Global Halal: Meat, Money, and Religion

Abstract

Abstract:The following article deconstructs (and demystifies) Halal with a view to unraveling how the religious, racial, economic, and ethico-political are articulated in and around material technologies of meat production and bodily techniques of religious consumption/the consumption of religion. It, thus, attempts to rethink the nexus of food, politics, and contesting visions of the sacred and the profane, from within the folds of the global and global Islam. Halal emerges as a terrain replete with paradigmatic juridical and political questions about the impasses of social and culinary conviviality and cosmopolitanism. Although there is certainly nothing new about religious taboos on food on the body, Halal is far from being a personal or strictly communal set of strictures and practices. On the contrary, global Halal emerges as a new agonistic field typified by charged debates concerning the place of secularism, recognition, and "food diversity" in the global marketplace. This paper offers a cartography, both phenomenological and social scientific, of this multi-tiered site of meat, power, and belief.

Meat traditions. The co-evolution of humans and meat

“…The usual focus is on dominant monotheistic religions (e.g., Mukherjee, 2014), but the concept is equally valid for other, less-studied or hybrid belief systems (Luzar et al, 2012;Nam, Jo, & Lee, 2010;Seleshe et al, 2014). We limit ourselves here to a brief discussion of some aspects of the history of Christianity, which has had a confounding relationship with meat traditions.…”

Malaysian Accommodation Providers’ Understanding of Halal Hospitality

“…Despite differences in acceptance of stunning and machine slaughter among Muslim societies, slaughtering without stunning is considered cruel by some animal rights activists. These activists often suggest halal slaughtering is cruel (Mukherjee, 2014).…”

Killing Animals for Food: How Science, Religion and Technologies Affect the Public Debate About Religious Slaughter

“…The number of animals slaughtered without stunning is not systematically recorded in most countries in Europe and the Halal certification can be granted to meat obtained from both stunned or non-stunned animals, depending on the certifying body standard (see Lever and Miele 2012 for a discussion about this issue). These trends have raised significant concerns about the welfare of farm animals at the time of killing and several Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) have asked for the ban of religious slaughter without stunning in the UK, in Spain and other European countries (Mukherjee 2014;White 2014;Miele and Rucinska 2015;Miele and Parisi 2001). A number of countries in Europe banned religious slaughter without stunning in the 1930s or earlier (Norway, Iceland, Switzerland).…”