Working Undercover in a Slaughterhouse: an interview with Timothy Pachirat | Medium | August 2014
Timothy Pachirat is Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and the author of Every Twelve Seconds: Industrialized Slaughter and the Politics of Sight (Yale University Press, 2011), an ethnographic account of his undercover job in a cattle slaughterhouse.
“I wanted to understand how massive processes of violence become normalized in modern society, and I wanted to do so from the perspective of those who work in the slaughterhouse. My hunch was that close attention to how the work of industrialized killing is performed might illuminate not only how the realities of industrialized animal slaughter are made tolerable, but also the way distance and concealment operate in analogous social processes: war executed by volunteer armies; the subcontracting of organized terror to mercenaries; and the violence underlying the manufacturing of thousands of items and components we make contact with in our everyday lives.”