Nurturing Masculinities: Men, Food, and Family in Contemporary Egypt by Nefissa Naguib (review)

The Egyptian man in general, and ibn al-balad [son of the country] in particular, loves his family and home. It is true we go out to work and then we like to spend time with our friends joking and playing backgammon in the coffee shop. We are men. But we go home at the end of the day. For us, the family meal is sacred—sitting around the tawla [low table] or, for the younger generations, a high table, eating our food with our hands or a spoon. We don't use a fork and knife and stuff like that. Then a man feels like a man with family and loved ones. We are together and close, and we share the same casserole.

(114)

Nefissa Naguib's Nurturing Masculinities is built around such conversations with working- and middle-class Egyptian men, this one with Moody, a shopkeeper from the working-class Cairo neighborhood of Bulaq. Moody and his family had recently moved to a larger apartment in one of Cairo's new suburbs, reflecting a rise in their socioeconomic status. Nevertheless, he remained deeply conflicted about severing ties with his old neighborhood and moving to an area that "had no soul or ambience" (113). Moody shared these concerns and memories of Bulaq with Naguib over a "tin plate of ful [fava beans]" and tea in a café. Naguib argues that food is central to masculinity in Egypt and offers understudied insights into men's vulnerabilities, affective ties, and gendered constructions of self, family, and community.

Naguib's study, based on ethnographic fieldwork in Cairo between 2011 and 2013, builds on an exciting body of anthropological literature that explores "lived masculinities." She completed interviews with fifty men of various ages and socioeconomic backgrounds whom she had previously met during trips to Egypt in the 1980s and the early 2000s. The men were similar in being emotional, caring, generous, and protective, standing in stark contrast, Naguib argues, to the stern authoritarian Egyptian man often seen in literature. Nurturing Masculinities, which challenges the efficacy of studying masculinity in urban centers through the lens of patriarchy, is composed of an introduction and four thematically organized chapters.

The first two chapters discuss the concept of "nurturing masculinities," which Naguib defines as "men's food talk and their efforts to care for loved ones" (33). She argues that an anthropological investigation of nurturing masculinities "problematizes the hitherto exclusive link between femininity and food in Egypt" (33) by revealing the centrality of food to men's fluid identities as husbands, fathers, and sons. Her interlocutors, inspired by duty as well as by affection, regularly and proudly shop for fresh vegetables, fruits, and meat for their families. The work argues that the intersection of "affection and authority" undergirds a wide range of men's activities in daily life.

Chapter 2, focused on "food activism," is based on interviews with members of the youth branch of the Muslim Brotherhood, who distribute food to the less fortunate and are highly critical of the organization's old guard. "Islamic activism," according to Naguib's interlocutor Sherif Hassan, a member of the brotherhood who studied economics at the American University in Cairo, "is about telling everybody that a Muslim's wealth is governed by communal obligations that stress the rights of the needy, poor, orphaned, and drifters" (62). In other words, food distribution is central to these young male pious activists' identities and ideal vision of society. Naguib shows how the intersection of age and gender among these activists fractures the category of even that Egyptian masculinity. She stops short, however, of investigating how food activism relates to the identity of these activists as sons, brothers, husbands, and fathers.

In chapter 3 Naguib discusses the centrality of food to men's recollections. One of her main interlocutors, the taxi driver Mustafa Hashim, describes the importance of "samna baladi" (clarified butter): "It'sthe flavor of Egyptian cooking. An ingredient an...