Sacred Cows and Chicken Manchurian. James Staples
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I engaged in with them in their new city also came to inform my field notes. The parents, of my own generation, had grown up in rural Andhra, the children of small-scale farmers, who remembered a time—pre–Green Revolution—when millet, not rice, was the staple food for families in their respective villages. Their own children had been educated in Delhi, one of whom had gone on to take a degree in catering management and to work in high-end hotels, and who had embraced a more cosmopolitan diet. Their different perspectives, shared across the dinner table or in the restaurants frequented by the younger members of the family and their friends, offered additional insights into dietary changes and continuities.
Beyond Anandapuram and Bhavanipur, alongside fleeting trips to natal towns and villages, Delhi, and Mumbai, my current work also draws significantly on research I conducted in Hyderabad. I lived in the city with my family for sixteen months in 2005 and 2006, conducting postdoctoral work largely focused on the anthropology of disability. As had been the case in Anandapuram, however, references to food and to eating featured heavily in my field notes. Miriam, a Roman Catholic woman who sometimes ate beef, was employed as a cook and maid for the apartment we rented from an interfaith nongovernmental organization (NGO) based in the city, and she taught me and my partner how to shop for and cook what she saw as the key dishes of the area. Her presence is still felt in our own home in the UK more than a decade later, with the recipes we wrote down then in a school exercise book (the pages now annotated with traces of tamarind pulp, groundnut oil, and squashed lentils) continuing to inform our weekly menu. When my research interests later veered specifically toward food, it was to Miriam and others we had met during that earlier visit that I initially turned.
With the help of Das, my research assistant, in 2016 and 2017 we also met butchers, brokers, and others for whom beef was an integral part of their everyday lives (even when, as was sometimes the case for the brokers, they did not eat it themselves). Through our beef-seller contacts, we also attended cattle markets, long bus rides away, in order to trace the journeys cattle took from the cowshed to the serving dish, and to tease out how what the animals meant or represented changed along the way. In the same way that other commodities are transformed by, or transformative of, the contexts through which they pass, so too are cattle and the other parties involved changed along the way.16
Taken together, these diverse settings, emerging as they did out of serendipity as much as preplanning, offered windows onto a unique range of everyday perspectives on cattle, on beef, and on food and eating more generally. Although some of those we worked with, such as the meat sellers, had a vested interest in keeping up to date with stories of vigilante attacks and government action on cattle slaughter, for the most part my interlocutors would not describe themselves as activists. We did not seek to work with those directly engaged in perpetrating violence against those who traded in beef, nor did we spend time with those who organized beef festivals or other events aimed at defending the gastronomic rights of those who wished to eat meat derived from cattle. There is, to be sure, important ethnographic work to be done with these groups, and there are interesting questions to be asked about their respective roles in contemporary democracy and the Indian state. The perspectives of both, however, have been well reported upon (and sometimes, perhaps, caricatured) in the press and in social media, occasionally represented more directly through blogs and YouTube videos. Although I have read and watched a great deal of this material, my interest has been to give greater weight to the voices of those not only less heard but also more widespread, and to interpret what they said in the richly layered contexts in which they were embedded. These were the voices of those who chose to eat or not eat beef but who, most of the time, took more ambivalent, more nuanced positions on the issues than those on either side of the debate as it was represented in everyday discourse. I regard those voices not as fixed but as shifting in tune with the world around them. Such people are not easily pigeonholed, either by caste or by community or even within the new classifications that have arisen out of more recent work that interrogates class.17
What I am imagining here is a different kind of middle, a middle that has long been there but that has not necessarily been thought of in those terms. Most of the people I worked with were not middle-class, new or old, in the ways that scholars have come to define it, even as their tastes and aspirations were shaped by it. Rather, in terms of meat eating, those I worked with were representative of a large and amorphous group sandwiched between the two dominant, but not necessarily elite, fuzzy-edged groups of activists, protestors, vigilantes, and politicians that have, until now, received the most attention.
METHODS AND ETHICS
My key tool, as for most social anthropologists, has been participant observation: the “deep hanging out,” as Clifford Geertz (1998) called it, of ethnographic fieldwork. That is to say, most of my interlocutors were not just people I interviewed and then moved on from. They were people I lived alongside and, in many cases, built relationships with over the course of many years. I asked them questions and recorded their answers, to be sure, but I also ate routine meals with them, traveled with them, and attended their weddings, daughters’ first menstruation celebrations, and sometimes their funerals. Feasts marked all these occasions. Other meetings, such as those with the “cutting men” responsible for the slaughter of cows and buffaloes or the brokers who mediated deals between farmers and meat traders, were necessarily more fleeting. But even when I relied largely on interviews, these often developed organically over the course of several meetings. Those meat sellers whom I met only in their shops, for example, were visited at least three times: first, to establish contact; second, if they were willing, to conduct a more detailed, semistructured interview, unfolding as I observed them going about their daily routines, customers sometimes chipping in with their own perspectives; and third, to follow up on what they had said, or to check anything that I was uncertain of.
In addition to my daily field notes—kept in a diary format—and the interview data I collected during the periods on which I worked consciously on food (in 2011, 2013, 2016, and 2017), I drew on the notes I made during visits from 1999 onward, all of which included copious references to food, as well as memories and informal recordings (such as letters, personal diaries, and recipes) dating back to 1984. In 2011, I conducted food-focused interviews with fifty-two households in Anandapuram and Bhavanipur, and in 2013, I also carried out a full village survey of eating habits in the former. On my last two visits, in 2016 and 2017, I persuaded twenty families to keep food diaries for me, recording everything they ate over periods of two weeks. On those same trips I also undertook a survey of eateries in Bhavanipur and along the half-mile stretch of highway that connected it to Anandapuram, the very acts of looking and counting, and sometimes talking and eating, leading to further qualitative insights. Collectively, these fragments formed a rich source from which to begin making sense of contemporary dietary choices in South India.
I also tried to be attentive not only to what people said and did but also to their sensory experiences and the emotional responses they evoked in relation to the world around them, to engage in, as anthropologist Chenjia Xu (2019) termed it concerning the rise of the “foodie” in China, “participant sensation” as well as in participant observation.18 I was as interested to learn how they felt about animals and the consumption of their flesh as I was to know their thoughts and actions in relation to those matters. This was significant because the positions people took were informed not just by abstract thought but also through their senses, and how they became attuned to them in everyday life. Visceral responses to the smells of bovines and their products or to the taste and mouth-feel of their meat were inseparable from the intangible ideas that people had about them. The love and affection that cattle owners expressed toward their animals—something that the anthropologist Radhika Govindrajan (2018) brings out so effectively in her descriptions of human-bovine relationships in Himalayan villages—was not just an instrumental response to the ritual and economic value of the cow, the way that the anthropologist Marvin Harris (1966), for example, was prone to see it. Rather, their feelings of kinship emerged out of prolonged proximity to the physical warmth, the earthy smells, and the particular sounds their animals made, as well as to the sensory enjoyment of consuming their dairy products. To paraphrase Donna Haraway, humans and their animals “became together” (2008, 19).
I did not, of course, have direct access to what the various sensual or emotional