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.
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Please check the full episode here: https://heritageradionetwork.org/episode/noha-fikry-rooftop-rearing-and-human-animal-relations
Papers by Noha Fikry
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.
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.
Please check the full episode here: https://heritageradionetwork.org/episode/noha-fikry-rooftop-rearing-and-human-animal-relations
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.
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.
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.
Please see the attached program and abstracts for a full description of the event and speakers.