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.