egypt. I ... more In this short commentary, I summarize the main arguments of my MA thesis on rooftops in Egypt. I also use the word 'recipes' in the title to evoke a particular disciplinary, theoretical, and ethnographic stance vis-a-vis fieldwork and anthropology.
Anthropology of the Middle East, 2019
The article explores the particularly lively rooftops of Cairo through which interspecies intimac... more The article explores the particularly lively rooftops of Cairo through which interspecies intimacies unfold. On these rooftops, various animals (such as chickens, ducks, geese, turkeys, goats and rabbits) are raised to be later eaten and consumed for sustenance. I expose the various patterned modalities, terms and codes bringing these different species together in their sustained long-term relationships. I follow these interspecies relations as they narrate wonders of life and death, collaborations, various instantiations of home, social gift exchanges, marital rituals and grieving patterns. Rooftop recipes for relating slowly cook these human-non-human relations as uniquely embedded in a socioecological intricate awareness of surrounding environments of neighbours and families, but also of trees, waste, changing seasons, aging species and growing parents.
The paper looks conversations with the abaya through its wearers. The conversations entangle us i... more The paper looks conversations with the abaya through its wearers. The conversations entangle us in stories about class, Islamic piety, and patriarchy. The paper relies only upon the conversations of the author with herself (auto-ethnographically), with her interlocutors, and with the abaya as a material object spanning the everyday of contemporary Egypt. No external sources are included, as an attempt to give priority to people's stories rather than theoretical baggage/s that nevertheless crowd our minds in reading the paper anyway.
This MA thesis explores the very particularly lively rooftops of Cairo (more specifically, in fou... more This MA thesis explores the very particularly lively rooftops of Cairo (more specifically, in four homes across different neighborhoods of Cairo and Alexandria during a 9-month journey of fieldwork) where multispecies intimacies inevitably unfold. All these homes are largely located in impoverished localities of their cities, leaving access to proper proteins a challenge if not an economic impossibility. On these rooftops, then, nonhuman animals such goats, sheep, rabbits, chickens, geese, ducks, and turkeys are raised, to be later eaten and consumed mainly for sustenance. I take these rooftops as initially human-centered projects of access to proper dietary nutrients, then try to follow these projects to explore how they expand and extend to include intimate, sustainable, ecological, and transformative relations between its protagonists. Rooftop recipes for relating, as witnessed and slowly cooked, by all means bring together polyphonic intimacies made of love, care, disciplining, slaughtering, eating, growing, and grieving - all taking place in an overarching social in which rooftops are complexly entangled.
This is an undergraduate thematic course on murder. It's taught to undergraduates who don't neces... more This is an undergraduate thematic course on murder. It's taught to undergraduates who don't necessarily have a background in anthropology. It builds on & converses with an undergraduate course taught by Naisargi Dave at the University of Toronto.
This is a syllabus for an undergraduate introductory class to sociocultural anthropology. The cou... more This is a syllabus for an undergraduate introductory class to sociocultural anthropology. The course expects students to have little/no background in anthropology and so is suitable for entry-level students from different majors/backgrounds.
Variously regarded as the comparative study of human cultures, the exploration of what makes us human, and the pursuit of making the strange familiar and making the familiar strange, sociocultural anthropology is the subject of this 15-week exciting journey. As an introductory-level course, we will explore some classic, emerging, and continuing themes in sociocultural anthropology.
Society for Cultural Anthropology, 2022
Society for Cultural Anthropology, 2022
Society for Cultural Anthropology, 2022
This is the course syllabus that I used for spring 2020
This is the course syllabus that I used for Spring 2020.
This workshop will take place in a hybrid format on February 7th, 13.00-18.00 Central European Ti... more This workshop will take place in a hybrid format on February 7th, 13.00-18.00 Central European Time. The Teams link for this event is enclosed in the documents.
Please see the attached program and abstracts for a full description of the event and speakers.
Food Anthropology Blog (of AAA's Anthropology of Food and Nutrition section)), 2023
Review of an edited volume exploring the region's foodways through archival research, ethnography... more Review of an edited volume exploring the region's foodways through archival research, ethnography, and recipes.
Gastronomica, 2022
Book review of an edited volume exploring the role of food in sanctuary making among displaced co... more Book review of an edited volume exploring the role of food in sanctuary making among displaced communities