From the pressing current debate on the ethical treatment of animals  to the suggestions of evolutionary biologists that stalking prey  contributed critically to the brain development of hominids, to the  advances in our understanding of the importance of sacrifice in  driving the growth of a cattle economy, meat has emerged in recent  years as the focus of a wide array of scholarly investigations, within  such fields as anthropology, classical studies, religion, sociology,  ethics, and evolutionary biology. The success of Michael Pollan’s  book, The Omnivore’s Dilemma, is a measure of the resonance of the  issue in the imagination of many beyond the academy. The current  intellectual climate is right for a conference drawing together some  of the leading theorists and investigators on the topic, approaching  it from a variety of viewpoints. Our aim is to gain some insight into  the human experience of killing and eating flesh.  This will include  further discussion of the role this act has played in the formation of  human nature and culture, the anxieties it provokes in the human  imagination, and the modes by which societies attempt to denature it  and authorize it.
 
Speakers and general topics:

Biology and Evolution

Craig B. Stanford* on Primates and Meat Adaptive Genes
Professor of Anthropology and Biological Sciences, Co-Director, USC Jane Goodall Research Center, Research Associate in Vertebrate Biology, Los Angeles County Museum of Natural History
 
Henry Bunn on Meat Making us Human
Professor of Anthropology
University of Wisconsin - Madison

Anthropology  (Symbolism, Domestication and Hunting)

James Serpell on Human and Animal Relations
Professor of Humane Ethics and Animal Welfare
School of Veterinary Medicine, University of Pennsylvania
Director, Center for the Interaction of Animals and Society

David Wengrow on Cattle Cult Lecturer, Institute of Archaeology
University College London
   
Religion (Killing, Sacrifice, the Soul)

Annette Reed on blood sacrifice
Assistant Professor
Department of Religious Stuides
University of Pennsylvania
 
Thomas A. Carlson on animals and Christian religious thought
Professor of Religious Studies
University of California, Santa Barbara

Classical Perspectives

Jeremy McInerney on Cattle Markets in Athens
Davidson Kennedy Associate Professor
Department of Classical Studies
University of Pennsylvania
 
Egbert Bakker on the Consumption of Meat in the Odyssey
Professor of Classics
Yale University

A Colloquium on the Significance of Meat in Human Society

The relationship between ourselves and the animals we eat is vexed, prompting an anxiety runs like a leitmotif through cultures and civilizations around the world. Baudrillard, for example,  writes,  “Bestiality, and its principle of uncertainty, must be killed in animals.” Yet the butchery of animals is fraught, often transformed by ritual into a sacred violence that must be contained, or displaced entirely into an alien world of abbatoirs and meat processing plants.  Vegetarianism, the complete renunciation of eating meat, is only the most obvious response to these anxieties, although even here the gradations of vegetarianism—from lacto-ovo to veganism—point to a persistent anxiety over the ethical boundaries that separate us from other creatures. Have we the right to inflict pain on other animals? Does the sentience of an animal imbue it with rights?

Even before the advent of the Animal Rights Movement such issues were fundamentally important to major world religious traditions, notably Hinduism and Buddhism. Western thinking, though heir to some taboos regarding food, was long ready to exploit a Cartesian notion of animals as natural automata. Ironically, the farther we have moved from a coherent, direct system of raising, killing and eating animalls, the more disquiet we seem to feel regarding our carnivory.  At the same time, however, research suggests that meat eating played a crucial role in the development of humans and human society. Meat adaptive genes have been linked to longer lifespans, and carnivory is a high yield food practice. If hunting was the defining social action that distinguished us from apes, does meat eating make us human?

In this colloquium we bring together speakers froma variety of fields, ranging from primatology to religious studies. Our aim is to present a set of papers that bridges the divisions between different fields of inquiry and explores every aspect of the meat experience from a truly interdisciplinary approach. Our contention is that cultural studies, broadly construed, can only profit by encouraging a much greater degree of communication between academic disciplines. We do not aim at a unified theory of cultural development, but do believe that the theme of “meat” permits and requires an examination of every aspect of human culture, possibly even of human nature.