Blanchette, A. (2018) Industrial Meat Production

AN47CH12_Blanchette ARI 18 September 2018 8:56
Annual Review of Anthropology
Industrial Meat Production

Alex Blanchette
Department of Anthropology, Tufts University, Medford, Massachusetts 02155, USA;
email: alex.blanchette@tufts.edu
Annu. Rev. Anthropol. 2018.47:185-199. Downloaded from www.annualreviews.org
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Annu. Rev. Anthropol. 2018. 47:185–99 Keywords

The Annual Review of Anthropology is online at meat, animals, capitalism, labor, postindustrial, rural
anthro.annualreviews.org
https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-anthro-102317- Abstract
050206
This review surveys the past 30 years of the anthropology of corporate
Copyright c 2018 by Annual Reviews. animal agribusiness, analyzing how various themes embedded in the words
All rights reserved
of the article’s title—industrial, meat, and production—have been taken up
This article is part of a special theme on Food. by ethnographers of confinement farms and mechanized slaughterhouses.
For a list of other articles in this theme, see
http://www.annualreviews.org/doi/full/10.1146/ In so doing, it describes how the literature finds the animal life-and-death
annurev-an-47-themes cycle underlying modern meat to be a hybrid and uneven mixture of indus-
trialisms both old and emerging, at once violent and caring, far-reaching yet
incomplete. The review further examines the numerous and distinct ways
that scholars have suggested that industrial meat production is an exceptional
kind of industrialism: one that requires analytics, ethics, forms of critique,
and modes of attention that differ from those developed by studies of other
sites of manufacturing.
185
STRANGE INDUSTRIALISMS
In 2016, the Working Group on the Anthropocene, a team of geologists tasked with determining
whether the planet has entered a new epoch defined by traces of human activity, officially made an
affirmative recommendation to the International Geological Congress (Carrington 2016). Their
two parameters for declaring the change are based on whether a signal marking a break from
the Holocene is detectable across most of the planet and whether it will remain identifiable
in sedimentary layers by future geologists. One unsettled debate is which signal is likely to find
clearest expression in the stratigraphic record. Sorting these signals to locate a precise date marking
the point of transformation is challenging because most emerge together around the 1950s, and
each is the outcome of much longer processes of industrial development. Some of the signals
under consideration include artifacts of industrial activity such as nuclear radioactive elements,
slow-decomposing plastics, or soil-polluting agricultural fertilizers.
However, the Working Group is also investigating a more peculiar signal: the enlarged skeleton
of the post-WWII chicken. Geologists have found that chicken skeletons—which, at least relative
to those of pigs and cows, are less frequently rendered into fertilizers and bone meals for pet food
in slaughterhouses—are accumulating in the fossil record under landfills and streets across much
of the planet (Carrington 2016). Between 1935 and 1995, the time it took to raise a mature chicken
decreased by some 60%, and yet the average size of each grown bird swelled by a stunning 65%
(Boyd 2001, pp. 637–38). The domestic chicken was transformed from an egg-laying farm animal
kept in small sheds for rural subsistence needs—one rarely served on urban dinner plates—into
the planet’s most populous species of bird (Striffler 2005, Squier 2010, Carrington 2016). In 1928,
the average American ate half a pound of chicken per year, and in 1945 this number climbed
to five pounds. Consumption soared to 70 pounds by 1995 (Boyd & Watts 1997). Indeed, as
fewer companies have come to coordinate greater shares of global poultry markets since the 1980s
(Hendrickson et al. 2013; Leonard 2014, p. 233), it is perhaps insufficient even to say that “the
industrial chicken” as a generic model is being mass-fossilized. Rather, it is likely that the earth now
contains many billions of poultry skeletons whose shape and density disproportionately reflect the
proprietary genetics, feed rations, and capitalist strategies of specific agribusiness corporations such
as Tyson Foods or Pilgrim’s Pride. The stratigraphic record may be legible as a kind of branded
entity, reflecting a moment in time when a handful of corporations competed to monopolize the
raising and killing of a species (see also Lowry 2018).
This review’s project, however, is not to stake a claim about the ultimate signal, cause, or
meaning of planetary despoliation—that is not why I begin with the image of a poultrified earth.
Instead, the image resonates with the findings of scholars, who have traced the many distinct labor
processes and industrial epochs that have been invisibly conjoined within the flesh and bones of
farm animals to generate such a profusion of bones. Over the past 30 years, ethnographers have
documented the incessant surge in the speed of industrial slaughterhouses, with their concomitant
increase in both the quantities of animal carcasses they generate and the human workers’ bodies that
they reshape through repetitive motion injuries (Fink 1998, Ribas 2016). They have analyzed the
breeding labs, universities, and barns that have swollen the average chicken’s body. These are places
where qualitative dimensions of animal biology—ranging from hormones, to metabolic processes,
even to skeletal strength—have become newly subject to technoscientific alteration across the
twentieth century (Boyd 2001, Schrepfer & Scranton 2004, Clark 2012). Indeed, chicken wings
accumulating in the soil appear relatively benign when compared with scholars’ findings of how
traces of confined animals saturate environments—especially in terms of chemicals leaching from
their concentrated excrement—and manifest in noxious rural air quality (Thu & Durrenberger
1998), the acidity of local rain (Noske 1989), greenhouse gases (D.R. Winter, dissertation in
186 Blanchette
preparation, “Emerging Food Imaginaries: Meat and the Climate Change Question in Denmark”),
algal blooms in rivers (Schneider 2015), and unruly microbial communities (Blanchette 2015,
Wallace 2016).
The “industrial” in industrial meat production is a complicated object, and this review traces the
many industrialisms that anthropologists and their kin have excavated from the vacuum-packed,
sanitized steaks, chops, and legs in grocery stores. Empirical findings aside, the secondary reason
that I invoke the image of fossilized chickens is that they may force us to examine other strange
and unnoticed worlds that capitalism produces alongside its seemingly cost-efficient circulations
of commodities. That is, the sheer quantity of engineered death recorded in the strata of the
earth might push against habits of interpretation that draw us to describe the key meaning and
stakes of industrial workplaces as being rooted in abstract and universal economic analytics of
labor productivity, efficiency, and wealth creation. In this sense, trying to fathom the discarded
lives (and livelihoods) marked by those bones helps underline a basic (though often unstated)
premise that seems to unify otherwise divergent anthropologies of capitalist meat production: that
it constitutes an unusual—and unusually problematic—form of industrialism. Most studies have

been compelled to approach industrial meat as an exceptional kind of mass-produced commodity—
one that requires methods, ethics, modes of analysis, and political commitments distinct from
those we have inherited from the study of labor processes in more typical sites of industry such as
automobile or computer manufacture.
Defamiliarizing the industrial and the postindustrial has also recently become the subject of
broader inquiry in anthropology, cued to transformations in work and the planet as capitalism is
experienced in new ways. The project of industrialism was not just about making inanimate things,
some remind us, but also one of making people and places (Gramsci 2000, Muehlebach & Shoshan
2012, Walley 2013). Those aspirations and values continue to fuel affect and activity long after
industrial work itself disappears (Muehlebach 2011). In parallel, others refuse the break implied
by terms such as postindustrial. They argue that the present is better characterized as one of “late
industrialism” amid worn-out infrastructures and struggles to think outside dominant twentieth-
century paradigms despite a rapidly changing planet (Fortun 2012, Shapiro 2015). Moreover,
as efforts to maintain the built environment formed during high industrial periods wane, and
the effects of decades of industrial activity manifest ever more palpably within ecosystems, some
people—especially those in long marginalized communities—are becoming disproportionately
affected by ineradicable toxins that once promised security and plenitude (Masco 2006, Murphy
2017, Simmons 2017). At root, this writing poses the question of what it would mean to create
other worlds after industrialism—and asks to what degree that is possible when many habits,
environmental chemicals, household objects, and even animal natures are saturated with residues
of twentieth-century engineering. It suggests the need to reimagine the under-noticed forms
through which industrialism still lingers in ostensibly deindustrialized places and to foment ways
to live better within and against the industrial project in the first place.
My suggestion across this review is that the literature on meat production can contribute
to this line of inquiry, if only because it has consistently sought to problematize, defamiliarize,
and challenge industrial capitalism within the workplace itself. However, the literature differs
on how it approaches the industrial in industrial animal agribusiness. One important lineage,
concerned relatively more with the character of agrarian life and conditions of human labor,
frames these sites as hyperindustrial in terms of their vicious effects on bodies and environments.
It addresses how modern meat’s biological variability, corporate consolidation, and low profit
margins exacerbate industrial labor hierarchies of race, class, and gender (Striffler 2005, Stull
& Broadway 2013, Stuesse 2016). This lineage emphasizes how slaughterhouses appear to be
uniquely more factory-like than most other industrial factories in terms of their punishing pace
www.annualreviews.org • Industrial Meat Production 187

and discipline over working bodies—and, in turn, it has devised practices of ethnography to better
confront this violence. Another lineage traces animal biology as more than a recalcitrant site for
capital accumulation (Page 1997). This literature reveals the cultural and organizational processes
behind how muscle and fat become generic “meat” or the surprisingly complicated hidden work
of making animal bodies edible (Noske 1989, Vialles 1994, Pachirat 2011). Taking into analytical
consideration the object of production—living, dying, and consumed animals—has led researchers
to further suggest certain limits to approaching factory farming from an anthropocentric frame
of industrial labor struggle (Beldo 2017, Porcher 2017).
The first section describes how American anthropologists first became interested in these
topics amid new waves of rural industrialization (in the shadow of deindustrialization) and charts
the findings of studies that center on the lives of human workers and farmers in industrial systems.
The second section explores how some have figured meat as a distinct kind of “political commodity”
(Vialles 1994) and how the management of animal death requires attention to issues of biology and
violence more extensive than the extraction of surplus value from human actions. The third traces
how scholars are now beginning to rethink agencies and analytics within production processes
themselves, asking how recent publications complicate what it means to “make” a living animal
and its flesh. My concluding aim is not to synthesize these lineages of attention and concern—
allowing, instead, readers to imagine ways they could be put into dialogue—but rather to suggest
that these studies might collectively point to new ways of approaching and critiquing industrial
worksites otherwise deemed “normal.”
INDUSTRIAL
The Working Group’s discovery of chickens piling up over decades underlines the fact that
industrial meat production is older than popular culture tends to imagine. The industrial killing
of animals predates many iconic forms of industrialization. Henry Ford is said to have taken the
idea for the automobile assembly line from meatpacking disassembly lines that were first developed
in nineteenth-century Cincinnati (Giedeon 1948, Shukin 2009). The 1890s Chicago meatpackers’
refrigeration technologies for moving perishable meat are the germinal forms of modern fresh
food “cold chains” that structure the global food system (Cronon 1991, Friedberg 2009, Twilley
2012). The development of antibiotics and nutritional sciences of bodily growth are inseparable
from mid-twentieth-century experiments to realize efficient feeds for adding animal muscle (Boyd
2001, Finlay 2004, Landecker 2016). How capitalist societies raise and dispatch farm animals has
long affected the ways that humans work, eat, and live.
Anthropologists, in turn, have not tried to establish a single dividing line between industrial and
nonindustrial meat. The journalist Michael Pollan (2002) suggests that animals are what they eat:
Cows that are industrial consume rations of commodity corn rather than grasses from pastures.
Others pin the issue down to a matter of confinement, whether animals permanently live indoors in
human-determined artificial environments (Centner 2004). The scholarship has instead favored
relative definitions, which can include quantitative scale, specialization of growing and killing
facilities (Stull & Broadway 2013), organizational structure and degree of corporate control (Watts
2004), the degree of fossil fuel–driven technologies used over human labor (Thu & Durrenberger
1998), or the relative standardization of engineered animals (Blanchette 2019). Relative definitions
of industrial meat are important for a few reasons. First, they suggest that industrial capitalism is
not a completed epoch but an ongoing process: Meat is still being industrialized. Beef still relies on
open-air pastures before animals enter confined feedlots (Pollan 2002); scientists are still struggling
to further industrialize ovulation to extract larger litters from animals (Blanchette 2019). Second,
the use of relative definitions recognizes that there are many major industrial models in meat
188 Blanchette
production. Even in the United States alone, pork corporations have consequentially different
organizational structures for killing animals (Watts 2004, Ashwood et al. 2014). Moreover, as
industrial agribusiness shifts to new locales, important contributions are being written on cowboy
culture in the Brazilian rainforest (Hoelle 2015), manure politics in China (Schneider 2015),
zoonotic disease and imperialism in Indonesia (Lowe 2010), indigeneity and guinea pigs in Peru
(Garcı́a 2013), circulations of chickens between industrial and domestic economies in South Africa
(Cousins & Pentecost 2018), and poultry biosecurity in Vietnam (Porter 2013). These studies
depict facilities of distinct scale and structure, which intermingle differently with those regions’
own politics and histories of agriculture, such as keeping backyard birds and pigs.1 They illustrate
that there is no single autonomous industrial animality the world over (see Page 1997, Franklin
2007, Schneider 2016). Finally, the use of relative definitions recognizes that, at least from the
global centers of agribusiness, the exemplars of industrial meat are themselves transformations of
prior industrial animalities. Cargill’s beef is a result of many waves of industrial restructuring.
American anthropologists began urgently studying corporate meat in the wake of two pivotal
moments of rural reindustrialization in the United States.2 The first moment was Iowa Beef
Packers’ (IBP) move, during the 1960s, to take larger shares of profits by changing how meat is cut
in the slaughterhouse (Grey 1998, Schlosser 2001, Stull & Broadway 2013). Many may imagine
the slaughterhouse as a space of brutal exploitation on account of reading Upton Sinclair’s The
Jungle (1906), a semifictional exposé of the early Chicago packinghouses. But by 1960, at least,
strong unions ensured that meatpacking paid significantly more than the national manufacturing
average (Stull & Broadway 2013, p. 98). The IBP Revolution, as it became known, was based on
using automation technologies like conveyor belts to make workers debone and cut meat into
finer vacuum-packed portions in the slaughterhouse, rather than shipping intact sides of beef for
processing by butchers. This approach allowed IBP to speed the pace of work and increase profits
per cow, taking over the butchers’ trade by directly selling to grocery stores and decreasing the
cost of shipping by packing now-uniform portions into standardized boxes. It also limited the
company’s reliance on workers who were skilled with knives, by specializing each person on
the line into one slice or motion (Grey 1998). The 1980s saw union power diminished, wages in
meatpacking were slashed by almost half, and the model moved through the United States and
across other species (Grey 1998). By 2011, only four firms would process 82% of the 34,000,000
cows killed annually in the United States (Hendrickson et al. 2013).
This system may have cheapened the wages of individual laborers, but it nonetheless required
more people in its large packinghouses to cut deeper into animals. Much of the literature examines
transformations to rural communities and the labor process once meatpacking became dependent
on migrant labor (Griffiths 1993, Grey 1998). It also tells of industrialization through deindus-
trialization: Economically depressed rural communities who lost their manufacturing base in the
1980s were forced to bid for these companies’ presence using tax-increment financing and other
incentives. As some packinghouses now kill 20,000 pigs per day and require upwards of 2,000
workers—and were founded in isolated towns with populations under 10,000 people to avoid
1
This review focuses on the United States, the United Kingdom, and France because these forerunners of animal industrial-
ization host most book-length research. It should be kept in mind, however, that emerging research suggests industrial animal
production will unfold differently in distinct postcolonial, agrarian, political, and religious contexts. As China—which is the
world’s largest pork producer in terms of sheer quantity—undergoes rural industrialization, Schneider (2016) illustrates how
globally hegemonic norms of industrial meat may also be shifting.
2
For deeper histories, Horowitz (2006) and Skaggs (2000) detail transformations in the postwar period with some focus on
cows. Mizelle (2011), Coppin (2002), and Horwitz (1998) offer cultural histories of the pig, whereas Striffler (2005) and Stuesse
(2016) provide histories of the corporate chicken.

nuisance suits over stench—Stull & Broadway (2004, p. 63) document how agribusiness presence
overwhelms housing supply and social services such as schools, health care, and utilities. Stuesse
(2016) details corporations’ use of labor contractors and efforts to foment new patterns of migrant
recruitment, at once to cheapen wages, evade paying benefits, weaken union power, and contend
with vast annual turnover rates due to injury and monotony. In so doing, Stuesse demonstrates in
detail how the politics of race and borders is one of the central inputs undergirding the cheap Amer-
ican meat of today. Miraftab (2015) further describes fraught yet cosmopolitan transformations to
rural labor and life, traveling with migrants from Mexico and Togo, while theorizing forms of in-
equality, resilience, and place-making that have turned the rural Midwest into a “global heartland.”
The second key moment of reindustrialization was the rise of new forms of vertical integration
and corporate contracting, especially in the wake of Tyson Foods’ transformation of the poultry
industry in the 1950s and its spread across pork production in the 1980s (Boyd & Watts 1997,
Striffler 2005). For much of the twentieth century, farms and packinghouses existed as distinct
entities—independent farmers sold pigs to packers at a fluctuating market price. Contracting was
a low-risk way for corporations to take control of farms without having to assume the capital costs
of land and buildings (Rich 2003). A corporation that processes 5,000,000 pigs per year would
otherwise have to expend resources on hundreds of farm sites. The packing corporation supplies
young animals and antibiotic-laced feed rations, while the farmer supplies the land, buildings, and
labor in exchange for a contracted purchase price on the mature animals. Research has found that
these contracts often indebt farmers while paying little, resulting in low returns on labor for the
privilege of remaining on one’s farm land (Rich 2003, Leonard 2014). Often vast in size, these
corporate arrangements also cheapen prices and imperil the ability of smaller independent farmers
to make a living (Thu & Durrenberger 1998). Contracts have allowed corporations to “vertically
integrate” the process—control, coordinate, and extract profits from more stages of life and death
(Stull & Broadway 2013); they have also enabled major meatpackers to dictate uniform production
procedures using confinement barns that densely concentrate animal life, pharmaceuticals, and
feed, while moving hog farming away from traditional Midwest enclaves and into North Carolina,
the Dakotas, Texas, Utah, and Manitoba (Rich 2003, Bonanno & Constance 2006).3 In turn,
uniform animal bodies spur the growth of processing rates within slaughterhouses as a corporation
can be assured that pigs weigh near 285 pounds, enabling further automation and standardization
of workers’ motions (Blanchette 2019). Today, the vast majority of American pigs and chickens—in
the upper 90%—are killed in corporate slaughterhouses at a rate of one every few seconds.
Vertical integration had the opposite effect of boxed beef in that it has cleared human bodies
(in this case, through the dispossession of landed farmers) out of the countryside. Anthropologists
studied places during this process that were rediscovering agrarian values and insisting that farm-
ing was too important to be controlled by corporations (DeLind 1995). Thu & Durrenberger’s
(1998) edited collection, for instance, examines the traditional hog belt of Iowa in the midst of
reindustrialization after meatpackers moved to places such as North Carolina. Featuring data on
how concentrated manure alters air and waterways, and developing the analytical question of
whether someone whose land is under contract can be considered an independent family farmer,
the volume revitalizes Goldschmidt’s (1978) pioneering studies of industrial agriculture’s eco-
nomically depressing effects on rural communities, while defending agrarian labor as deserving
special consideration and preservation within society.
3
Contracting is not, however, universal even in the United States. Blanchette (2019) describes pork corporations that directly
own farm sites. Ashwood et al. (2014) analyzes emerging farmer cooperatives that operate as limited liability corporations to
diminish their culpability for pollution. See Schneider (2016) for a host of organizational forms operating in China.
190 Blanchette
Even as vertical integration now consumes the vast majority of farm animals in the United
States, and is making rapid inroads around the world, anthropologists who have worked within con-
finement farms counter the popular idea that industrialization is a completed or uniform project.
In some US states, confinement was made possible only by corporations’ co-opting “right-to-
farm” laws that were designed to protect small farmers and agricultural values from encroaching
suburbs, by blocking odor-based nuisance lawsuits. If confinement farms were regulated as in-
dustrial operations, they would not receive this exceptional status (DeLind 1995, 1998). Tsing
(2016) argues that contract farming is a hybrid form, the family-cum-industrial farm combines
plantation logics and (in her case) Danish vernacular values. Rich’s (2003) study of hog contracting
in the United States reflects this insight. He finds that some contracts involve people contracting
with other family members to fulfill production quotas of a larger contract that they hold with
a corporation. Odd mixtures of kinship solidarity, masculinity, cooperative values, and capitalist
discipline jostle to make industrial meat. Baker’s (2013) study of confinement pig farm workers in
the United Kingdom illustrates the skilled vision, craftsmanship, and “experiential intensities” that
people mobilize to make industrial meat (see also Grasseni 2009). Blanchette (2019), in breeding
operations in the United States, argues that workers’ knowledge and care for pigs have become
necessary because of the ruinous condition of industrial genetics; some of his coworkers insist
that their identification with fellow creatures spurs them to work harder in the face of animals’
illness or injury. Much of the literature not only pushes back against the idea of a perfect ter-
minus to industrialism, but also illustrates how subaltern values of animal love, agrarian skill,
and cooperative kinship are fomenting from within, and even tensely fueling, highly capitalized
operations—potentially leading to yet unseen rural politics.
In this sense, the literature suggests that vertical integration remains uneven as a cultural
project: different experiences, work regimens, and values inhere on the life-and-death phases of
meat making (see Wilkie 2010). If these hybrids of animal love and violence offer one glimpse
at meat’s strange industrialisms, ethnographic portraits of labor in slaughterhouses illustrate a
place that appears unusual in its excessive rigor. Ethnographers write painful descriptions of labor
exploitation, cold, injury, and monotony as conveyor belts in refrigerated warehouses compel
workers to make many thousands of identical motions each day (Fink 1998). Striffler’s (2005)
experience within Tyson Foods describes how muscle pains consume out-of-work life, as even
grocery shopping—picking up a lime—becomes difficult. Ribas (2016) narrates in graphic detail
the physical and mental violence of slaughter work as hands spasm uncontrollably, fingernails
fall out, and workers wear diapers on the line because they are denied bathroom breaks. Many
of these books explicitly invoke just how jarringly similar things are to the conditions of work
described in Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle from more than 100 years ago. In so doing, they push
against ideologies of gradual and inviolable industrial progress. Scholars who have worked as meat
cutters often describe modern American slaughter as constituted by an inhuman pace of work
and a politics of ethnoracial disposability that rivals Sinclair’s nadir image of industrial capitalism.
The causes of the unique rigors of the slaughterhouse are likely multiple. They range from the
low profit margins of cheap meat to the racialized neoliberal collapse of workers’ rights (Stuesse
2016)—and the material specificities of animal killing matter in many of these texts. The biological
variability of meat, even in genetically uniform animals, makes it more challenging for companies
to replace workers with machines than it is with some other products. While many tasks have been
mechanized, the slaughterhouse still relies on human eyes and hands to wield a knife, position body
parts in machines, and differentiate between subtle differences in organ and tendon distribution
(Horowitz & Miller 1999, cited in Stull & Broadway 2013, p. 99). Industrial slaughter is a site
where machine technology can augment, rather than relieve, pressure on the bodies that remain
(Blanchette 2019).

Perhaps spurred forward by observations that an exceptional and intractable injustice underlies
American meatpacking, many books are distinguished by their effort to develop new practices
of participant observation and collaboration. One group of studies has debated the ethnographic
ethics of conducting undercover research in these sites of killing (Fink 1998, Striffler 2005, Pachirat
2011)—along with the ethical implications of leaving them unobserved—which are notoriously
guarded and can be difficult to otherwise access (see also Dutkiewicz 2018). Thu & Durrenberger’s
(1998) edited volume puts anthropologists into dialogue with farmers and politicians. Stull (2017),
who pioneered the anthropological study of American industrial meat, gained insights by serving
for years as an adviser to communities set to host new slaughterhouses—and for agribusiness
corporations themselves—striving to mitigate harms that he observed in other locales. Stuesse
(2016) tested the possibilities of new forms of labor organizing—and of activist anthropology—
by collaboratively developing a center that advocated for workers’ rights alongside labor unions.
These texts collectively probe the kinds of knowledge that can be gained through the process of
trying to transform obstinate forms of capitalism, while forcing us to ask what constitutes a just
anthropology in the face of profound industrial violence.
MEAT
There is a risk that some studies—centered as they are primarily on harms against human bodies
and communities—can, following Pachirat’s (2011) suggestion, have an abstracting effect from
the fact that meatpacking is also the work of killing (see Fitzgerald et al. 2009). However, as
noted above, animals often do figure as biology. Pushing against standard political economies
that theorize industrial capitalism as pursuant to a uniform logic, geographers have long sought
to explain how the industrialization of fiber, grain, and flesh differs from patterns in standard
manufacturing (see Goodman et al. 1987). While acknowledging that the cultural and political
histories of regions are consequential, these scholars also articulate in remarkable detail how
gestation periods, growth rates, or disease—to name just a few factors, which differ across species—
makes the continual application of industrial labor difficult (Page 1997). Geographers’ insistence
that materiality and nonhuman nature are consequential in capitalist production underpins most
studies and also helps clarify why industrial meat production is so uneven across its many phases
of life and death (Boyd & Watts 1997).
A series of important ethnographies move in other directions, however, in their efforts to
metaphorically bring life back to meat. If agricultural industrialization is exceptional from pat-
terns observed in manufacturing, then these studies suggest that making meat is the exception
to the exception. Vialles’s [1994 (1987)] book examines the “ellipsis” between animal and edible,
corpse and carcass, muscle and meat. It describes isolated and invisible French slaughterhouses
not (primarily) as sites for generating capital, but instead as places that manage cultural sentiments
about death. Vialles [1994 (1987)] moves with a fine-toothed comb over the ritualistic stunning,
bleeding, and flaying of animals, arguing that industrial meat is “an organic substance obtained
by dispersal of the biological” (p. 51). Industrialization is measured in this book by the degree to
which it can “deanimalize” meat, as part of an “obscure desire for our meat to be obtained with-
out bloodshed, for slaughtermen to be ‘just like other workers’ and for abattoirs to be ‘just like
other factories’” (p. 66). Pachirat (2011) develops this thread in an ethnography of death within a
Nebraska beef plant, which immerses readers in the muck of killing in an effort to resist the ways
that society spatially and culturally sequesters violence. Highlighting recent American legislation
that creates special forms of criminality for depicting industrial meat making on camera (Potter
2011), Pachirat portrays the paranoid intensity through which lines of sight into the American
slaughterhouse are policed. His book takes on the added challenge from Vialles of attempting
192 Blanchette
to “reanimalize” the sanitized acts of killing—to write in ways that make readers sense animals’
death, to make the “object” of production into a kind of protagonist—while elaborating on how
the slaughterhouse’s architecture and division of labor can make death (and culpability for it)
imperceptible even for the workers themselves. Industrial hog killing offers a striking illustration
of this idea. Ostensibly to improve welfare, animals are rendered unconscious in carbon dioxide
chambers before they are hoisted onto a chain and their arteries are cut. With no sensible move-
ment on the hog’s part as its heart propels blood from the wound, the onlooker (or participant)
cannot detect the moment it dies.
These pathbreaking texts remind us that animals, however engineered, are not reducible to
capitalist inputs, and much cultural and political work goes into making animals’ bodies into
expungable commodities. In Vialles’s [1994 (1987), p. 66] refusal to allow slaughterhouses to be
“just like other factories,” the author challenges scholars to find meaning in the infliction of animal
pain and death, including, but also beyond, economic idioms such as rates of labor exploitation
or farmers’ incomes. If meat is a matter of managing death, scholars are also looking further
down the chain into the refrigerated struggle against decay (Friedberg 2009). Some researchers
examine efforts to corral and work with the microbial life that thrives after industrial death,
including difficult-to-eradicate foodborne pathogens (Dunn 2003, Wentworth 2015, Hinchcliffe
et al. 2017). In arching our attention further along the life cycle of dead meat, these studies also
serve as a reminder that a key characteristic of present-day industrial meat is vertical integration,
whereby the slaughterhouse—however shocking to some—becomes one site among many. Other
projects begin to defamiliarize how corporations corral life itself. Examining mass reproduction—
such as artificial insemination’s use of human actions to stimulate animal reproductive instincts,
making bigger litters—Rosenberg (2017) illustrates the jarring recognitions that can ensue from
industrial meat. As industrialization came to press human and hog bodies together more intimately,
state legislatures across the United States were compelled to create special agricultural exceptions
to bestiality laws.
One juncture of making flesh into meat where the literature remains sparse, however, is the
distribution of animal parts. This lacuna is glaring in places such as the United States or Denmark
that are riddled with issues of overproduction: These systems produce far too much flesh than can
be consumed domestically (Boyd & Watts 1997, Weis 2013). American companies export animal
parts to as many as 30 countries. Their goal is not only to avoid overflooding domestic markets,
but also to keep body parts such as ears or trotters out of even-cheaper pet foods by guiding
them to culinary markets that may consume them in larger quantities (Blanchette 2019). One
important exception is Gewertz & Errington’s (2010) ethnography of the distribution of reviled
and fatty lamb meat flaps that are shipped from New Zealand to Papua New Guinea. This book’s
analyses of meat traders not only illustrate the unequal global distribution of animal parts—and
the multiplicity of the category “meat”—but also offer insights into the postdeath work required
of any large packinghouse. As a perishable commodity, meat is made, and must continue to be
semiotically maintained, long after the point where animals are bled and carcasses are cut to pieces
(see Yates-Doerr & Mol 2012, Cavanaugh 2016).4
Moreover, in the wake of critiques of industrial meat’s moral depravities—that it is not only
anthropologists that grasp it as an aberrantly problematic industrialism (Horwitz 1998, Dave
2014)—there is an emerging instability underlying the category of “meat.” This instability goes
beyond efforts to realize anti-industrial meat (and dairy) production that purports to center on
4
For reasons of space, this review cannot accommodate the vast anthropological literature on meat eating, industrial or
otherwise. For a recent edited collection on these topics, see Staples & Klein (2017).

the well-being of animals (Weiss 2016, Paxson 2012). From efforts to produce insects industrially
as snacks and flours because they are deemed a more ecologically sustainable “protein” (Yates-
Doerr 2015), to the guinea pig bodies whose increased production is promoted to fuse divided
cultural worlds amid Peru’s gastronomic boom (Garcı́a 2013), to the hyped rise of in vitro meat
that purports, however unsuccessfully, to make animal protein without the death of an individual
creature ( Jönsson 2016), to the extension of intensive farming principles into aquatic species as
healthier fish become “animalized” (Lien 2015), industrial production is paradoxically taking hold
of new bodies in order to threaten the growth of older ones.
PRODUCTION
One important opening within the literature is an effort to foment vocabularies and orientations
that do not inadvertently reproduce the orientations of industrialism itself (cf. Fortun 2012). Tied
to multispecies turns in anthropology (Kirksey & Helmreich 2010), some anthropologists have
started to ask what exactly it means to “produce” an animal and its attendant meat. This query is also
in line with recent social theory attuned to planetary damage, which offers relational approaches
to capitalist production that recognize how other species’ (unrecognized) activities make human
labor possible in the first place (Andrews 2008, Moore 2015, Tsing 2015). Beldo (2017) takes up
a version of this project by examining how the “metabolic labor” and vitality of broiler chickens
organize farms. While industrial intensification might mean that human labor affects dimensions
of animals, in breeding their bodies toward more prolific expressions, one of Beldo’s points is
that processes such as the multiplication of chicken cells or digestion are indispensable to, but
never fully controlled by, capitalism. This approach suggests other entryways into analyzing work
on farms as an interspecies choreography, ones that do not begin with the principle that capital
(and human work) autonomously authors meat. Porcher (2017) develops an original critique of
industrial meat by contrasting it to an ideal form of farm husbandry whereby animals flourish as
(co)workers, whereas Williams (2004) examines how mass slaughter must take into account (some
aspects of ) animals’ perception if it is to operate effectively. Collectively, these studies are attuned
to animals’ still existing and potential agencies in both vital–biological and semiotic–perceptual
terms, and they complicate subject/object distinctions that underlie traditional political economy
by expanding what (and who) counts as labor on farms. These texts suggest analytical and political
openings once animals are treated by industry itself as mindful kinds of subjects in animal welfare
policies (see Anneberg et al. 2013), and they begin to position processes of human and nonhuman
exploitation within conjoined (yet not identical) frames (see also Noske 1989, Tsing 2012, Coulter
2015, Blanchette 2019).
Another emerging direction of scholarship complicates the object of factory farming and the
production of meat in other ways, asking what else the “animal industrial complex” generates
(see Noske 1989). Scholars have been researching, for instance, how industrial confinement farms
pathogens alongside animals (Franklin 2007, Wallace 2016). Lowe (2010) examines how indus-
trialization may have created new “viral clouds” through zoonotic disease in Indonesia, rendering
many entities—backyard birds, confined poultry, rural and urban human populations—newly en-
tangled with and vulnerable to each other. Hinchcliffe et al. (2017) reread animal agriculture in
the United Kingdom through its many pathogens. This kind of creative approach also expands our
critical attentions beyond the teleology of meat. Profits in large-scale slaughter have long revolved
around nonflesh substances (Cronon 1991, MacLachlan 2001). The value of nonmeat carnalities
in animals has changed over time, but hundreds of commodities ranging from industrial glues to
medicines remain derived from animal bodies (Meindertsma 2009). Cheap meat is undergirded
by the industrialization of many other physiological forms. While my book (Blanchette 2019)
194 Blanchette
touches on a dozen of these—notably fat-cum-biodiesel and hog lungs for pet food flavorings (see
also Mullin 2007, Wrye 2015)—it is striking that most studies of animal agribusiness implicitly
revolve around meat substances despite society’s routine consumption of gelatin in household
objects such as photographs or paper (see Shukin 2009). One might speculate how ethnographies
of industrial blood, fat, gelatin, or manure could lead to different openings than does presuming
that the central object of animal production is flesh.
Tied to this idea, some recent texts are beginning to ask where we might locate production
today. Friedberg (2009) argues that the industrial animal became a “world steer” more than
100 years ago: The feeds and drugs that sustain its existence are the product of (human and
nonhuman) activities pooled from around the world. But with the exception of Lien’s (2015)
innovative approach to farmed fish feed, either many places that are indispensable to industrial meat
as we know it—South American soy fields, Midwestern corn, animal drug companies, confinement
technology developers, and especially corporate offices—are underexamined or the research does
not analyze how industrial animality dwells within the site.5 The literature is perhaps too fixated on
witnessing places where human labor comes into direct contact with animal flesh—it is, in this one
regard, too imitative of traditional factory studies. An exception is Rich’s (2008) ethnography of
working on pigs by disinfecting their feces. His employment in growing barns, a stage of the process
that requires little direct interspecies labor, meant power washing barns between batches of pigs to
decrease their susceptibility to illness. In so doing, Rich offers an important entryway into thinking
about how the labor of meat is not necessarily a matter of being face-to-snout (or carcass). This
notion also resonates with Weston’s (2017) call to attend to the emerging “techno-intimacies” that
manifest in large-scale cattle rearing through tracking media such as radio frequency identification
ear chips. Critiquing how agrarian food movements cling to the idea that the only way to ethically
know (and produce) others, including other species, is through unmediated face-to-face contact,
Weston considers the political possibilities in the new sorts of intimacies latent in large-scale
production. Generating more senses of how industrial chickens inhabit space in disembodied (or
technologically mediated) form—from household goods, to fields reserved for their food, to the
antibiotic-resistant genes they emit (see Landecker 2016)—can lead to a greater appreciation of
how industrial meat is transforming the planet, and it may also help foment ways to challenge
meat production beyond food choices and without entering the slaughterhouse.
CONCLUSION
This review has examined the mix of hybrid, uneven, violent, excessive, and intimate industrialisms
that anthropologists find embedded in industrial meat. Factory farms are places where industri-
alized beings keep being reindustrialized and where humans both are astonishingly exploited—if
not themselves reduced to biological matter—yet often care about the “products” they work with
in spite of it all. In closing, then, I return to the potent idea that subterranean industrial chicken
skeletons could be declared a signal of a geological epoch, for it offers the simple suggestion that
perhaps industrial meat making is not such an exceptional form of manufacturing. Consider the
attention to the liveliness and activities of things labeled mere objects, the continual political work
required to reduce something to a commodity, production processes widely distributed across
space, reversions to modes of exploitation believed to be outdated, uneven intensities of capital,
5
One exception is Coppin’s (2002) history of the pig, which tracks the shaping of the animal across domains ranging from
university science labs to the size of standard domestic kitchen oven doors. Others, largely from geography, are Schneider’s
(2014) and Weis’s (2013) examination of the “industrial grain-oilseed-livestock complex.”

jarring environmental externalities, rampant human disposability, and insistence that some facets
of existence are too important to be industrialized: These might not be taken as signs of a strange
form of production but instead reflective of the emerging norms of late industrialism and the
grounds for generating more radical critiques of industrial work as it exists today.
DISCLOSURE STATEMENT
The author is not aware of any affiliations, memberships, funding, or financial holdings that might
be perceived as affecting the objectivity of this review.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I thank Tatiana Chudakova, Susanne Friedberg, Julie Guthman, Lisa Haushofer, Allison-Marie
Loconto, and Wythe Marschall, along with an anonymous member of the ARA board, who offered
invaluable critical feedback on an earlier version of this review.
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Contents Volume 47, 2018
Perspectives
Others’ Words, Others’ Voices: The Making of a Linguistic

Anthropologist
Richard Bauman p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p 1
Archaeology
Development and Disciplinary Complicity: Contract Archaeology in

South America Under the Critical Gaze
Cristóbal Gnecco p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p 279
Ethics of Archaeology
Alfredo González-Ruibal p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p 345
An Emerging Archaeology of the Nazi Era
Reinhard Bernbeck p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p 361
Bayesian Statistics in Archaeology
Erik Otárola-Castillo and Melissa G. Torquato p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p 435
Looting, the Antiquities Trade, and Competing Valuations of the Past
Alex W. Barker p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p 455
Developments in American Archaeology: Fifty Years of the National
Historic Preservation Act
Francis P. McManamon p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p 553
Biological Anthropology
Ethics in Human Biology: A Historical Perspective on Present

Challenges
Joanna Radin p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p 263
The Bioarchaeology of Health Crisis: Infectious Disease in the Past
Clark Spencer Larsen p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p 295
Crop Foraging, Crop Losses, and Crop Raiding
Catherine M. Hill p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p 377
vii
Emerging and Enduring Issues in Primate Conservation Genetics

Richard R. Lawler p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p 395
Effects of Environmental Stress on Primate Populations
Jason M. Kamilar and Lydia Beaudrot p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p 417
Ethics of Primate Fieldwork: Toward an Ethically Engaged
Primatology
Erin P. Riley and Michelle Bezanson p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p 493
Hunter-Gatherers and Human Evolution: New Light on Old Debates
Richard B. Lee p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p 513
Female Power in Primates and the Phenomenon of Female Dominance
Rebecca J. Lewis p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p 533

Anthropology of Language and Communicative Practices
Food and Language: Production, Consumption, and Circulation of

Meaning and Value
Martha Sif Karrebæk, Kathleen C. Riley, and Jillian R. Cavanaugh p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p17
Language of Kin Relations and Relationlessness
Christopher Ball p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p47
The Ethics and Aesthetics of Care
Steven P. Black p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p79
The Language of Evangelism: Christian Cultures of Circulation
Beyond the Missionary Prologue
Courtney Handman p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p 149
Children as Interactional Brokers of Care
Inmaculada M. Garcı́a-Sánchez p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p 167
Political Parody and the Politics of Ambivalence
Tanja Petrović p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p 201
Word for Word: Verbatim as Political Technologies
Miyako Inoue p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p 217
Sociocultural Anthropology
Literature and Reading

Adam Reed p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p33
The Anthropology of Mining: The Social and Environmental Impacts
of Resource Extraction in the Mineral Age
Jerry K. Jacka p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p61
viii Contents
Science/Art/Culture Through an Oceanic Lens

Stefan Helmreich and Caroline A. Jones p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p97
Consumerism
Anne Meneley p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p 117
Police and Policing
Jeffrey T. Martin p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p 133
Alex Blanchette p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p 185
Interspecies Relations and Agrarian Worlds
Shaila Seshia Galvin p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p 233
Hybrid Peace: Ethnographies of War

Nikolai Ssorin-Chaikov p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p 251
The Gender of the War on Drugs
Shaylih Muehlmann p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p 315
Precarity, Precariousness, and Vulnerability
Clara Han p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p 331
The Anthropology of Ethics and Morality
Cheryl Mattingly and Jason Throop p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p 475
Theme I: Ethics
The Ethics and Aesthetics of Care

Steven P. Black p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p79
Police and Policing
Jeffrey T. Martin p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p 133
Children as Interactional Brokers of Care
Inmaculada M. Garcı́a-Sánchez p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p 167
Ethics in Human Biology: A Historical Perspective on Present
Challenges
Joanna Radin p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p 263
Development and Disciplinary Complicity: Contract Archaeology in
South America Under the Critical Gaze
Cristóbal Gnecco p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p 279
The Gender of the War on Drugs
Shaylih Muehlmann p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p 315
Precarity, Precariousness, and Vulnerability
Clara Han p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p 331
Contents ix
Ethics of Archaeology
Alfredo González-Ruibal p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p 345
An Emerging Archaeology of the Nazi Era
Reinhard Bernbeck p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p 361
Looting, the Antiquities Trade, and Competing Valuations of the Past
Alex W. Barker p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p 455
The Anthropology of Ethics and Morality
Cheryl Mattingly and Jason Throop p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p 475
Ethics of Primate Fieldwork: Toward an Ethically Engaged
Primatology
Erin P. Riley and Michelle Bezanson p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p 493

Theme II: Food
Food and Language: Production, Consumption, and Circulation of

Meaning and Value
Martha Sif Karrebæk, Kathleen C. Riley, and Jillian R. Cavanaugh p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p17
Consumerism
Anne Meneley p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p 117
Alex Blanchette p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p 185
Interspecies Relations and Agrarian Worlds
Shaila Seshia Galvin p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p 233
Crop Foraging, Crop Losses, and Crop Raiding
Catherine M. Hill p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p 377
Indexes
Cumulative Index of Contributing Authors, Volumes 38–47 p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p 575

Cumulative Index of Article Titles, Volumes 38–47 p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p 579
Errata
An online log of corrections to Annual Review of Anthropology articles may be found at

http://www.annualreviews.org/errata/anthro
x Contents

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AN47CH12_Blanchette ARI 18 September 2018 8:56

Annual Review of Anthropology

Industrial Meat Production

Annu. Rev. Anthropol. 2018. 47:185–99 Keywords

it constitutes an unusual—and unusually problematic—form of industrialism. Most studies have

www.annualreviews.org • Industrial Meat Production 187

www.annualreviews.org • Industrial Meat Production 189

www.annualreviews.org • Industrial Meat Production 191

anthropology in the face of profound industrial violence.

www.annualreviews.org • Industrial Meat Production 193

www.annualreviews.org • Industrial Meat Production 195

invaluable critical feedback on an earlier version of this review.

Fortun K. 2012. Ethnography in late industrialism. Cult. Anthropol. 27(3):446–64

www.annualreviews.org • Industrial Meat Production 197

R Cassidy, MH Mullin, pp. 277–304. London: Berghahn

Vialles N. 1994 (1987). Animal to Edible. London: Cambridge Univ. Press

www.annualreviews.org • Industrial Meat Production 199

New From Annual Reviews:

ANNUAL REVIEWS | CONNECT WITH OUR EXPERTS

Contents Volume 47, 2018

Others’ Words, Others’ Voices: The Making of a Linguistic

Development and Disciplinary Complicity: Contract Archaeology in

Ethics in Human Biology: A Historical Perspective on Present

Emerging and Enduring Issues in Primate Conservation Genetics

Rebecca J. Lewis p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p 533

Anthropology of Language and Communicative Practices

Food and Language: Production, Consumption, and Circulation of

Literature and Reading

Science/Art/Culture Through an Oceanic Lens

Hybrid Peace: Ethnographies of War

The Ethics and Aesthetics of Care

Erin P. Riley and Michelle Bezanson p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p 493

Theme II: Food

Food and Language: Production, Consumption, and Circulation of

Cumulative Index of Contributing Authors, Volumes 38–47 p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p 575

An online log of corrections to Annual Review of Anthropology articles may be found at

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