ABSTRACT
Based in urban rooftops in Cairo, Egypt, this essay asks what does it mean if one invokes tarbiyya as a descriptor of one’s food? On a number of rooftops in Egypt, working and middle-class families raise animals for nutritional sustenance. Throughout one-year of fieldwork on rooftops, my interlocutors always invoked tarbiyya to describe their relations to rooftop animals. Etymologically traced to ‘r b a’ in Arabic, tarbiyya refers to acts of rearing, nurturing, raising, and educating both humans and nonhuman animals. In using tarbiyya, my interlocutors refer to both a human–animal relation and, more importantly and primarily, delicious meals. Through various ethnographic encounters, I argue that tarbiyya refers to a particular value/understanding of food, one that is rooted in an intimate human–animal relation of nurturance, feeding, discipline, and reciprocity.
