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To Kill and to Care: Reflections on Rearing Animals and Making Meat in Rural Egypt
Abstract
How do we understand eating when caring and killing are its fundamental components? In this essay, I explore home-rearing practices of women farmers in rural Egypt, in which women rear animals to feed their families and in which caring for animals ends with a conscious act of killing. I rely on six stories from fieldwork to situate caring and killing practices in broader economic and nutritional dilemmas, juxtaposing these stories with the capitalist meat industry in Egypt which relies on frozen cheap meat with unknown sources. I further rely on an intriguing question that anthropologist Naisargi Davé posed during a roundtable discussion on multispecies ethnography: “Does that which is inevitable cease to matter?.” My answer is no: Animal killing is inevitable in home-rearing practices in rural Egypt, but it never ceases to matter. I argue that for many families in rural Egypt, eating well is partly about caring for an animal before and during killing it. Far from a moral resolution, however, it is a particular mode of killing and caring for animals that my interlocutors offer as their attempt to live, kill, and eat well. This mode of killing is preceded by caring for animals, premised on caring for family members, and practiced according to religious laws. On the other hand, their mode of caring involves caring for animals [everyday feeding, cleaning, etc.] and caring about animals [abstracting animals as meat through gastronomic descriptors of taste]. In rural Egypt, eating “well” is a relational matter fraught with everyday acts of killing and caring. In the dearth of trusted affordable proteins, caring for animals as food must entail killing, and the promise of a wholesome meal draws caring and killing as everyday bedfellows. In home-rearing practices, inevitable animal killing matters because the reason for, mode of, and relations preceding and following animal killing partly define eating well.
Discipline
Anthropology
Geographic Area
Egypt
Sub Area
Ethnography