First, please note I am putting this in GQ’s, not Great Debates. Not looking to fight about the issue, I’m looking for factual info on a specific aspect of this.
So… India. Lots of starving people. Cows walking around the street, can’t be touched because they are considered to be gods there.
As a Westerner, I can’t help but think of that as silly, much as I see any form of idol worshipping. But obviously they take it incredibly serious there, as they’d literally rather starve to death than eat cows.
So my question is this: is there any anthropological evidence as to how, of all animals, cows ended up becoming deities there? It seems much of the Middle East used religion to outlaw eating pork, so it seems a bit odd that Hinduism went in such a different direction.
I’ve heard theories that pork was outlawed due to trigonosis. I know orthodox Jews disagree with that, but it seems to be a partially viable theory when you remove the religious context. I’d assume Muslims did it for similar reasons, or because Islam sprang from Judaism. Any similar theories on the outlawing of beef?
Cows play one HUGE role in India that can not be overlooked when you take into account their sacred status. Dried cow dung is a very common fuel there. You can almost be assured that the fact that India isn’t entirely devoid of trees is due to the fact that dried cow dung burns well.
Thanks for the book link. As for cow dung, I’m sure it’s crucial. But you can have your cake and eat it, too. Or in this case, no reason you can’t have your cow pie and still eat… never mind.
Hindus also use cows for their milk and cheese. Butchering a cow gives you meat – which would spoil quickly in India’s climate – and cuts off any milk or cheese. So, for practical purposes, it’s better to keep the cow alive. This probably was the genesis of the belief.
As far as pigs are concerned, the trichonisis/tapeworm connection was not known in ancient days. More likely, the issue had to do with the animals the Israelites were familiar with. They generally were herders, so they were familiar with sheep, goats, and cattle. Pigs, OTOH, were generally raised by farmers, and were outside the Israelites’ daily life.
The way I remember Harris’ theory the taboo arose because cattle are the main plough animals in India. No matter how hungry you are after the crops have failed, it’s a really bad idea to eat your means of planting for next season. My WAG is that this reasoning may also have something to do with the Scandinavian/British horsemeat taboo.
Mind you Harris also pointed out that cows that say died of natural causes would be sold for meat to Muslims, so I think pretty much all the bases were covered really.
You’re looking at it backwards. The reason there are so many Indians is because they protect the cows. If the Indians had not protected cows with religious prohibitions against harming or killing one, it’s doubtful they would have reached the high population density they’ve got now. I think there’s a passing reference in Guns, Germs, and Steel to the effect that they’re one of the only big animals in India that can be domesticated, live in a wide geographic area, and can be used for labor. They’re still used in most areas to plow fields and they’re a much better use of resources than machinery in most cases.
Not only would it be stupid from an food/resources/economic point of view to start eating cows but it’s also a religious and cultural issue. Asking them to eat cows would probably be like asking you to eat dog, only worse since there’s little moral aversion in Western culture to dog eating; it’s just cultural training.
There are lots of poor people in the US who don’t have enough food. Why don’t we use the stray dogs and cats that are destroyed by Animal Services to feed them? The production of dog food and cat food takes up resources we could better use to feed hungry people. This is pretty much the same issue as your OP framed in a different way.
An Indian and a Hindu checking in. AFAIK, cows are not gods, per se. We refer to them as Gau Mata , or Mother Cow, the rationale being that since we drink cow’s milk, it occupies the same position as a mother would. Also, two of our gods, Krishna and Shiva are usually depicted to be in the company of cows. Krishna was a cowherder, and Shiva has a faithful cow, Nandi to keep him company. These raise the status of the cows in the Hindu mind.
Another, historical reason is that the Aryans used to worship the cows because it gave them milk, ploughed their fields, and when it died, their skin provided them with leather. This gave the cows a special place in the society.
Hope that helped.
I will also add that not all Hindus refuse to eat beef. Some do, particularly in provinces like Kerala where cows are regularly slaughtered for meat. In fact I believe India actually exports beef to surrounding nations. It is often both a caste/class issue as well as a regional difference.
In addition to milk and curds/cheese, cows are the source of butter and more importantly ghee ( a type of clarified butter ), which is important both to cuisine and, as I understand it, ritually. Still when dairy animals have exhausted their usefulness, in many areas of India they are indeed shipped off for slaughter.
So it’s hard to make blanket statements about either “India” or “Hindus” in this context.
The horse meat taboo may be one that’s purely religious, or religious/political. The vikings ate horse meat, and they were definitively agricultural. Horse was expensive, and hardly a big part of the diet, but when you wanted a kick ass sacrifice you’d kill a horse. You’d put its head on a pole outside the hov (temple), pour the blood on the statues of the gods, and eat the meat.
When a new religion was imported, and some literally cutthroat competition ensued, eating horse meat was associated with worshipping the norse gods, and became one of those are-you-with-us-or-against-us lithmus tests. In one of Snorre Sturlason’s *) sagas, there’s a Christian wannabe-king whose potential supporters demand that he eat some of the sacrifical meal. He negotiates a compromise: He’ll bite the handle of the kettle used for boiling the meat. He then cheats by placing a handkerchief on it before biting. (I don’t remember if he survived the resulting outrage.) A norse derisive term for Christian is blotnekter = sacrifice-denier.
*) Note that Snorre should be read with a healthy dose of scepticism - he wrote in part about events taking place several hundred years before he lived, and wasn’t above making up stuff to improve a story and letting his bias influence his stories.
It’s not a strong taboo these days. You can find horse meat sausage in (some) Norwegian shops.
One other take is that a race of people does not kill and eat the animals that are useful to it. Roman European descendants generally do not consider eating horses or dogs, as a horse or a dog is very useful to the race of people in question. Cows on the other hand, do not serve much of a purpose to these peoples, hence they are fair game.
If Harris actually wrote that, either he is too abysmally ignorant to know what he was talking about, or maybe he found cases where Muslims were hoodwinked. The fact is that an animal that died of natural causes is not allowed as a meat source in Islamic law. The Qur’an verses that say “Forbidden to you is the meat of dead animals…” state this categorically. The only exception is when you would starve to death if you didn’t eat that because there was nothing else to eat.
Speaking as a vegan, I would say slaughtered animals are just as dead as animals that dropped dead. I mean, duh. But the Qur’an language, for some reason, uses “dead” to mean “died of natural causes”, as opposed to slaughtered. The Muslim slaughter uses the same principle as the Jewish, to slit the throat and drain all the blood out.
Have you ever been to India? Have you seen the markets where Muslim butchers sell meat to Muslim consumers? Would a Muslim buy meat from a non-Muslim butcher? The answer is no. Unless the butcher happened to be Jewish, which is OK in Islam. (There are Indian Jews in the state of Kerala, where Muslims also live.) In India, Muslims do not buy meat from Hindu butchers and that’s that. There is no scenario in India whereby a Hindu could butcher a cow found dead and sell it to Muslims. Not unless said Hindu was able to successfully pass himself/herself off as a Muslim (not an easy trick to pull off), and defraud the buyer about the source of the meat. Once the fraud was exposed, there would be hell to pay. No, I just can’t see that happening. Looks like Harris made up something out of his own imagination. Unless you can provide anything to back up his assertion.
Indian Muslims eat mostly goat and chicken anyway. Yeah, they do eat beef, but not all the time, not like Americans who think they have to eat beef every damn day. There are lots of Indian Muslims who have beef only at rare (NPI) intervals if at all. There is a hadith attributed to Prophet Muhammad saying that cows’ milk is “healing,” cows’ ghee is “medicine,” but beef is “disease.”
Speaking as a carnivore, there’s a huge difference between eating the meat of an animal that was slaughtered and eating the meat of one that was found dead. What killed it? Disease? Poisoning? How long has it been dead? I mean, duh… “Died of natural causes” is a very dangrous thing where your source of food is concerned. That the animal is dead is not the issue, it’s how it got that way that’s important. Ever had food poisoning? It ain’t fun.
– Speaking broadly, Hindus do not worship cows as gods. In Hinduism, anyone or anything can and often is worshipped, including prepubescent girls, unremarkable mounds of dirt, and flowers. The divine is present in everyone and everything in Hinduism. Indeed, everyone and everything is the divine. Tat tvam asi. God is not an entity separate from creation. The Hindu greeting with palms together is literally a prayer recognising the divine in the other person. Thus, Hindus literally worship everyone. The cow plays a more significant role than other animals and is considered particularly auspicious. Why? Read Marvin Harris.
– The Aryans did eat beef. The prohibition on eating beef came later. As Harris says, the prohibition on slaughtering cows for food made them much more available as sources of agricultural labor (principally) and dairy products, fuel, and fertiliser (secondarily). Sure, there can theoretically be a balance between eating some cows and not eating others, but food prohibitions usually do not follow such rationalistic lines. And communities that start eating something tend to eat a lot of it (especially if it’s as tasty as beef). Compare other societies’ avoidance of eating pork, or insects, or other humans (or compare sex taboos – sex between adult kin might not always have bad consequences). Yes, there might be cases to make where a balance could be achieved, but maybe it’s better not to go down that road at all. Cultural characteristics are not based on rational policymaking.
Harris says –
Further more, it is far more economic to let scrawny cows scrounge for food than to fatten them for food:
Nevertheless, cows sometimes are eaten during times of famine. Additionally, there is a community of untouchables (chamars), who are permitted to dispose of cow carcasses as they see fit. Unseen by general society, according to Harris, “In one way or another, twenty million cattle die every year, and a large portion of their meat is eaten by these carrion-eating ‘untouchables.’”
There’s a lot that goes on in the world that is beyond the literal strictures of a person’s faith. Just as there are Hindus who eat beef (hoodwinked? perhaps, perhaps not), there are Muslims who eat carrion (hoodwinded? perhaps, perhaps not). There are even Muslims in the Middle East who eat pork. But they keep that quiet. The consumption of food is much more beholden to agricultural and environmental circumstances than it is to professed faith. But one must keep up appearances, after all.
There is plenty of food in India. If you went there, you’d never go without a meal. The problem with hunger anywhere in the world is not the sheer amount of food, but distribution- namely, who can afford food. Throwing a few cows in to the mix will not fix the problems of a family that cannot afford much more than a cooking pot and a handful of lentils now and then. Any sort of meat is way above the price range of the poorest of the poor. Even vegetables are precious.
There are plenty of cows in Hindu South Asia (Nepal/India) pretty much wandering around, with the right of way. Or the right to just lie there. I get the impression that they aren’t so much actively worshipped as respectfully tolerated. I also get the impression that the “free range” cow isn’t doing a lot (or any) work, but is protected by credit given to others who do and did.
You can also easily get a nice juicy water buffalo steak in a lot of places; presumably this isn’t technically “cow” and therefore on the menu. Link (scroll to “meat.”)
I was surprised at the number of pigs I saw in Rajasthan since I thought all Hindus were vegetarians. Apparrently I was wrong about that. IIRC, the Muslim population in Rajasthan is small.