Voice with Every Bite

Abstract

Through an examination of vegetarians' practical boundary-work, this paper not only highlights the significance of people's dietary identity but also accounts for how the triadic relationship among social groups complicates people's boundary-work. This paper illuminates vegetarians' strategies for managing cultural membership and identity in a triadic group relationship—namely, meat-eaters, vegetarians and vegans. In the triadic group constellation, I distinguish three types of hierarchical boundary-work from nonhierarchical boundary-work. Unlike non-hierarchical boundary-work, which merely marks and reproduces social differences, hierarchical boundary-work represents and reproduces unequal social categorizations. Focusing on the enactment of dietary identity, I argue that vegetarians conduct a type of hierarchical boundary-work to represent their selfidentification as “the second best” in the triadic constellation. I detail four ways in which vegetarians conduct the-second-best boundary-work ; moreover, I also show that hierarchical boundary-work in general and the-second-best boundary-work in particular can be used to examine the management, maintenance and reproduction of selfidentification in various social communities.

Keywords:

• vegetarianism
• dietary identity
• food habits
• hierarchical boundary-work
• triadic group relationship

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Hsin-Yi Yeh

Hsin-Yi Yeh is a PhD candidate in the Sociology Department at Rutgers University. She is interested in cultural sociology, cognitive sociology, political sociology, social movement and collective memory. Department of Sociology, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ, USA ([email protected]).