Boiling pots
Human-animal interactions in cities are influenced by seasonal variation. Historically, summer heat has posed particular challenges. My presentation will focus on two distinct examples from the 19th century regarding heat related problems with animals in cities – livestock and the production of meat; insects (esp. flies and mosquitoes) in urban street traffic.” Each of these examples will highlight specific historical aspects how animals were seen as a threat to human visions of order in the city and how these alleged threats were addressed through means of public hygiene measures, medical interventions, and technological innovations. Through these empirical examples, the presentation will particularly address questions 1 and 3 from the CfP. It will demonstrate how heat affected the material flows of cities and how they led to new multispecies engagements with bodies in urban space. I also hope to raise conceptual questions about the relationship between heat and threat that was increasingly articulated by urban reformers. My presentation is going to draw on the fields of Historical Urban Studies, Multispecies Studies, and Science and Technology Studies.
@workshop HEATMATTERS
January 2023, Institute for European Ethnology, HU-Berlin
Transcript of audio summary
I want to talk a little bit how heat mattered in a multispecies arena of metropolitan centres in the 19th century and I’m just going to use sort of different examples. I will speak to you this morning about livestock, heat and urban markets.
Seasonal variation was a central force in livestock trading and in meat production. This was especially the case in Chicago. Chicago, as we know, is the sort of meat packing centre of the world in the 19th century and seasonal variation actually plays an important role in this. Because Chicago, with its continental climate that has very cold winters and very hot and humid summers, actually was not a good space for the building of slaughterhouses. And when they first emerged there in the 1860s, butchering was only possible between October and April, only during the cold months. And here we see a connection between both the transformation of urban space, the integration of animals, but also the controlling of environments, the reconfiguration of spaces in many ways, but in order to overcome natural conditions.
Heat was also a big factor in the slaughtering process itself. If you sort of open up animal bodies and extract blood and take the life force out of them this also, of course, radiates a lot of heat. But within the slaughtering process, we also have the heat that is generated in the disassembly, the actual working on bodies. There is also the physical labour of the butchers who exude heat. And this was quite an issue that they were talking about: the steam – because there’s also lots of water involved – the steaming conditions in slaughterhouses, which were very difficult for workers leading to all kinds of health problems, you know, arthritis, rheumatism, after all heat exhaustion.
Heat was part of the process of turning animals from the living to the dead and turning animal bodies into carcasses, into meat. And one of the big issues, this is what you can see here (see added picture), is loosening, loosening the bristles on pigs, for instance. And what how that was done; they were put into these boiling vats with boiling water because after heating them, you could scrape off the bristles really easily. And because they wanted to keep the skins to make leather, but they didn’t want to keep the bristles on there. So, the body itself is, you know, a depository of heat, but the disassembly also often takes heat in order to pull the body apart.
Meat as a product was also very much related to challenges of heat. Heat also becomes not just a way to identify bodies as living creatures or to separate different body parts, but also to keep flesh edible and to keep sort of another production starting: microbes and acting and sort of spoiling processes starting which heat makes that go much faster.
And this also led then to particular urban problems with regard to transporting meat from slaughterhouses back to the butcher shops. Because for centuries butchers slaughtered in the back of their shops, but in the process of urbanisation it was said that well we can’t have sort of people slaughtering all over, people didn’t want to hear it anymore and they didn’t want to see the blood in the streets. So, they figured it makes much more sense to have central places where animals are killed and have these slaughterhouses that could be controlled by the state and so forth. But that created a new issue because then the meat had to be taken back to the butcher shops.
They started to sort of these different railroad cart technologies, but to place them, you know, a little bit apart so that their body heat didn’t lead to further exhaustion to include watering troughs so that they could drink and not overheat and to also integrate a little bit means of ventilation. And this was for the transport of livestock. So, with animals you want to keep them from dying of heat exhaustion and on the other hand, with meat, you want to keep it from spoiling.
Here then it became a big factor how you could ship meat over distances. And Gustavo Swift, one of the big Chicago meatpackers, was one of the big innovators who in the 1880s revolutionised the meat trade. And one of the big innovations that he made was the railroad, the cooled refrigerated railroad car. And this invention really revolutionised the meat trade and made Chicago the hog butcher of the world eventually.
And I think what the slaughterhouses show us is that they are networks of heat. So, heat is not just a thing, right? It’s a network of different constellations where seasonal conditions, of course, play a large role based on climatic conditions, climate conditions – summer heat, of course, being the most important factor. Bodily heat is another big aspect in these networks. Bodily heat often connected to physical health, particularly fever, sort of what is the normal state of bodily heat and what happens if that goes over to a different condition – a fever being the most extreme with regard to heat. But also heat as an indicator of threat, as an indicator of threat to life of living creatures, but also with regard to illnesses and so forth. Heat as a factor in spoiling and spoiling, you know, products, but heat also and this is, I guess, the example here, heat is a multispecies urban problem.