‘I heard a dog cry’: More-than-human interrelatedness, ethnicity and zootherapy in South Korean civil society discourse about dog meat consumption

Abstract

Korean diet is heavily based on meat. This is connected to a discursive tradition that associates the consumption of specific animal products with medicinal virtues. When justifying the use of nonhuman animals as curative commodities, Koreans often engage with ideologies about zootherapy, pure blood and ethnicity beyond the human world. Furthermore, alongside civil and state society discourse about South Korea’s ‘uniqueness’ as a nation (cf. concepts of jeong, uri, han, gi and Minjok literature), my participants also mobilized folk beliefs about care and necessary harm in the handling, treatment and processing of nonhuman animal bodies. Bringing together classic anthropological debates about primordial and instrumental ethnicity with a human geographical analysis of the shaping of East Asian post-industrial more-than-human landscapes, this paper examines civil society discourses about more-than-human interrelatedness, cultural uniqueness and bloodlines connected to dog meat consumption in South Korea.