UC San Diego

This dissertation is an ethnography of the kill floor – the small concrete room where animals are killed and dismembered – in small U.S. slaughterhouses. From 2010-2014, I visited two dozen slaughterhouses and meat businesses, spending time with people and animals, asking questions, helping out, and trying to answer one overarching question: How is meaning made in practice?

To answer this question, I take three different analytic approaches: In the first section, I work as an anthropologist. I focus on the details of daily work in a slaughterhouse to understand how boundaries (between life and death, clean and dirty, inside and outside, animal and human) are made. Here I build on work in anthropology that seeks to understand the core frameworks that organize our cultural worlds. I argue that these core frameworks, and difference more broadly, are not fixed entities but are made through daily practice.

In the second section I focus on how bodies make meaning and become meaningful. I articulate a theory of embodied knowledge located not only in human bodies, but in animals, microbes, body parts and tissues. I contribute to interdisciplinary conversations on how cognition is distributed, and to feminist theories of how bodies come to matter.

In the third section, my analysis is sociological. I focus on shared cultural meanings, exploring how human relationships, feelings and actions carve out social worlds. I gather stories on and off the kill floor to explore how lives, livelihoods, and worlds are made in practice. I argue that seemingly intractable differences across cultural communities are located in the same core urges. Our hopes and fears for the future congeal in the present as political commitments.

Over the course of the project, I offer a novel analysis of the nature of difference, the nature of knowledge, and the nature of socio-political worlds. I argue that difference, knowledge, and the worlds we live in are all made through daily practice, and through interactions between humans, non-humans and things. Meaning is made through bodies, movement, action, interaction, cuts, marks, repetition, and agreement.