Paper short abstract:

This MA thesis explores rooftop ecologies in Cairo and Alexandria (Egypt). Working and Middle class families raise animals for nutritional sustenance. These animals are further embedded in rituals, gift exchanges, ecological entanglements, and multispecies collaborations of various kinds.

Paper long abstract:

In a background of economic and nutritional necessity, Egypt's grand majority is faced by the everyday struggle of eating their ways through life. With no affordable access to proteins, middle class families resort to "sinking" into their conditions and make way to raise their own proteins. Animals including goats, chickens, rabbits, and others are raised on homes' rooftops to be later slaughtered and eaten. Based on one-year fieldwork, this thesis argues that these multispecies entanglements unfold in conversation with existing "animal turn" literature, albeit in a different tone and modality. These entanglements as enunciated in the Middle East are muddied with necessity, love but also killing/slaughtering, gifting but also selling, caring but also disciplining. This helps us rethink binaries such as human/nonhuman, but also add so much to conversations on ecologies, "poverty", animal rights, and access to food. In knowing everything that their animals have eaten, my interlocutors feel empowered and liberated through their "bellies" and the bellies of the animals they raise - especially when compared to myself, a middle-class woman who is completely ignorant of the "food" she eats, where it comes from, or its life history.

Paper short abstract:

I approach botanical gardens as remains from the past. The paper will address transfer of seeds, plants and botanists from former empires to Egypt; the effects on contemporary landscapes, human and other-than human socialities in and around the gardens.

Paper long abstract:

Without diminishing botany to nothing more than an supplement of colonial rule, the significance of empire in the rise of botany as a formal science - in the Middle East and Europe - is the point of departure of this paper. It was in the process of dealing with the problems of transfer of plants and seeds - stolen, appropriated or otherwise - across very different ecological and social contexts that natural history was transformed into formal botanical science in both regions. This paper will approach the garden as remains from the past through which imperial powers continue to assert influence - implicitly and explicitly - on plants and people in contemporary Egypt. In particular I will address the mobility of seeds, plants, and botanists between France, Britain and Egypt; the scientific network that "plants of empires" (Baber 2016) created, and the effects on landscapes in relation to ideas of health to the gardens ecosystems, threats to extinction and extermination, human and other-than human socialites in and around the gardens.

Paper short abstract:

What brings camels, Shari'a and insurance market together? Showing how dwindling population of camels is contributing to the bankruptcy of insurance companies in Iran, this paper reveals an unlikely relation which points to the interdependency of human and non-human life forms in the Middle East.

Paper long abstract:

The looming threat of bankruptcy is prompting insurance companies in Iran to invest in camel breeding as the most viable method to lower the soaring price of life insurance. Bound to observe Shari'a, insurance companies have to pay the state-sanctioned amount to cover the loss of a life in car accidents— the value of which is determined by clerics, varies each year, and it is tantamount to the average annual market price of one hundred young healthy camels. Two issues in recent years have factored in the skyrocketing price of life insurance and imminent bankruptcy of insurance companies: For the past three decades, Iran has been at the top of the international table for deadly car accidents, thanks to poor road infrastructure and low quality of nationally produced cars. Coincident with a surging number of motorway deaths, long-term droughts and dramatic floods have dwindled the number of camels in the country, thus increasing the market value of camels. Insurance companies have repeatedly asked Islamic authorities to change camels as the benchmark for measuring the value of human life. Their requests, however, have been to no avail. Locating the value of life at the intersection of nature, jurisprudence, and market, I show how detrimental impacts of environmental changes have intensified the enduring clash of two calculative logics of market and religion. Consequently, I illustrate the interdependency of life forms—human and non-human— in an Islamic country, revealing new kind of relationalities in the Middle East.

Paper short abstract:

This talk explores border regimes, invasive species and thalassopolitics in the context of the Med Sea and Lessepsian migrants - marine species from the Suez Canal. What are these migrants legally, politically and conceptually? What are the regimes that render them threats, resources or "nature"?

Paper long abstract:

The opening of the Suez Canal in 1869 shortened the sea route from Europe to India, accelerated humans and goods mobility, and the colonization of East Africa. A less studied effect of the Suez Canal is Lessepsian Migration, a term denoting a northward mobility pattern of marine species through the Suez Canal. This the canal construction breached the biogeographic barriers that for millions of years had isolated the biotas of the Red Sea and the Mediterranean. More than 300 species have settled in the Mediterranean. While the process has been going on for 150 years, the proliferation of new species has intensified in the last decades, due to recent widening of the Suez Canal, human disturbances of ecosystems, and global warming. The marine invasion-topic has been a topic of natural science for long, but has recently reached the public sphere: newspaper headlines have alerted readers how Lessepsian migrants outrival native species, damage fisheries, tourism and human bodies. The task of surveying and regulating the species labeled invasive is becoming an urgent issue among sea experts and policy makers. But how do you regulate marine species, which seemingly don't care about borders, passports or rules? In this talk I explore border regimes, discourses on invasive species and thalassopolitics in the context of the Mediterranean Sea and Lessepsian migration. What are these marine migrants legally, politically and conceptually - terrorists or tourists, migrants or pirates, parasites or saviors? What are the regimes that render them threats, resources or just "nature"?

Paper short abstract:

The paper searches for the existential pattern that connects Palestinian refugee lads to the pigeons they raise, as well as the one connecting them to the researcher. Through this search, ethnography ceases to be just a research method to become a deep human experience as well, based on empathy.

Paper long abstract:

Until relatively recently, the shabab (lads) from Shatila, a Palestinian refugee camp in the outskirts of Beirut, were highly invested in pigeon-raising. With the possibility of effectively leading active sexual lives curtailed by their economic prospects, which force them to postpone marriage plans, the shabab celebrated the animals' sexual prowess. With their capacity to engage in fights opening perilous paths, due to the probability of fast escalation in light of the absence of any authority holding the legitimate monopoly of force in the camp, they engaged in competitive hunts through their birds. With the perspectives of travelling or migrating impeached because of their status as stateless refugees, they partook in their pets' unencumbered freedom to fly. By searching for the pattern that existentially connects shabab and birds, human and non-human, through the former's desire and hope for liberty and the latter's effective freedom, the researcher was triggered to also reflect upon the pattern that connects himself to the shabab. This time, however, the pattern that connected was through constraints, rather than through freedom. In the case of the shabab, socio-legal-economic constraints. In the case of the anthropologist, constraints derived from the very conditions characterizing research in a refugee camp. Searching for the pattern that connects enables an ethnography understood not only as a research method, but as a deep human experience ultimately based on empathy.

Paper short abstract:

This paper examines the history of war, exile and revolution experienced by a Syrian community displaced in Lebanon through its relationality with nature. Despite its unspeakability, this history is evoked through the senses in the midst of exilic gardens.

Paper long abstract:

In 2013 a Syrian rural community was expelled from its home during a ruthless military campaign led by the al-Assad regime and Hezbollah militants. The expulsion was followed by 'the journey of death', a perilous flight to Lebanon where the community built a small camp and a school. Soon after their construction, both spaces were transformed into gardens embellished with not only plants and flowers but also paintings representing human interaction with the nature and the community's lost home. Based on a long-term ethnographic fieldwork started in 2014, this paper examines the political features of the relationality between the community and nature across the Syrian-Lebanese border. Specifically, it captures how this relationality becomes a site to articulate the political origin of the community's history of war, exile and revolution as well as tasharrud, the affective state of permanent loss generated by this history. As tragic and mundane losses constituting the community's predicament are silenced and unspeakable within the revolutionary political project, I argue that this collective history and tasharrud are imprinted in the exilic gardens. Community's encounters with plants, flowers and paintings animate an amalgam of sensory modalities and communicative channels other than the voice - such as performativity and aesthetics - through which fragments of this collective history can be evoked. The paper reflects on the limit of a voice and the absence of a coherent political discourse characterising the predicament of tasharrud.

Paper short abstract:

This paper focuses on trans-local civil society alliances which contest hydro-hegemony in the Euphrates-Tigris river basin. It will examine the confronting claims following rivers of mesopotamia and their historical roots as well new images of community emerging in the region and theier cooperation outside the region.

Paper long abstract:

An alliance of civil society actors and organizations are contesting what Zeitoun and Warner (2006) called ‘hydro-hegemony’: Large scale dam projects like the Turkish Southeastern Anatolia Project (GAP) present a monopolisation of transboundary water resources for the cause of a nation-state development policy.

In this case the historical foundation for this hegemony was laid after the First World War with the Treaty of Lausanne in which the borders between Turkey and the present-day states of Iraq and Syria were drawn.

The sources of the Euphrates-Tigris are thus located within the territory of Turkey and the river system extends from the Taurus Mountains to the arid and semi-arid regions of Syria and Iraq.

The region is threatened by severe droughts, supply crises and environmental disasters. In all three countries Turkey, Syria and Iraq there is growing concern for a protection of ecosystems, 'waterscapes'

and cultural heritage as well as questions of sustainability and social justice, but local population is confronted with diminished political participation and shrinking spaces of civil society. Within this, new images of community are emerging - defined by the course of the river and crossing nation-state and ethnic-religious borders. By using the concept of political ecology I will analyse the new trans-local/international spaces and coalitions that open up through water/eco advocacy and mutual learning.

Paper short abstract:

This paper aims at exploring Islamic reformist contestation of Northern Moroccan local understandings of animal speech, particularly of those conveyed through oral narratives. It will allow us to provide insights into ethnographic theories on the articulations of the human in speculative fictions.

Paper long abstract:

Islam is often presented as a strongly anthropocentric religion. Anthropomorphism, in the case of God and animals as well, has been and still is at the heart of many theological debates. In many fables which are transmitted orally by both arabophone and berberophone speakers in the mountains of Jbala and Ghomara (Northern Morocco), animals are able to talk, and to express their thoughts and their feelings. Many of these fables present the characters of a wolf and a hedgehog, challenging and trying to outsmart each other. Other traditional oral narratives, in this case unproblematically aligned with Islamic core understandings (Quran, Hadith), portray both Sayyidina Sulaymān (King Solomon) and the jnûn (non-human invisible beings) as able to speak with animals. In some villages, the reform-oriented preachings of Salafī muslim imams at the local mosques have been sometimes presenting the transmission of the fables as undersirable or forbidden, adressing them as disapproved (makrūh) or unlawful (ḥarām), and considering these forms of storytelling as acts which are detestable from an Islamic point of view. Interlocutors often stress that the intergenerational transmission of these stories is strongly contested both through the mosque and the traditional quranic schooling. Drawing from long-term in-depth ethnographic fieldwork in rural communities of Northern Morocco, I will examine the local ethnographic theories on the articulations of the human conveyed through speculative fictions about talking non-human beings, particularly animals (al-hayawanat) and I will explore how they are contested by certain individuals adhering to pluralistic forms of religious reformism.