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

Abstract

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.

Alimentary Dignity: Defining a Decent Meal in Post‐Soviet Cuban Household Cooking

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“…Richard Martin and David Trigger () questioned the distinction between indigenous and introduced species, Lyle Fearnley () that between domesticated and wild birds. Emily Yates‐Doerr () called into question definitions of meat. In highland Guatemala, she said, meat was defined less by its animal source than by its taste and texture, the way it was cooked, and how it was served.…”

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