Assembling halal meat and poultry production in Brazil: Agents, practices, power and sites

Abstract

Over the last few decades, an emerging, thoroughly globalized market for halal products has been generating increasingly sophisticated, diverse, contested halal regulations. Today, the Brazilian halal meat and poultry industry is among the world’s largest exporters of halal meat and poultry. Against this backdrop, this paper examines how halal meat and poultry production has been assembled in Brazil. Drawing on assemblage thinking and ethnographic fieldwork, this paper traces assembling practices of halal meat and poultry production and sheds light on how halal standards have been taken on board. Current research has conceptualized halal and other food standards predominantly as mobile, globalized knowledge objects through which centres assemble and govern food production at a distance. However, I argue that halal meat and poultry production is assembled through sites and their interconnections – including sites of production and others – rather than globally. The assemblage is constituted and shaped as power is transmitted through assembling practices (e.g. the mobilization of Muslim labour from abroad), and sites (e.g. meat processing plants, agribusiness cities, sites of Muslim workforce recruitment and migration networks). The findings suggest that future research on the “bigger picture” of halal should take the role of sites, practices and transmission of power into closer consideration, and address the nexus between halal standards, skilled Muslim labour and migration. Like Brazil, most of the world’s large halal producers are countries where Muslims are a minority population.