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- Title
Men Who Shout at Goats: Agrarian Cultivation and Gendered Slaughter on an Azorean Island.
- Authors
Burger, Tim
- Abstract
Across many world regions, the informal slaughter of livestock occupies an important place in rural day-to-day realities. This article examines killing goats on São Jorge Island to show how attention to slaughter enhances our understanding of gendered selfhood, human–animal relations, and the impacts of depopulation. Building on ethnography of smallholder farmers who see their masculinity and livelihoods endangered by demographic decline, I argue that their idea of agrarian cultivation underwrites verbal hostility against animals. Male farmers' concept of cultivation, here conceived as productive order-making between a threatening 'natural' and a desirable 'domestic' domain, is hence an ambivalent moral idiom. In moments of slaughter, the frustration about the difficulties of cultivation is expressed as men deriding goats to salvage a desired image of manhood and competence.
- Subjects
AZORES; AGRICULTURE; HUMAN-animal relationships; MASCULINITY; DEMOGRAPHIC change
- Publication
Social Analysis, 2023, Vol 67, Issue 2, p1
- ISSN
0155-977X
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.3167/sa.2023.670201