The animal body multiple: science, religion, and the invention of halal stunning

The animal body multiple: science, religion, and the invention of halal stunning

Chao, En-Chieh

English

20200611

This article proposes a specific kind of ontological investigation in the field of science and religion. I argue that science and religion can create distinct practices that enact multiple realities, and thus they should be seen as more than different views of the same world. By analyzing the details of scientific experiments crucial for the invention of halal stunning, I demonstrate that religion and science are both permeable to the social, the biological, and to each other, and that seemingly incommensurable realities can co‐occur in the body of an animal. Here, animals’ modes of existence are interdependent with the technologies being used, and with the web of interactions that they are drawn into. In the process of inventing halal stunning, it is not so much about the same animal body that is thought about differently as it is about animals spanning across multiple, physiological, realities as they are recruited into different webs of interactions to create a new slaughter method.

22.1

22.1; 1.2

animal welfare [pri]; halal [pri]; Islamic slaughter [pri]

anthropology; modern Muslim religious scholars; religion; science

New Zealand

Meat Industry Research Institute on New Zealand (MIRINZ)

halal stunning

Zygon 2020 June 11; 55(2): 286-305

© 2020 by the Joint Publication Board of Zygon

j

e

50 refs., 6 fns

14679744 (online)