Dr. Knut Christian Myhre, The Nordic African Institute, Uppsala

How to butcher an animal:

Reflections on normativity and relationality among the Chagga of Kilimanjaro

Abstract:

Over the past few decades, social anthropologists have grown increasingly impatient with normative statements and structures. In this paper, I argue that this impatience is largely due to a specific notion of normativity that is modeled on law, regulative rules, and social control. By investigating the slaughtering of animals and sharing of meat among the people of Rombo District, Kilimanjaro Region, Tanzania, I explore an alternative conception of constitutive normatively. In this endeavour, vernacular justifications for the sharing of meat are not approached as cultural norms with which practices may or may not concur. Rather, such statements are investigated with regards to their practical, material, and social concomitants. In this manner, the paper explores how normative statements are entangled with conceptual usages, which involve certain practices and objects, and constitute social relationships of a specific kind. The paper thus shows how people’s ability to claim and elicit specific shares of meat rests upon their engagement in practices and relationships that are both constitutive of the person who does the slaughtering, his reproductive capacities, as well as the animal that is slaughtered.
Dr. Knut Christian Myhre has for the past four years served as Nordic Research Fellow at the Nordic Africa Institute in Uppsala, and is currently taking up a position as a post doctoral research fellow at the Department of Social Anthropology, University of Oslo. He has done extensive anthropological field works in Eastern Tanzania on the basis of which he has published several articles in international journals; for further information, see http://www.nai.uu.se/research/researchers/knut_christian_myhre/
You can also meet Knut informally in an encounter after the seminar in the Corner Room where, as usual, refreshments will be served.

All interested are welcome!