Paper short abstract:

Carnism is a term used by vegan activists I encountered during fieldwork in Bristol, UK in 2017. It denotes the belief system that has mythologised the consumption of meat as normal, natural and necessary. This paper examines anthropology's role in privileging meat and how this needs questioning.

Paper long abstract:

In my work with vegan activists in Bristol UK, I came across the term carnism, coined by psychologist and vegan activist Melanie Joy. This denotes “the belief system that conditions us to eat certain animals” (Joy 2011: 30). She is working to bring the cultural system of carnism into the light, name it, so it can be challenged. She explains why using the term ‘meat-eater’ is not enough. She posits that people know what a vegan or vegetarian is and that it is assumed to represent an ethical orientation. ‘Meat-eater’, on the other hand, Joy says, “isolates the practice of consuming meat as though it were divorced from a person’s beliefs and values. But is eating meat truly a behaviour that exists independent of a belief system?” (Ibid: 29). Carnism, for Joy, is an invisible, violent ideology that has mythologised the consumption of meat as normal, natural and necessary (Ibid: 97).

In this paper I want to consider what she says as a possible critique of anthropology. Are anthropologists some of these myth makers? And if so, in what capacity? I examine different anthropological ethnographies to show the privileging of meat, not only in diverse cultural contexts but also in anthropological analyses of food systems (Fiddes 1991). Instead of looking only at how we eat meat, as is usually the case in anthropology, through assessment of taboos around certain meat and so on, just as we question why some people are vegetarian, so we must question why we eat meat.