Noha Fikry
Biographic Data
| ID | 347265 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Noha Fikry |
| GIVEN NAMES | Noha |
| FAMILY NAME | Fikry |
| SIGNATURE | FIKRY N |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Toronto |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-6213-5045 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 11 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 5 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 11 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2019 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 2 |
The Native That Therefore I Am
Based on an incident from my ongoing fieldwork in rural Egypt, I focus on my status as a “native” Egyptian anthropologist and the fraught challenges that this status brings about while situating these elements in historical debates on native anthropology. While most existing literature suggests doing away with the term “native anthropology,” this essay takes native anthropology as a positionality that highlights an ambivalent orientation of anthr…
Living Food, Killer Species
Have you ever considered if your food is living or dead? Take, for example, scraps, peels, children’s not-so-favorite meals, stale bread, discarded, misshapen vegetables, and about-to-go-bad fruits. You might call these leftovers, food waste, or surplus. All are correct descriptors. But to my interlocutors, these are key ingredients to an ideal meal. As a recipe for feeding, ingredients must be “living.” The recipe for feeding here does not feed …
A Fox, a Few Chickens, a Theft
This article centers around a story about a fox who ate a few chickens in a town on the Nile Delta in Egypt, where the author conducts ethnographic fieldwork exploring home-based animal-rearing practices among women farmers. Neither the author nor their interlocutors witnessed this event: nobody saw the fox eating the chickens. The chickens were gone, but with no trace left behind. To find the culprit, the author's interlocutors sought divination…
Devouring Relationalities
Drawing on one year of fieldwork in Egypt, this research explores rooftop rearing practices among lower-middle class families in Egypt. Lacking access to trusted meat proteins, many families raise nonhuman animals, including chickens, goats, and sheep, for nutritional sustenance. Nurtured with love and nourished with household leftovers among other ingredients, rooftop animals are valued for their carefully controlled gastronomic histories. Drawi…
Doing More-Than-Human Research
Increasingly, qualitative researchers are considering the more-than-humans that Euro-Western social science largely has ignored. But if social science research methods were made for humans, how does one include everything else? In this article, five scholars describe the methodological steps they each have developed. We explore the role of onto-epistemology as an analytical tool to understand relationships between people and food-producing plants…
Caring (Enough) to Kill
Cited in María Puig de la Bellacasa, Matters of Care: Speculative Ethics in More than Human Worlds (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017), 3.2. John Hartigan, Care of the Species: Races of Corn and the Science of Plant Biodiversity (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017), xvii.3. Cited in Thom Van Doreen, Flight Ways: Life and Loss at the Edge of Extinction (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014), 83.4. Garry Marvin, “W…
Today’s Children, Tomorrow’s Meals
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 extension…
Short Breaks Are for Hot Chocolate, Long Breaks Are for Salads, Weekends Are for Baking
I received my acceptance letter for a PhD program in sociocultural anthropology at the University of Toronto in March 2020, right when universities began shifting to online learning. University of Toronto is more than 9,000 kilometers away from my hometown in Egypt, and the rapidly evolving pandemic made it difficult to envision when or how I would begin my studies. I thus made the decision to defer my program start date to January 2021. The viru…
A Genre of Failed Novelists and Poets
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…
Rooftop Recipes for Relating
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 t…
Spaces of Life, States of Death
Caring (Enough) to Kill
Cited in María Puig de la Bellacasa, Matters of Care: Speculative Ethics in More than Human Worlds (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017), 3.2. John Hartigan, Care of the Species: Races of Corn and the Science of Plant Biodiversity (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017), xvii.3. Cited in Thom Van Doreen, Flight Ways: Life and Loss at the Edge of Extinction (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014), 83.4. Garry Marvin, “W…
A Genre of Failed Novelists and Poets
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…
Rooftop Recipes for Relating
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 t…
Rooftop Recipes for Relating
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 t…
Spaces of Life, States of Death
Today’s Children, Tomorrow’s Meals
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 extension…
Short Breaks Are for Hot Chocolate, Long Breaks Are for Salads, Weekends Are for Baking
I received my acceptance letter for a PhD program in sociocultural anthropology at the University of Toronto in March 2020, right when universities began shifting to online learning. University of Toronto is more than 9,000 kilometers away from my hometown in Egypt, and the rapidly evolving pandemic made it difficult to envision when or how I would begin my studies. I thus made the decision to defer my program start date to January 2021. The viru…
A Genre of Failed Novelists and Poets
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…
Caring (Enough) to Kill
Cited in María Puig de la Bellacasa, Matters of Care: Speculative Ethics in More than Human Worlds (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017), 3.2. John Hartigan, Care of the Species: Races of Corn and the Science of Plant Biodiversity (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017), xvii.3. Cited in Thom Van Doreen, Flight Ways: Life and Loss at the Edge of Extinction (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014), 83.4. Garry Marvin, “W…
Living Food, Killer Species
Have you ever considered if your food is living or dead? Take, for example, scraps, peels, children’s not-so-favorite meals, stale bread, discarded, misshapen vegetables, and about-to-go-bad fruits. You might call these leftovers, food waste, or surplus. All are correct descriptors. But to my interlocutors, these are key ingredients to an ideal meal. As a recipe for feeding, ingredients must be “living.” The recipe for feeding here does not feed …
A Fox, a Few Chickens, a Theft
This article centers around a story about a fox who ate a few chickens in a town on the Nile Delta in Egypt, where the author conducts ethnographic fieldwork exploring home-based animal-rearing practices among women farmers. Neither the author nor their interlocutors witnessed this event: nobody saw the fox eating the chickens. The chickens were gone, but with no trace left behind. To find the culprit, the author's interlocutors sought divination…
Devouring Relationalities
Drawing on one year of fieldwork in Egypt, this research explores rooftop rearing practices among lower-middle class families in Egypt. Lacking access to trusted meat proteins, many families raise nonhuman animals, including chickens, goats, and sheep, for nutritional sustenance. Nurtured with love and nourished with household leftovers among other ingredients, rooftop animals are valued for their carefully controlled gastronomic histories. Drawi…
Doing More-Than-Human Research
Increasingly, qualitative researchers are considering the more-than-humans that Euro-Western social science largely has ignored. But if social science research methods were made for humans, how does one include everything else? In this article, five scholars describe the methodological steps they each have developed. We explore the role of onto-epistemology as an analytical tool to understand relationships between people and food-producing plants…
The Native That Therefore I Am
Based on an incident from my ongoing fieldwork in rural Egypt, I focus on my status as a “native” Egyptian anthropologist and the fraught challenges that this status brings about while situating these elements in historical debates on native anthropology. While most existing literature suggests doing away with the term “native anthropology,” this essay takes native anthropology as a positionality that highlights an ambivalent orientation of anthr…
Sociology (8 works) · Anthropological Studies and Insights (5 works) · Political science (5 works) · Anthropology (4 works) · Computer Science (4 works) · Geographies of human-animal interactions (4 works) · Biology (3 works) · Culinary Culture and Tourism (3 works) · Ecology (3 works) · Ethnography (3 works)