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ABSTRACT
Meat eating in India cannot be analysed simply as a marker of ritual impurity: the culinary experiences of South Indian Christians also indicate the importance of meat in forging positive identities. In this paper, I draw out some of the fine-grained distinctions made by my informants in relation to meat eating, which suggest that its consumption is shaped not only by caste and religion, but also in relation to gender, age, status and other personal considerations. Second, I attempt to situate these practices within wider contexts: the cross-cutting influences of national anti-cattle slaughter campaigns and reactions against them; a growing movement of environmentalists and food activists; and the economics of meat production, which are rapidly changing in relation to new farming methods and other ecological shifts.
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Notes
1. See, e.g. Béteille (Citation1996: 56–60), Marriott (Citation1968), and Mayer (Citation1960).
2. As early as the 1920s, the local municipality recorded the second highest number of Christians – 20,367 – within the district (Graefe Citation1925: 119).
3. See New Testament, Mark 5:1–17.
4. This story interestingly mirrors the logics employed against the consumption of both cattle, for Hindus, and donkeys, for Christians: all of them are used for transport, performing a noble service for human beings that must be repaid.
5. See, e.g. www.rediff.com/news/1999/jan/23oris.htm (accessed 8 September 2011).
6. See http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/south_asia/2945020.stm (accessed 8 September 2011).
7. For the full-text of the Act, see: http://ahfd.ap.nic.in/mcrhrd.htm (accessed on 8 September 2011).
8. At least in theory. Although people officially claimed not to eat the animals they reared, many privately admitted – away from interview contexts – that they did sometimes eat such meat, even though they felt that they should not do so.
11. Hindutva, or ‘Hinduness’ is a term first coined in a 1923 pamphlet authored by Savarkar (Citation1969), and subsequently appropriated by contemporary Hindu nationalists.
14. Personal correspondence with Jacqueline Bonney, who ran an NGO in the area at the time. Another NGO that she worked for subsequently had started marketing broiler chickens in the 1970s at the same time as the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations was promoting broiler chicken farming in India as a good source of cheap protein for the growing population.
16. Despite the phonetic similarity, the chikungunya virus is unrelated to chickens (Lahariya & Pradhan Citation2006). However, many of my informants thought the disease came from chickens and was spread by them.