Attuning with SoundSonic Methodologies for More-Than-Human Geographies: the Politics of Listening in a Traditional Slaughterhouse in the UK |
Feeling with ImagesOn “Finishing”: A Visual Memoir of Care and Death on an Irish Cattle Farm |
Sound is an established parameter in animal welfare studies. A sonic ethnographic study of a traditional slaughterhouse in south-west England reveals how animal welfare, conceived as ‘respect for the animal’ at slaughter, is based on sonically attuned practices. Such sonic engagement distinguishes the traditional slaughterhouse from industrial operations and works to dispel the stigma of killing for the workers. A sonic approach centers the more-than-human methodologically whilst also revealing the politics of listening in the slaughterhouse.
Mc Loughlin, E. (2023). Sonic methodologies for more-than-human geographies: the politics of listening in a traditional slaughterhouse in the UK. cultural geographies, 30(4), 539-553. Weaving Worlds OtherwisePorcine WordsI have been studying slaughterhouses for the last seven years, and I still remember the first time I stood in the chill of the kill floor of a cattle slaughterhouse as the saws screamed, the machines thudded, and the workers roared to one another above the din. I felt exfoliated—compelled to return, to document, and to transform (Dave 2014; Mc Loughlin 2019).
María Elena García (2019) describes the tragedy of multispecies ethnography as the ethnographer’s experience of shame and grief in negotiating the contradiction of doing something by doing nothing. Indeed, the landscape that the anthropologist must negotiate as both inside and outside is fraught with their own anxieties of exploitation and objectification. Yet, we persist. This poem reflects on the conflictual tension of multispecies ethnography that is brought into sharp relief in an industrial pig slaughterhouse where I conducted extensive ethnographic research. I continued to struggle with the vain hope of multispecies ethnography in the face of industrial-scale pork production, where up to 100,000 pigs are killed a week. In confronting the powerlessness of the pig, the powerlessness of the observer is unearthed and brought into question. Mc Loughlin, E. (2021). Porcine Words: Making Words of Worlds and the Tragedy of Multispecies Ethnography. Anthropology and Humanism. |
Through attuning to emotionally fraught multispecies relations on the farm, inflected as they are with care and contradiction, we come to see and feel for the cattle as John does, possibly more so, by the time they are sent to slaughter, bound as they are in a system rooted in the cultivation of the dispossessed.
Mc Loughlin, E., & Casey, J. (2022). On “Finishing” A Visual Memoir of Care and Death on an Irish Cattle Farm. Visual Anthropology Review, 38(1), 34-59. Sensing OtherwiseBeing Existed by Another through the SensoryThe ungrievable deaths of industrial pigs in slaughterhouse tours
This chapter examines the sensory experience of witnessing industrial death to demonstrate the productive and affective potential of the sensory in conceptualizing deathscapes. The sensory awakens us to the existence of the nonhuman other which, in an industrial slaughterhouse with incorporated transparency, is obscured from our awareness through the discursive marshalling of painless, ungrievable animal death. Through ethnographic moments from the slaughterhouse tours, I reveal how the pigs come into existence for guests in ways that disrupt the coherence and calculability of the discursive construction of industrial death, making witnesses of us in the deathscape of industrial slaughter. Mc Loughlin, E. (2023). Being existed by another through the sensory: The ungrievable deaths of industrial pigs in slaughterhouse tours. In New Perspectives on Urban Deathscapes (pp. 162-179). Edward Elgar Publishing. |