Does meat come from animals? A multispecies approach to classification and belonging in highland Guatemala

Bibliographic Data

ID2260652
AuthorsEmily Yates‐doerr (0000-0002-0895-7136, Department of Anthropology University of Amsterdam P.O. Box 1561, 1001 NE Amsterdam The Netherlands, corresponding author)
Year2015
Volume42
Issue2
Pages309-323
Publication date2015-05-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueAmerican Ethnologist (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0094-0496 • E-ISSN: 1548-1425
PublisherWiley (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1111/amet.12132
OpenAlexW1608503611
LanguageEN
Citations received32
References cited59

In the Guatemalan highlands, distinctions between human and animal are often irrelevant to the treatment of an object as meat. I draw from my ethnographic fieldwork on eating practices in that region to suggest that if the recent social science turn to species is to be a departure from the limitations of Euro-American humanism, it must take species not as a genealogically mappable identity but as a coherence situated amid ever-transforming divisions and connections. Stable distinctions between human and other species are precisely what deserve to be called into question. The power of multispecies scholarship thus lies not in how it "centers the animal" but in its challenge to conventional taxonomic formulations of classification and belonging. That meat takes various, situated forms has implications for multicultural politics as well as anthropological method and inquiry

Aesthetics · Coherence (philosophical gambling strategy · Ethnography · Ethnology · Geography · Humanism · Identity (music · Linguistics · Multiculturalism · Object (grammar · Political science · Politics · Power (physics · Scholarship · Situated · Sociology · Anthropological Studies and Insights · Anthropology · Computer Science · Culinary Culture and Tourism · Geographies of human-animal interactions

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