“Yesterday You Slaughtered Animals, Today You Pity Them”: Ambivalence and Resolution Among Jewish Israeli Slaughterers

Ben-Yonatan, Anat

doi:10.1080/08927936.2021.1996023

Cited by 2 publications

(2 citation statements)

References 37 publications

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“…All societies slaughter animals for meat and delineate cultural-specific methods and tools for this task. However, the cultural taboos, rituals, and laws concerning animal slaughter indicate that this task generates cultural ambivalence (Arluke and Sanders, 1996; DeMello, 2012; Tuan, 1984) through contradictory, but simultaneous notions of compassion and violence toward animals (see Friedland, 2011 for elaboration on the philosophical roots of reconciling killing and compassion toward animals; see Ben-Yonatan, 2021 for an elaborate discussion on ambivalence and its resolution among Jewish slaughterers). While processes of cultural refinement may increase the discomfort toward killing animals for food (Elias, 1939), meat consumption continues to grow worldwide (OECD/FAO, 2021; Sans and Combris, 2015).…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“The knife needs the intention of the heart” The construction of ethnic and moral boundaries in Israeli slaughterhouses

Ben-Yonatan

2022

Ethnicities

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This study examines aspects of ethnic, religious, and moral boundary work among Jewish-Israeli kosher slaughterers based, on 35 in-depth interviews, four ethnographic observations, informal conversations, and other secondary sources such as video footage of the slaughter sites gathered between 2014 and 2019. In Israel, the self-proclaimed sovereign homeland of the Jewish people, being Jewish means being part of the political, ethnic, and religious hegemony. While being stigmatized for doing dirty work, the Jewish slaughterers’ workplace setting groups them with menial laborers from a minority ethnic group, both physically and organizationally. The stigma associated with animal killing in Israel encourages the slaughterers to distinguish themselves from other workers by engaging in boundary work. Within the workplace setting, this boundary work occurs around various aspects of intersecting identities: racio-ethnic, national, religious, and professional. Furthermore, this boundary work is fueled by various organizational mechanisms such as the slaughter site’s spatial architecture, differential wage structure, and the use of tools and technologies. While these workplace conditions are determined by the employers, they are constantly restructured and reinforced by the slaughterers to assert their moral superiority vis-a-vis other workers. While exploring these organizational mechanisms, I conceptualize the Jewish slaughter knife as a boundary-maintaining object. I claim that the slaughterers constantly leverage these material, symbolic, and discursive resources to morally segregate the two workers’ groups and the morally tainted aspects of slaughter, such as violence and cruelty, to the ‘Arab’ others. Meanwhile, the prevailing Jew–Arab tensions and the popular symbolic representation of the Arabs ensures that these behaviors are treated as an inherent racio-ethnic trait, thereby reinforcing these boundaries.

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Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“The knife needs the intention of the heart” The construction of ethnic and moral boundaries in Israeli slaughterhouses

Ben-Yonatan

2022

Ethnicities

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“…Another example of occluded clients emerges in the context of abattoir work; in fact, our search returned three empirical studies of slaughterhouse work (Baran et al., 2016; Ben‐Yonatan, 2022; McCabe & Hamilton, 2015), but we excluded them because of their empirical neglect of worker‐client relations. As Ackroyd and Crowdy (1990) observed, most of us would agree there is something morally wrong about the killing of innocent animals.…”

Section: Categories Of Dirty Work Clientsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Challenging the ‘dirty worker’—‘clean client’ dichotomy: Conceptualizing worker‐client relations in dirty work

Galazka

Wallace

2023

Int J Management Reviews

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Dirty work research has long analytically prioritized focusing on the people who do dirty work, largely sidestepping who the clients of dirty work are and what contribution they can make to workers’ experience of the job as more or less dirty. We address these oversights through a systematic review and analysis of 65 articles, theorizing the role played by clients within dirty work. Firstly, we propose a three‐fold categorization of dirty work clients based on their temporal‐spatial proximity to the work and explain how clients can be a source of stigma through communicative and corporeal interactions with workers. Secondly, we collate existing discussions that mention worker‐client relations into a conceptual framework of clients’ contributions to dirty work through considering several feedback loops between clients’ and workers’ behaviours and discourses. In doing so, we examine the ways in which clients can both reinforce and alleviate workers’ experience of dirty work stigma.

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“Yesterday You Slaughtered Animals, Today You Pity Them”: Ambivalence and Resolution Among Jewish Israeli Slaughterers

Cited by 2 publications

References 37 publications

“The knife needs the intention of the heart” The construction of ethnic and moral boundaries in Israeli slaughterhouses

“The knife needs the intention of the heart” The construction of ethnic and moral boundaries in Israeli slaughterhouses

Challenging the ‘dirty worker’—‘clean client’ dichotomy: Conceptualizing worker‐client relations in dirty work

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