The palgrave international handbook of a 196

Slaughterhouses

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familiar, face we so admire. And that the two faces are perfectly comfortably
attached to the same body. What we perhaps fear most, is that each of the two
faces can no more exist without the other than can the two sides of a coin
(2001, p. 7).

If we strip away that comfort and confront the Holocaust on Bauman’s terms
we are left with the uncomfortable idea that ‘the Holocaust was not an
irrational outflow of the not-yet-fully-eradicated residues of pre-modern
barbarity. It was a legitimate resident in the house of modernity; indeed
one who would not be at home in any other house’ (2001, p. 17). The crucial
point for this discussion is that the mass slaughter of living, sentient beings is
not an aberration. Rather, it is woven into and a direct consequence of
modernist social relations.
It is essential, albeit confronting, coming to terms with the violent not just
refined face of modernity. Arendt (2006) explained how it is that violence
and atrocities are normalised and routinised; how they come to be accepted
by many—otherwise ‘good’ or compassionate—people. The strength of such
a view that is an inherently sociological one is that it moves away from binary
thinking of (individual) good versus evil and instead allows us to acknowledge the way violence and abuse are embedded in and often justified by social
systems and their authorities. Identifying the ideological mechanisms used to
uphold socially sanctioned regimes of power is important if we are to have
any hope of untangling and dismantling them.
In the next section, we consider some of the recent ethnographic work
done in slaughterhouses and discuss the specific ideological mechanisms that
contribute to the normalisation and acceptance of the immense scale of the
slaughter of animals. We start with a discussion of the use of technology for
large-scale violence.

Responses
While there has been considerable multidisciplinary work focussing on the
slaughterhouse, attention has tended to focussed on labour conditions,
public health implications and the economics of meat processing and consumption as opposed to the animals themselves (for example, Gouveia and
Juska 2002; LeDuff 2003; Young Lee 2008). In part this is because such foci
reflect the interests of the AIC and/or reflect the anthropocentrism common
to the vast majority of scholarship in the west. However, it is also worth
noting that gaining access to slaughterhouses, their workers and their