Sacred Cows and Chicken Manchurian - The Everyday Politics of Eating Meat in India (Paperback)

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.

General

Imprint:	University of Washington Press
Country of origin:	United States
Series:	Culture, Place, and Nature
Release date:	November 2020
Authors:	James Staples
Foreword by:	K. Sivaramakrishnan
Series editors:	K. Sivaramakrishnan
Dimensions:	229 x 152 x 18mm (L x W x T)
Format:	Paperback - Trade
Pages:	248
ISBN-13:	978-0-295-74788-0
Categories:	Books > Humanities > History > Asian / Middle Eastern history > General Books > Social sciences > Sociology, social studies > Anthropology > Social & cultural anthropology > General Books > History > Asian / Middle Eastern history > General
LSN:	0-295-74788-9
Barcode:	9780295747880

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