An interdisciplinary look at the rise of the slaughterhouse in nineteenth-century Europe and the Americas
Over the course of the nineteenth century, factory slaughterhouses replaced the hand-slaughter of livestock by individual butchers, who often performed this task in back rooms, letting blood run through streets. A wholly modern invention, the centralized municipal slaughterhouse was a political response to the public’s increasing lack of tolerance for “dirty” butchering practices, corresponding to changing norms of social hygiene and fear of meat-borne disease. The slaughterhouse, in Europe and the Americas, rationalized animal slaughter according to capitalist imperatives. What is lost and what is gained when meat becomes a commodity? What do the sites of animal slaughter reveal about our relationship to animals and nature? Essays by the best international scholars come together in this cutting-edge interdisciplinary volume to examine the cultural significance of the slaughterhouse and its impact on modernity.
Contributors include: Dorothee Brantz, Kyri Claflin, Jared Day, Roger Horowitz, Lindgren Johnson, Ian MacLachlan, Christopher Otter, Dominic Pacyga, Richard Perren, Jeffrey Pilcher, and Sydney Watts.
“This collection presents a cross-cultural and cross-disciplinary exploration of the emergence of industrialized animal slaughter, a disturbing and evocative subject that also reveals a great deal about less-hidden aspects of modern societies.”—Harriet Ritvo, Arthur J. Conner Professor of History, MIT
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PAULA YOUNG LEE teaches Art and Architectural History at Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas, and is the author of a number of scholarly articles.
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