I’ve been reading a number of things regarding ancient China lately (15th to 19th century or thereabouts.) In both fiction and non-fiction, I keep coming across references to the profession of a butcher as generally the lowest of the low, on a status with prostitution and often referred to as “polluted” and dirty. It seems to especially apply to pig butchers, but also butchers in general. To be married (arranged) to a butcher was seen as a horrible fate, despite the fact that a butcher would likely bring home more money than a farmer.
Okay, besides the obvious distaste some people may have for killing animals, what gives? In all cases, there is no reference to vegetarianism in any sense… in fact, fancy banquets are described in which there are whole roasted pigs, pig’s feet, many pork dishes as well as other meats. The closest to China I’ve ever been is living in Singapore for a while, and never did I know a Chinese vegetarian, though a number of my Indian friends were/are vegetarian.
So why in ancient China does it seem that people were perfectly okay eating meat, but looked with such disdain on those people that did the necessary “dirty work” to provide such meat? Anyone?
I can’t say, but I can say that butchering was considered an unclean profession in both Korea and Japan as well. It’s thought that it was due to the adoption of Buddhism, which is, theoretically if not in practice, vegetarian. So it’s possible the same thing was true in China, where Buddhism was also very strong.
I suspect Buddhism put a “karmic” stamp on what was a far older concept of ritual impurity.
It’s not just that you ought to be a vegetarian, it’s that by exposing yourself daily to blood and gore, you make yourself unsuitable to enter the presence of the gods (at the temple or whereever). And since such professions relegated to caste, you must have done something really awful in your past life to be born into a family of butchers.
Thanks for the info. I can understand the “unclean” idea and how killing animals would certainly be bad “karma” - I just still find it very odd that most people had no issues with eating the meat. They looked down on these butchers with such disdain, yet ate the products of the butcher’s labor! Again, in most of these references there is no mention of eating meat as being bad. In fact, many complain when there is no meat at a meal due to poverty, yet are then horrified that someone is betrothed to a butcher.
Then again, many such old traditions make no sense… like how a woman’s worth is determined by her ability to have sons, yet she is considered “polluted” for 100 days after giving birth to this wonderful boy child who was born of… an unclean, lowly woman. Strange contradicitions.
You should never underestimate the importance of hypocrisy in human behavior. This certainly isn’t the only case of something like this happening. In the antebellum South, slave traders were looked down on, even by slave owners. In a lot of places where execution is accepted and even endorsed, executioners are kept anonymous because they fear the social stigma. Like one article about the attempt to force Florida to reveal the name of it’s executioner said, “While many people support the death penalty in general, there’s a sense that actually carrying out the sentence is dirty, shameful work.”
I’m sure you can find other professions that carry with them social stigma, even by people who enjoy the benefit that those professions bring.
Butchering animals has historically been a literally dirty job. Butchers were caked with offal and they smelled bad. They didn’t take showers. It was a gross job.
People wore leather too, but actually tanning it was one of the nastiest jobs you could imagine, and tanners were equally low on the social pecking order.
Just to add an observation; a lot of traditional Chinese cooking involves serving meat chopped up and unrecognisable (cite: Best Food & Beverage Products and Services – ArticlesBase.com) which would certainly add a buffer between the people eating the animal and the creature itself compared to the individual who killed and prepared it.
My history professor in college told us that in pre-modern Europe, butchers were respected: meat was a precious commodity, and a talented butcher can extract more and better meat from a carcass than any enthusiastic layman.
Mind you, sometimes history professors will themselves repeat things they heard at some conference somewhere without really thinking about it.
Lots of men who regularly pay for the services of prostitutes at the same time look down on those prostitutes as filthy and degraded.
You’d think a man who pays women for sex would show some respect for the women who provide the services he needs, but it is frequently the case that he hates and despises those women. A little thought into the psychology of the situation can explain the seeming contradiction.
You can say the same thing about people who work at fast food joints. Lots of people patronize them, but actually working at one is regarded as lowly, and patrons often treat them with arrogance and contempt.
And this is a society which ostensibly has an egalitarian culture and ideology. The idea that all people are inherently equal is relatively modern. Throughout most of history, people had no such assumption and presumed a stratified class system as the natural, god-intended order. They would actually be insulted if you told them all classes were equal.
Wouldn’t your ancient artisan’s shop and home be the same building or at least very close by? In other words, a butcher would basically live in a butcher shop.
I have a hazy recollection that Buddhism forbids cutting into a body. The only recent information I’ve come across regarding that was from a re-run of MAS*H (Korean doctors who claimed that they’d never performed surgery because they were Buddhist), which is hardly the pinnacle of reliable cites, but I’m reasonably sure that I’d read it in a more authoritative book years gone by as well.
There could be something like that somewhere in the different sects of Buddhism, but AFAIK there isn’t any religion-wide prohibition. For example, Taiwan’s Buddhist Tzu Chi General Hospital has gotten some fame for its advanced surgical techniques for things like organ transplants.
No matter how much you love eating meat, the fact is that converting a live animal into convenient chunks and slices of meat is usually a pretty ghastly process. Even today calling someone a “butcher” is not likely to be a compliment.
Butchering meat is on par with other skilled laborers. Even in the United States meat packers made a pretty decent living until the process was largely automatized or given the assembly line treatment and taken over by illegal aliens. (Not a dig against the aliens…the industry actively recruits them.) Being a butcher was a pretty respectable occupation in the west. You weren’t high class or anything but you could make a decent living.