The Humane Myth: Le Sang des Betes

Gastronomica:

This 22-minute documentary established Franju as a formidable French filmmaker, and the slaughterhouse as a horror house within contemporary society. Here, a peaceful Paris suburb also yields an endless carnage of sheep, cattle, and horses, bludgeoned to feed meat-loving humans. Franju's work is viciously graphic and surrealistic, perfectly and simultaneously attractive and repulsive.

I think it is naive for people to think that industrial slaughter has made killing more humane or cruel than it was previously; in some ways it may have become even more "humane." Niether "Old MacDonald's farm" nor "humane" killing of animals ever existed ni the past. Both are romanticised images of a past that never was and never will be--just as is the "noble savage." Each are abject misrepresentations, revisionist apologetics, a denial of our own crimes.

Anyways, I think Franju's Le sang des bêtes (1949) may be one of the first documentaries on slaughterhouses and illustrates this point. I at least cannot watch the scene with the calves and not feel the perversity of such a relationship between humans and other creatures. Slaughter can never really be a compassionate and dignified act. At its worst, it is cruel, unnecessary, and arrogant. And at its best... well such only exists ni the abstract, an abstract whereby we intend only human character and experience, not the experience of the animal other who falls victim to our whims.

[Fastforward to 3:00, 7:50, 14:00 for the "best" of the worst examples. From 14:00 on, it's difficult not to be moved to anger andd/or tears or both. I think this video highlights the wrongness in killing naimals much better than Meet your Mea and similar videos that concentrate more on the suffering/welfare (it seems that death may even be a good thing in the case of those CAFO animals). Here we do not care how well the animals are treated before, we are regardlessly disgusted by the disloyalty and arrogance inherit within slaughter]

Mascots: Representation and the Trivialization of Violence

In Thinking Animals, human ecologist, Paul Shepard, argues that animals are core compenents of human cognitive development following Claude Levi-Strauss's famous words, "animals are good to think." Shepard points to the affluence of animal symbology throughout cultures, even within those societies, such as the United States, which is often said to be alienated from nature. While many people find the use of such symbols romantic, spiritual, empowering, closer to nature, etc. often these symbols occlude the historical and representational violence done to particular animals belonging to such categories such as "bear," "bull," "tiger," etc.

To understand this, let's first take a look at how sports mascots appropriate other people's cultures and trivialize the genocide of those people. There has been much controversy over the use of Amerindian mascots, particularly the "Fighting Illini," "The Fighting Sioux," "the Seminoles," the "Cleveland Indians," the "Boston Redskins," etc.

Representation, Appropriation, & The Logic of Genocide
Caricatures can sometimes be very fun and even have a prodound truth to their simplicity--as is evident in the best politicla cartoons--, however they can also trivialize and occlude actual violence. According to Wikipedia, a caricature "exaggerates or distorts the essence of a person or thing to create an easily identifiable visual likeness." In other words, caricatures are representations that signify a "truth" that is truer than truth (the presence of the actual person/group being depicted) itself through distortion. However, these caricatures of Amerindians do not only function as stereotypes, they also appropriate and signify the logic of genocide. In "Heteropatriarchy and the Three Pillars of White Supremacy," Andrea Smith argues that the

[logic of genocide] holds that indigenous people must dissapear...non-native people then become the rightful inheritors of all that was indigenous--land resources, indigenous spirituality, or culture... why would non-Native people need to play Indian--which often includes acts of spiritual appropriation and land theft--if they thought Indians were alive and still capable of being Indian themselves.

Likewise, Brenda Farnell notes that the passionate supporters of such mascots "defend a "White public space" in which any contemporary NativeAmerican presence is positioned as disorderly." Of course, such a White public space can only exist by exlcuding Amerindians, who are majorly opposed to such symbols, from the public shere. As Charles Springwood explains, White people claim "Indianness" "not to realign themselves psychically or sympathetically withNative Americans but rather to obscure, if not dissolve, Native voices." "Demolishing the mascot slot," argues Pauline Strong, "is a prerequisite for full cultural recognition and participatory citizenship for Native Americans."

Because the appropriation and genocide of Amerindians in American culture is a historical "tradition," it is oftena ccepted as "natural" and or valuable as such colonialism is itself proudly part of the American narrative/identity. However, when European people who survived genocide are used as sports mascots, the perversity of such exploitation/appropriation becomes all the more apparent. Take for example the Dutch soccer team the Ajax Juden, or Jews. Lisa @ Sociological Images notes

This brings up some interesting issues about the appropriation of cultural symbols...Critics of American Indian mascots often ask questions along the lines of “What would happen if a team called itself the Fighting Jews?”... but it’s always presented as an unimaginable, completely hypothetical situation. And yet it turns out not to be so hypothetical after all

Just as it is difficult for many Americans to give up their supposed-entitlement to their tradition of characterizing Amerindians so it is the same for Ajax fans. According to a New York Times article "forcing the fans to change their behavior was a daunting task... because it has become part of their identity."

Ajax fans are proud of their "Jewish Club," eventhough they themselves know or care little about Jewish affairs and culture. They adorn themselves with Star of David tatoos and wave Israeli flags (which is itself unessential to Judaism). Meanwhile, their opponents will adorn themselves with swastikas, calling themselves the SS and shout anti-semitic rhetoric such as "we're hunting Jews," "death to the Jews," "Ajax to the gas chamber."

during a game against a German team late last year, a group of Ajax supporters displayed a banner that read “Jews take revenge for ‘40-’45,”

Ssssssssssssssssssssssssss… (the hissing sound of gas)
We’re hunting the Jews!
There is the Ajax train to Auschwitz!
Sieg! Sieg! Sieg! (German for ‘victory’, yelled while performing the Hitler’s Salute)

While such rhetoric may seem more obscene to Americans than rhetoric surrounding Amerindian mascots--painting them as savages--, it is not so different from the "cowboy and indian" games/themes affluent today. In both cases, the "logic of genocide" is in action in which both groups "must always be dissapearing;" both are treated as history despite the oppression of both groups today; both trivialize the very real violence; both stereotype and reduce.

Animal Symbols: Anthropocentrism and the Rhetoric of Genocide
There seems to be a formula for going about token-fying an entire group of individuals as a symbol. First, one must recognise that group as an Other--without doing so, one cannot objectify. If one did belong to that group, the mascot would not be so much a symbol as a marker of one's own identiy, one would be the subject of one's own discourse, thus subjectivity would be rretained. This requires then, secondly, that the Other must be made into an object through the denial/ignorance of their subjectivity--they have no right to signify themselves. Third, the Other preferaly ought to dissapear so that one has the absolute authority to objectify them, as their would be no other subjectivity to challenge such a representation. Further, through their dissapearance, the symbol takes on more truth as it is "alive," the last survivor of the group.

Finally, the objectified, extinguished Other is celebrated. We celebrate everything it stands for not it in and of itself; we hold romanticized views of it an mourn the past, a presense in which we terminated. We love these mascots/symbols because they fit within a romantic narrative about our past orpossibilities that could have been; we relive the past (or rather, a truncated history) by cheerishing these icons and "eat the other" as bell hooks would say. We appropriate that otherness and assimilate it into our own self-project with little if any recognition of the full otherness of those beings. The same process occurs within the ecocide of developers, when, once the habitat is cleared, the developers name the property after the community hthey wiped out: Park Ridge, Redwood falls, etc.

This brings us back to the question of animal representation and symbology. Animals in art and stories tend to be treated as props and symbols rather than characters themselves (for instance, in a creative writing seminar I was told that choosing the right prop for a story is essential and that if a cat doesn't work out, substitute n a dog). In another post at Sociological Images, Lisa explains how, like animals, women are often always representing something for men as allegorical figures:

Male figures appear in these paintings too, but almost always as gods or Biblical figures, people with names. Men are characters, women are symbols...Is it any surprise that women’s bodies are treated as a public concern? The entire culture is accustomed to seeing them used as metonymies for our highest (and lowest) values. The long historical pedigree of anti-woman sentiment means that the fact that women’s bodies contain women’s minds has always been elided, in favor of metaphorical elevation or degradation. We always have to stand for something, and what we stand for is everyone’s business... This is why objectification isn’t just the province of misogynists, by the way. Often you’ll hear Nice Guys protest that they don’t objectify women — no, they worship them! So instead of just being sexual receptacles, women stand for all that is good and beautiful in the world. (my emphasis)

Though animal others are in a sense subjects, they (mostly) are not capable of self-representation through language–at least not to humans. As such, they have often been de-particularized and objectified into tokens for human virtues and vices (much like women’s bodies have). I’ve been wondering whether the Bears and the Bulls (among other animal-named sports teams) are similarly "wrong" as the Red Skins, eventhough they may not offend "animals" themselves. Both de-subjectify and stereotype the category of beings represented.

Such de-subjectification, I think, rationalizes their literal and figural disappearance as equals (whether through genocide, eviction, or cultural marginalization). And of course, Amerindians, women, and animal others don’t produce and distribute these images–they are not in control of their own signification. Rather, the privileged construct and consume these images in a dominating way as discussed by bell hooks in “Eating the Other.”

One objection may be that "animals" are more biologically determined, so they do not vary as much as humans, and thus that such stereotpes about species is justified. I would argue, however, that is stipulated in always already thinking about animals as categories rather than singularities. similarly, just because "animals" may not themselves be subjects the tokenfying gaze's presupossition tiself may be violent, though it does not de-subjectify. For instance, say Amerinidians of jews were no longer in existence; would these macots be honoring them in any true way, or ought we still be disturbed by their token-fied representations of those people, a trace of colonial genocide? I'd say the latter.

Thoughts?

Shrinking Animals

While humans have in the past deliberately bred animals (think "toy" dogs and cattle) to be small, so have humans incidentally "selected" for smaller animals through their eating habits. It is a well known and still contested theory that our ancestors wiped out the mammoth megafauna during the end of the last ice age, just prior to the Neolithic period, but it is less well known that humans though "over-fishing" and sports hunting are modifying gene pools where the smalle rand younger survive.

Earlier this year, Wired magazine featured an article on the phenomenon by which human hunters "genetically shrink their prey" and the potential consequences of such shrinking are.

Size is really, really important...If there is one [species] that has changed dramatically in size, its relationship to natural predators could be lost...As a consequence of targeting large adults, we're targeting reproductive age adults, so those that [reproduce younger] have an evolutionary advantage... The problem is that these younger mothers don't produce as many babies, which could have major impacts on how humans estimate fishery population and potential... [Finally], even if you could stop hunters and fishermen from pressuring the population, genetically altered animals would have to re-evolve their previous phenotypes, or forms.

Just recently, scientists have confirmed that not only human hunting has been influencing the size of animals, but human climate change as well. As has long been observed (at least in mammals), there is a negative correlation between size and temperature. US News reports that

As Earth's climate continues to warm, life might become the province of the small... Two such ecological changes [resulting from climate change] that have been noted and predicted are [1] the shift of species' ranges to higher altitudes and latitudes to keep within their temperature comfort zones and [2] the shift in the timing of key events in the life cycle of organisms... A third change can now be added to that list: [3] As temperatures rise, organisms get smaller, from the , from the scale of whole communities down to the individual.

Meat Water... wtf, mate?

No... this is not a joke.

Meat Water--the High Efficiency Survival Beverage--is quite real and infinitely more disturbing. There is so much wrong with this product I don't even know where to start.

Perhaps it is the liquifying of the corpses of animals into a cold and refreshing work-out beverage. Perhaps it is the advertisments' heavy machismo which promote the product as having/giving you "more balls." (are they referring to the balls of the (male) consumer or the liquified testees that he is drinking?).

Perhaps it is the fact the drink comes in flavor ranging from haggis to peking duck to numerous other "meats" which I have never heard of. Perhaps it is the idea that "meatwater" is more nutritious than tap water, that one can eat a full "english breakfast" in a bottle of liquid--a classic example of nutritionism.

Or perhaps it is the marketing of male identity or the perpetuation of the "High efficiency" philosophy of modernity can befriend the viril romantic's obsession with "the will to power."

Got Sexism?: The Absence of Female Agency

What we learn from Gotmilk.com is that men do things with their bodies and women have things done to theirs; men produce things, women have things produced for them.

Slav, Igor and Sergie work their muscles to solve a puzzle; Mr. Osseous works the assembly line saving a valuable product, and Chuck assembles cartons for shipment. A nameless steer even drives the milk truck. On the other hand, Miss Dowdy needs to be *given* a makeover by blasting from a cannon into a pool of milk filled by the truck driver and Mother Hen needs your help because she is "tense and irritable" from her PMS. While the male animals are productive laborers, the female animals are either ditsy blonds or cruel old hens not worthy of the same honor, but still customers who need milk.

While the male animals perform all the labor in the games, the literal labor of female cows giving birth in order to begin lactating as well as the exploitation of their bodies' labor in producing all of the milk is completely absent. It is as Joan Dunayer writes in Animal Equality: within the dairy industry, "Milking is done to her rather than by her."

The political-economy of milk consumption (the hundred million dollar ad campaigns, the hundreds of celebrity spokepersons, the federal subsidization, the bias within school lunch programs and cafeterias, the killing of dairy cows who don't produce enough milk or are too expensive to feed, the veal industry, etc.) becomes absent and (cow's) milk becomes sold as "Nature's perfect food" (though goats milk is much more similar to human milk) eventhough few people in the world ever drank or needed "fresh," unsoured milk before the Industrial Revolution.

The Power of Meat, a Matter of Taste

Is the value of power just a matter of taste?

Last year, China Daily reported on an article publshed in the Journal of Consumer Research titled "The Interactive Effect of Cultural Symbols and Human Values on Taste Evaluation."

While a big, juicy steak may indeed be culinary nirvana for many, your taste for beef could be based in part on expectation rather than reality...

On the assumption that meat is associated with social power in some peoples' minds, researchers rated study participants on what they call a Social Power Value Endorsement measure, to determine their preferences for meat and their cultural perceptions of it. Participants were then told they would taste either a beef sausage roll or a vegetarian roll...

"Participants who ate the vegetarian alternative did not rate the taste and aroma less favorably than those who ate the beef product...what influenced taste evaluation was what they thought they had eaten and whether that food symbolized values that they personally supported."

The authors conclude that taste is neither purely objective nor radically subjective, but culturally constituted.

This research should not be surprising to any vegan who has experienced first hand the cynisism of certain omnivorous humans when invited to try vegetarian food as well as the "I can't believe it's vegan" rsponses after they unknowingly consume something made with vegan intent.

As French Sociologist, Pierre Bourdieu, writes in his groundbreaking work Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste," taste is reproduced and policed through consumption used to mark distinctions in social statusin order to protect andmaintain boundaries of identity. "Meat" is sometimes argued to be universally preferenced over plant-based foods, and while their may be some evolutionary/nutritional truth to such claims, scholars have noted that such a prefernce is far from "natural" (i.e. objective and inevitable).

Though Bourdieu does not discuss food preferences in much legnth, his thesis about taste and consumption reflecting social values and identities, often centering around the tastes of the "higher" classes, is very relevant to understanding "meat." For instance, Carol Adams (1990) in The Sexual Politics of Meat discusses how meat signifies male privilege as meat is almost always disproportionately distributed to men cross-culturally. Similarly, Nick Fiddes (1991) in Meat: A Natural Symbol are es that meat within the modern Western tradition has symbolized the domination and/or control over "nature," Man's superiority to all others. prior to the present study, Julia Twigg (1983) in "Vegetarianism and the Meaning of Meat" had all ready studied the associations between meat and power held by both those who preffered and abstained from consuming animal flesh.

The power of meat as a symbol of class and gender prestige has even been demonstrated in the Chilean food riot just over a century ago: Banjamin Orlove argues in "Meat and Stregnth: The Moral Economy of the Chilean Food Riot" that unlike previous food riots, this one wasnot a matter of lack of "food," but lack of red meat which was a food consumed to distinguish the nomadic peasants from secure blue collar working men. Finally, meat can be seen as a symbol of national and cultural superiority and a rationalization and means of colonization and imperilaism. As food historian Rachel Laudan argues in her conference paper "Power Cuisines, Dietary Determinism and Nutritional Crisis: The Origins of the Globalization of the Western Diet," meat is the pinnacle of a "power cuisine" in modern times, which has been globalized through trade and conquest.

Of course, much of our taste for power comes neither from innate taste nor from symbolic culture, but from the political economy/ecology of our society. Thus, we can partially explain how American taste's have "evolved" from pork to beef to chicken. Though that's not to deny the nutritionism of the time does not also dictate preference (take a look at the doubleling of chciekn consumption from the 1970s to the 1990s based on the recommendations to eat "lean meat").

Do Feral Children have Language, Rights?

In May, the BBC reported on a Siberian child 'raised by dogs.' According to the article:

Russian officials have taken a five-year-old Siberian girl into care, saying that... "For five years, the girl was 'brought up' by several dogs and cats and had never been outside"... The police said the girl had managed to master "animal language only", but seemed able to understand Russian.

Do many Siberians believe "animals" can speak a "language?" Many US linguists and philosophers would call such beliefs naive. And what is "animal language?" Is there a universal language all (nonhuman) animals are thought to share? Doesn't that suggest a break between humans and animals at the same time a continuity exits (i.e. language)?

In an essay "Feral Selves and Familiar Others," Peter Steeves briefly speculates that the ability of feral children to be socialized as a member of a different species suggests that in some ways many dogs are able to be sociallized into humans--a becoming-human if you will--(as are some other "pets" like monkeys).

One must wonder whether a feral child is entitled to less rights than a human socialized child because he is "only an animal." Or do we admit the (racist) importance of genetic heritage to moral considerability? At the very least, ought we not morally consider all animals who can potentially be socialized as humans just as we do with infants?

Sexuality = Animality = Mortality?

Obviously, many snakes and spiders are highly venomous and potentially could give humans fatal bites. To what extent are these fears evolutionary and cultural constructs?

Is it possible that the fear of these particular animals has been heightened by not only their cultural construction but also the heigtened fear of death in many modern/industrial Western cultures?

A little while back, lisa @ Sociological Images made a post on the use of arachnids and spiders in safer sex PSAs to represent sexually transmitted infections.Interestingly, the snake--a mythologically feminine animal--here is associated with men (for obvious reasons). The spider, of course, is often associated with women (think about the Greek myth of the spider as well as other Spider woman myths around the world) as well as the film noir notion of the black widow who lures in men with her sexuality and murders them.

While the spider is an acknowledgement of female sexual agency, the symbolism represents it in a fatal way in which the archetypes of womb and tomb are resurrected in our conciousnesses. Women's sexuality (at least in many Western cultures) has thus been associated not only with procreation but also with the destruction of life--as is "the animal" or animality. Thus, the intersections between sexuality, women, animality, and mortality.

Are these intersections with mortality partially responsible for the loathing of women, sexuality, and animality in Western history?


ASLO: See more STI PSAs from Europe and the linking of sexuality to (male/phallic) violence: 1, 2

Meat Hats, More Disgusting than Leather Hats?

We've all seen hats made out of leather (the skin of animals), but rarely do we see hats anymore made out of meat (the muscles and fat of animals).

Here's an excerpt from a webpage on the history of meat hats:

The expression “I’ll eat my hat” traces back as far as the 19th century, usually credited to Abraham Lincoln in reference to one of his trademark stovepipe hats, which were often made of tenderloin...The popularity of meat hats began to fade in the twentieth century, especially during the depression of the 1930’s. Indeed, few people had the luxury of wearing meat on their heads, needing instead to feed their families with it.

The hightened disgust is not simply the idea of matter being out of place; afterall, chocolate and vegetable clothing doesn't disgust us. So why is meat more disgusting to wear than leather?

Does meat make the death and fleshines of the animal more visible and disturbing? Or does it have to do with meat supposed to being "inside" (covered by skin or consumed) while leather is supposed to be adorned on the "outside" (hence the revulsion some people have toward eating leather)? Or is there an evolutionary reason: we're grossed out because spolied meat carries disease?

Welcome to Zoophobia

Welcome to zoophobia!

Zoophobia is normally defined as the abnormal fear of animals, but it is my belief that the fear of "the animal" (or "animality") is actually the norm in modern and Western cultures. Bear with me (and my cheesy puns) as I document and deconstruct the normativity of zoophobia within online media.

Love,
zoo