1 - Fresh and Frozen Chicken in Mumbai: Texture and Taste; Profit and Presence; Theory and Subjectivity

The anthropology of industrial meat production and consumption turns around revelation and naturalisation as tropes of scholarly imagination, ethical mobilisation, and theoretical reflection. With revelation, ethnographers of industrial farming and slaughter reveal to audiences’ violent practices ordinarily hidden from view. Yet, in Mumbai live chickens are transported daily to Muslim dominated inner-city meat markets and butcher stores for slaughter according to customer request. Both Muslim and Hindu ritual practice recognise the relation between meat consumption and human-animal violence. The sensory experience of meat consumption at inner-city markets does not necessary elicit disgust and offense. And there is recognition by Muslim butchers of the intimacy between plans for urban modernisation, the extension of industrial forms of production and consumption in urban life, and the Hindu Right wing politics of anti-Muslim marginalisation. This paper thus presents an ethnography of inner-city butcher shops as sites of contestation, competition and ethical recognition between Muslim butchers, meat consumers, and industrial producers over the form, place, quality, and moral sensibilities of chicken production and consumption. In Mumbai an other-than-liberal ethics of the senses, debt, trust, and profit contests the reasonability, rationality, and inevitability of liberal and neoliberal morality and market practice.