Conventional versus Ritual Slaughter–Ethical Aspects and Meat Quality

Social pressure on increased protection and welfare of animals results mainly from the initiative of people living in the urbanized parts of the world. The respect for the right to freedom of religion, which is indisputably one of the fundamental liberal rights, must be taken into account. The right to freedom to religion also includes the right to follow a religion’s dietary recommendations. The aim of the literature analysis was to systematize the knowledge on the ethical aspects and quality of meat obtained from carcasses of animals subjected to conventional and ritual slaughter. Consistent with the importance of ritual slaughter for humans of two major faiths (Islam and Judaism), it is important that scientists be objective when evaluating these practices from an animal welfare and meat quality point of view. To evaluate the welfare of the slaughtered animal, it is necessary to openly discuss ritual slaughter and the improvement of its methods. The quality of meat and the degree of bleeding of animals do not always correlate with the ritual slaughter method used.

Rights and Social Inclusion

Anthropological research played an important role in tracing the ethnographic contours of the rise and transformation of rights in the post-Cold War period. This chapter surveys some of the most important currents in the anthropology of rights as an enduring context for the wider field of anthropology and law. First, the chapter examines key developments in the anthropology of human rights, which served as a methodological and conceptual anchor for the post-Cold War anthropology of rights more generally. The chapter then turns to another category of rights with which anthropologists have been closely associated, both as researchers and as engaged scholars: Indigenous Peoples’ rights. Next, the chapter examines anthropological research that has revealed the importance of what might be called non-liberal categories of rights, that is, rights that are not based, historically or conceptually, in the development of liberal rights within the Western philosophical and political tradition. The chapter concludes by looking to the future: how will the anthropology of rights evolve in the coming years, both in preserving certain core concerns and in moving in new directions?

Breaking New Spain, 1808–21

In 1800, New Spain was the richest region of the Americas, socially diverse, deeply unequal, stabilized by a regime of judicial mediation. The Iguala movement, led by Agustín de Iturbide, in 1821 severed the tie between Spain and New Spain, the bond that had long sustained the power of the Spanish Empire. But the Mexico proclaimed in 1821 came out of years of revolution. The break began when Napoleon invaded Spain in 1808, setting off debates about sovereignty in Mexico City, leading to military a coup that kept silver flowing to Spain. Two years of political debates and social predations led to the 1810 Hidalgo revolt. Attacks on property and trade broke silver capitalism by 1812, when the Cádiz Constitution promised liberal rights to back armed powers in Spain and New Spain. Insurgents fought on, making new communities and breaking oligarchic families while women challenged patriarchy. New Spain was gone in 1821, when military commanders and struggling oligarchs claimed independence. This essay offers a synthesis of the pivotal transformations—underway from 1808—that made the break with Spain possible, perhaps inevitable—and made the construction of the Mexico envisioned in Iguala impossible.

Gender Equality in and on Tibetan Buddhist Nuns’ Terms

Gender equality and feminism are often cast as concepts foreign to the Tibetan cultural region, even as scholarship exploring alliances between Buddhism and feminism has grown. Critics of this scholarship contend that it superimposes liberal discourses of freedom, egalitarianism, and human rights onto Asian Buddhist women’s lives, without regard for whether/how these accord with women’s self-understandings. This article aims to serve as a corrective to this omission by engaging transnational feminist approaches to listen carefully to the rhetoric, aims, and interpretations of a group of Tibetan nuns who are redefining women’s activism in and on their own terms. We conclude that their terms are not derivative of foreign or secular liberal rights-based theories, but rather outgrowths of Buddhist principles taking on a new shape in modern Tibet.

A State Affair?: Notions of the State in Discourses on Trans Rights in Sweden

Departing from previous scholarly work that has studied the effects of state violence and conditional state recognition on the living conditions of gender-variant people (Beauchamp 2019; Linander 2018), this chapter explores the function of narratives of the state in discourses on trans rights in Sweden. It provides insights into the relation between state and civil society, and the practicalities of governance, through an examination of how activists interpellate the state and hold it accountable. With a critical inquiry into the hegemonic narrative that the Swedish state has a responsibility to alleviate the suffering of gender-variant citizens as a background, it addresses and situates the tension between liberal rights discourses of trans rights on the one hand and transformative politics asking for restorative justice on the other hand (Spade 2011). The argument is that the interpellation of the state can be understood as a strategy to repoliticise the violent effects of governance in times of neoliberalism.

How Place-Specific Duties Make Borders Morally Relevant

Many people today hold that borders are morally arbitrary, and therefore we should seek a world without borders. This chapter challenges this view. It holds that borders matter morally because bounded jurisdictions sustain liberal rights, which are still the most effective means to resist oppression. However, the chapter argues, the value of borders does not come from grounding equal rights among the members of a group defined by identity, instead what defines the scope of right is place. The chapter examines the idea of place and place-specific duties. The chapter argues that rights cannot be upheld unless the beneficiaries participate in common institutions with others, and a necessary part of these institutions is indexed to place rather than identity. Such institutions, including the rule of law, are embodied and require specific local practices of cooperation. This explains why we need borders to coordinate action in modern societies marked by pluralism.