The Opened Vein: Slaughterhouses as Sites of the Hidden Sacred

Focusing on hog slaughter in North Carolina, this ethnographic project uses scholarly models of sacrifice to interrogate the religious mechanisms that scaffold industrial slaughter in America today. Within the span of two hundred years, the killing of animals for human consumption has gone from being an accepted part of daily public life to an act shrouded in secrecy. Informed by this historical transformation, I argue that the ostensibly secular site of the contemporary slaughterhouse has taken on valences of the “negative sacred” that both respond to and fuel public sensibilities around animality, intimacy, and the act of killing. My project examines the ways in which the religious dynamics that structure this negative sacred space participate in the production and amplification of ostensibly non-religious social categories. By testing models of sacrifice in the context of hog slaughter, I open up a new set of theoretical questions around the relationships between prohibition, transgression, and social control.Doctor of Philosoph