Paper short abstract:

The experience of industrial death in a slaughterhouse with incorporated transparency produces a strange paradox; death is everywhere and nowhere. Examining how death is articulated and experienced manifests an ethical act that counteracts the marginalisation of the nonhuman other.

Paper long abstract:

Emerging at the turn of the nineteenth century, the contemporary industrial slaughterhouse is a stereotypical space of death that has been removed from the urban sphere, and consequently public consciousness. An industrial pig slaughterhouse in Denmark challenges this distancing from public consciousness by offering public tours of its facility which attract up to 25,000 visitors a year. This paper draws on six-months ethnographic fieldwork in this slaughterhouse and explores how death is articulated by tour guides, experienced by guests and confronted by the workers themselves.

Ethnographic insights from public tours and the production floor convey how death is in many ways obscured from view and yet simultaneously pivotal to industrial meat production. In this way, the industrial slaughterhouse is characterised by death being simultaneously everywhere and nowhere, thereby creating a terrain where life and death bleed into one another.

I draw on Jacques Derrida's work term la vie la mort / life death to elaborate on this complex terrain and illustrate how porcine bodies are deadened and enlivened by the logics of commodification.