Sacred Cows and Chicken Manchurian
eBook - ePub
Available until 23 Dec |Learn more

Sacred Cows and Chicken Manchurian

The Everyday Politics of Eating Meat in India

  1. 248 pages
  2. English
  3. ePUB (mobile friendly)
  4. Available on iOS & Android
eBook - ePub
Available until 23 Dec |Learn more

Sacred Cows and Chicken Manchurian

The Everyday Politics of Eating Meat in India

About this book

Challenges popular generalizations about cow protection and beef consumption Bovine politics exposes fault lines within contemporary Indian society, where eating beef is simultaneously a violation of sacred taboos, an expression of marginalized identities, and a route to cosmopolitan sophistication. The recent rise of Hindu nationalism has further polarized traditional views: Dalits, Muslims, and Christians protest threats to their beef-eating heritage while Hindu fundamentalists rally against those who eat the sacred cow. Yet close observation of what people do and do not eat, the styles and contexts within which they do so, and the disparities between rhetoric and everyday action overturns this simplistic binary opposition. Understanding how a food can be implicated in riots, vigilante attacks, and even murders demands that we look beyond immediate politics to wider contexts. Drawing on decades of ethnographic research in South India, James Staples charts how cattle owners, brokers, butchers, cooks, and occasional beef eaters navigate the contemporary political and cultural climate. Sacred Cows and Chicken Manchurian offers a fine-grained exploration of the current situation, locating it within the wider anthropology of food and eating in the region and revealing critical aspects of what it is to be Indian in the early twenty-first century.

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Yes, you can access Sacred Cows and Chicken Manchurian by James Staples, K. Sivaramakrishnan in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Politique et relations internationales & Histoire de l'Inde et de l'Asie du Sud. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.

Table of contents

  1. Cover
  2. Series Page
  3. Title Page
  4. Copyright
  5. Dedication
  6. Contents
  7. Foreword by K. Sivaramakrishnan
  8. Acknowledgments
  9. Introduction: Sacred Cows and Chicken Manchurian
  10. Chapter One: Differential Histories of Meat Eating in India
  11. Chapter Two: Everyday South Indian Foodways
  12. Chapter Three: From Cattle Shed to Dinner Plate
  13. Chapter Four: Cattle Slaughter, Beef Eating, and Ambivalence
  14. Chapter Five: Health, the Environment, and the Rise of the Chicken
  15. Chapter Six: From Caste to Class in Food
  16. Conclusion: Taking on Sacred Cows
  17. Glossary
  18. Notes
  19. References
  20. Index
  21. Series Title