The anthropology of the Middle East has addressed ethical life as a matter of central concern for the development of theoretical and empirical understandings in 1) differences in perceptions of the good life 2) questions about (differentiating) secular and religious subjects 3) questions about ordinary vis a vis extraordinary dimensions of ethical life in the context of the Middle East. This paper focuses on the gap-like qualities of ethical life, and draws on extensive fieldwork in Amman, Jordan. Looking to the artistic and activist dimensions of ethical life, we can formulate a theory of the extraordinary potential - gaps - in seemingly mundane scenes and materialities. By playing around with the potentials of the urban context, its affordances, and its relations, artists and activists in Amman are shaping spaces for dwelling in ethical uncertainty, as well as in the temporal spaces of ethical possibility that comes out of that uncertainty. This in part creates spaces for imagining the otherwise in the context of a neoliberal economy, state investment in notions of cultural traditionalism, and the multiple relations that overflow such contextualization of society and dominant ethico-political moral norms. Thus, the paper presents an ethnographically informed understanding of the risks, reparative labor, and playfulness involved in imagining other ethical worlds possible among artists and activists in Amman, Jordan. By suggesting "the gap" as an imagistic approach to ethical uncertainty and potentiality in activist-artistic encounters, I suggest an ethnographically informed conceptualization of a playful approach to the radical openings in ethical life.

In 2015, the photograph and news story about the Kurdish-Syrian boy, Alan Kurdi, who was found washed up and dead on the shores of the Mediterranean, was widely circulated. The reaction to the photograph triggered an upsurge in international concern for the Syrian refugee crisis. What Strange Paradise, a novel by Omar el Akkad, a journalist by profession, begins with a Syrian boy, Amir, who is also washed up on the shores of a Greek Island. But unlike the real life story, the novel offers a different outcome: Amir survives the shipwreck and is rescued by a local 15-year-old girl, Vanna. Offering a cutting critique of global relief efforts, the novel does not suggest alternative resolutions. Instead, it dwells on the boy’s life, past and present; and by the end of the novel, the children escape authority but Amir’s fate remains tragic. What Strange Paradise is an inversion of the Peter Pan story by J.M. Barrie, which is the story of the boy who is stuck in perpetual childhood or, inversely, never gets to become a man. Neverland is a powerful metaphor for queer refusal, for play, and the turning away from prescribed temporalities. In Neverland, all rules are broken and the reality at hand—a refugee camp with no foreseeable exit plan—is rejected. In this way, the novel gestures towards a radical shift from the epistemologies of conclusions to the value of what makes life livable. Although as readers we never experience Amir playing/living like Peter Pan likes to do, arguably the novel describes his voyage on the fight for the right to play. And Vanna, his Wendy, helps him fight for that right.

Pivoted in Al-Daqahliyya governorate on the Nile’s Delta in Egypt, my broader project explores animal rearing practices among women farmers and its emotional valences of caring, killing, and eating. A key intervention of this project is proposing tarbiyya as a conceptual tool to understanding human-animal relations in the Middle East. Commonly used to refer to rearing animals for food but also rearing human children, tarbiyya is an Arabic word that exposes the nurturing and disciplining components of relating to specific nonhuman animals. Alongside tarbiyya and its derivative adjectives, the lack of tarbiyya describes someone who is immoral, undisciplined, rude, or indecent. An etymological exploration of tarbiyya exposes its root as “r b y”, which is also the root of the word Rabb, God. In this particular rendition of the word, Rabb refers to an overpowering, omnipotent, all-knowing entity. In light of these reflections, this essay explores anti-tarbiyya as a mode of (unGodly) relating, gesturing towards a mode of relationality that begins with unknowability and relies on play, experimentation, and indifference as means for engaging with one’s surroundings of humans, visible and invisible nonhumans. In beginning with unknowability and acknowledging our limits as humans, anti-tarbiyya explores relationality in an intransitive sense that is not necessarily limited to specific animals reared for specific ends such as food. Unlike tarbiyya, anti-tarbiyya operates within an expansive horizon of beings with whom we experiment, play, and engage with, oftentimes violently. This essay thus centers on children (interlocutors) & their unrestricted, oftentimes violent, and passionate playful engagement with animals such as goats, chickens, bees, stray cats and dogs, birds, and worms. These engagements do not follow a fixed script: Children can play with worms, kill them, or “hunt” insects in early mornings. They try to know these more-than-humans but often fail to do so in full. More importantly, they do not begin with a quest for fully knowing or disciplining these more-than-humans. Drawing on Bateson and Hamayon’s understandings of play as a process and modality of action that is characterized by a reciprocal interaction with and relationship to alterity we can engage with new dimensions of activity and rethink old concepts. In this light, field-sites unfold play-sites; spaces of experimentation, imagination, and play. I use these reflections to argue that play offers a useful entry point to complicating the human-animal relation in Egypt beyond the calculative and fixed scripts of food, its provisioning, and eating.