Timothy Pachirat

This is an account of industrialized killing from a participant's point of view. The author, political scientist Timothy Pachirat, was employed undercover for five months in a Great Plains slaughterhouse where 2,500 cattle were killed per day—one every twelve seconds. Working in the cooler as a liver hanger, in the chutes as a cattle driver, and on the kill floor as a food-safety quality-control worker, Pachirat experienced firsthand the realities of the work of killing in modern society. He uses those experiences to explore not only the slaughter industry but also how, as a society, we facilitate violent labor and hide away that which is too repugnant to contemplate. Through his vivid narrative and ethnographic approach, Pachirat brings to life massive, routine killing from the perspective of those who take part in it. He shows how surveillance and sequestration operate within the slaughterhouse and in its interactions with the community at large. He also considers how society is organized to distance and hide uncomfortable realities from view. With much to say about issues ranging from the sociology of violence and modern food production to animal rights and welfare, Every Twelve Seconds is an important and disturbing work.

Industrialized Slaughter and the Politics of Sight

Every Twelve Seconds

industrialized slaughter and the politics of sight

Every twelve seconds

Summoned by an anonymous Prosecutor, ten contemporary ethnographers gather in an aging barn to hold a trial of Alice Goffman’s controversial ethnography, On the Run. But before the trial can get underway, a one-eyed wolfdog arrives with a mysterious liquid potion capable of rendering the ethnographers invisible in their fieldsites. Presented as a play that unfolds in seven acts, the ensuing drama provides readers with both a practical guide for how to conduct immersive participant-observation research and a sophisticated theoretical engagement with the relationship between ethnography as a research method and the operation of power. By interpolating "how-to" aspects of ethnographic research with deeper questions about ethnography’s relationship to power, this book presents a compelling introduction for those new to ethnography and rich theoretical insights for more seasoned ethnographic practitioners from across the social sciences. Just as ethnography as a research method depends crucially on serendipity, surprise, and an openness to ambiguity, the book’s dramatic and dialogic format encourages novices and experts alike to approach the study of power in ways that resist linear programs and dogmatic prescriptions. The result is a playful yet provocative invitation to rekindle those foundational senses of wonder and generative uncertainty that are all too often excluded from conversations about the methodologies and methods we bring to the study of the social world.

Ethnography and the Immersive Study of Power

Among Wolves

This book provides a benchmark treatise on the relationship between ethnography and interpretive approaches to research in the social sciences by accomplishing four specific objectives. First, it situates ethnography as a research method within a broader field of methodologies, contrasting ethnography conducted and written within an interpretive methodology against ethnography conducted and written within a positivist methodology. Second, it maps the range of approaches to ethnography within an interpretive methodology with a specific emphasis on the stances interpretive ethnographies implicitly or explicitly take on issues of truth and power. Third, it provides readers of interpretive ethnography with major evaluative criteria while simultaneously offering practitioners of interpretive ethnography guidelines for conducting and writing interpretive ethnography. And fourth, it draws on the unique strengths of interpretive ethnography to advance a series of provocations and questions about broader tendencies in mainstream social science research. In contrast to other treatments of ethnography that either ignore or conflate the relationship between ethnography as a research method and broader interpretive and/or positivist methodologies, Pachirat explicitly emphasizes the distinction between method and methodology in order to underscore the advantages of conducting ethnography within an interpretive framework. Rather than drawing inspiration primarily from abstract philosophical literature, Ethnography and Interpretation relies throughout on discussions of actual, exemplary ethnographies in the social sciences to illustrate and animate its arguments and propositions. This concise volume will be valuable reading for teachers, students, and practitioners of ethnographic research across the social sciences.

Timothy Pachirat

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