A Fox, a Few Chickens, a Theft

Abstract This article centers around a story about a fox who ate a few chickens in a town on the Nile Delta in Egypt, where the author conducts ethnographic fieldwork exploring home-based animal-rearing practices among women farmers. Neither the author nor their interlocutors witnessed this event: nobody saw the fox eating the chickens. The chickens were gone, but with no trace left behind. To find the culprit, the author's interlocutors sought divination with the help of a local religious authority. The article shares three stories about the same chain of events, featuring the perspective of three different interlocutors with varying stakes in the chickens’ disappearance. In juxtaposing these three stories, the author argues that the recognition of and engagement with nonhumans in our field sites necessitates reflecting on the limits of what we (can) know, how we know, unknowability, and the limitations of our social-scientific modes of knowing. Through bringing together multispecies ethnography and anthropologies of Islam, the author further argues that unknowability provides a possibility to revisit ethnographic praxis. If our interlocutors live with nonhumans, supernaturals, and God through uncertainty and unknowability, our ethnographic praxis must learn to attend to, think with, and make space for these factors in our ethnographic accounts.