Whispering to Hamburgers: A ritual of animist liberation from the instrumental object


iowyth hezel ulthiin, Toronto Metropolitan University

This presentation is a sustained meditation on eating that draws evidence from a situated analysis in conversation with popular culture, using an episode of Bobs Burgers and an encounter with a bear, as texts provoking this mediation. I tell a story about eating that situates me among others who are also trying to eat me. In the attempt to engage in ethical eating practices, and to recognize the interdependencies respectfully integrated by Indigenous ways of being, I discuss the ways that people could be seen to eat other people and, crucially, that a regularized form of eating requires one to deny the instantaneous recognition of mutually perceiving intelligence in ones food. In this, I argue that rituals of transubstantiation organize the processes of enclosure that turn living vitality from personhood into abstract (instrumental) matter. In making meat, I argue that such rituals allow instrumentalization to become a process that may become untethered from eating, becoming engaged in various sites as a tool of perception, where the transformation of a person into an object only requires the appropriate perceptual frame to become engaged. Whispering to hamburgers attempts to integrate intimate encounters with personhood within the act of eating. In drawing close the intimacies held between subjects and objects, I seek to bring forward the potential for personhood to emerge during such moments of recognition, allowing for the potential to regularize such encounters. Here, one may attend to the agential experience of ones food, as wavering into and out of the recognition of its potential histories (and interrupted futures). In seriously contemplating Indigenous ways of knowing, one may create space for greater compassionate awareness of those subjectivities that fail to cohere according to the standards proposed by supremacist modes of ranking and categorization. As such, a relational and ecological awareness of one’s body also draws one into a space of interpersonal intimacy which necessitates mutual recognition, allowing for a body-full negotiation of ones encounters in ways that allow for the suffering, desire, and attentiveness of one’s food (through being potential food oneself). As such, I attempt to draw attention to rituals of transubstantiation that may equally make people into objects or objects into people. This process attempts to manage encounters provoking thanatophany. These instances of relation offer a dark reflection of ones meatness and thus morality that must be continually contested if one wishes to remain other to ones other. Yet, I argue that to recognize the horror of eating is to enable oneself to engage seriously with the relation of a biological entity requiring fuel to live. In this interdependency, rightful relations emerge from attuned attention to the insecurities of contact. I argue that in the acknowledgment that people are meat too, one can enter into encounters with food more profoundly grounded in the recognition of the vulnerability of reliance. Moreso than even this, I believe that in the continual encounters with persons who may be located everywhere and anywhere, individuals may come to recognize the vitality of the world around them, thereby recognizing the terrain itself as supporting ones existence, in the air, water, and food, but even in the ground which supports the body, the floor, the walls, the lightbulbs reveal the vulnerability of ones dependence on the world, for existence.

This paper will be presented at the following session: