Aristotle at the Döner Kebap Stand

I have been saying for quite some time that one of the most useful windows into a culture's folk-ontological commitments is the unique way it variously applies mass nouns and count nouns to foodstuffs. Russians see potatoes as a mass: e.g., give me some potato. This is revealing, I believe, of many other things besides.

It is with respect to animals, in particular, that these folk commitments might be thought at once to carry with them significant moral implications. Ordinarily, animals are taken as individual beings par excellence, and this at least since Aristotle said, in the Categories, that what he means by 'substance' is really just 'this particular horse or man' (to paraphrase).

Animals lose their substantial unity in slaughter and preparation, yet even there they frequently maintain their conceptual unity: for Thanksgiving, e.g., a family has a turkey, and that is as much a single, individual entity as the living, strutting tom that preceded it. The further we move down the scale of ritual importance, it seems, the more likely the creature, following its slaughter, is going to be treated as a mass, or, ironically, as a 'substance' not in the Aristotelian sense but in the decidedly modern sense (of which the dreaded 'pink slime' is arguably a limit case, much like prime matter in Aristotle's scheme).

I have been noticing for a while now that 'chicken', long mass-produced on a scale rivalled by no othery poultry, and long considered a very low-status meat, has filtered into German to describe the end product of the process of deanimalization, which is at the same time a process of deindividualization. I think it was the Turkish döner vendors who first started using the word chicken in compounds to describe the stuff they scrape off of those massive mounds of flesh that spin around all day, like brontosaurus thighs, in their tiny sweltering Imbissstuben. I have even seen some döner joints, run by Turks bent on German hypercorrectness, who have taken the first bold steps towards Germanification of the spelling: Tschickendöner.

Now the German language is extremely promiscuous, or at least it has an ongoing unsavory relationship with English, and is often seen to import words for which it would be extremely easy to find a properly Germanic equivalent. Why, oh why, do Germans say Citycall and Departmentstore? Every time I see these abominations I think to myself: this is not what I came here for. These unwanted babies are the product of the same cultural uncertainty that has German parents choosing names like Kevin and Lisa, to the utter disappointment of those of us who have come looking for Heinrichs, Wolfgangs, and Hedwigs. But anyhow, it's a different story with French, and when an English word pierces through the thick membrane of pride that has grown up around their tongue, you will know this is for strong conceptual reasons: there was an idea there that had to be expressed, and only English could do the trick. Enter chicken.

As is well known, French law requires advertisers who use English to include an asterisked translation in tiny text at the bottom (other languages as well, but de facto 90% or so English; most Italian allusions, for tomato sauce and stuff, are taken care of by the suffixation of an -issimo to a proper French word, which does not necessitate an asterisk). The burger chain Quick (and remind me to write another note soon on the word quick and its connection to the word bios, and thus its surprising proximity to the issue currently at hand), has decided to sell a 'chicken' product, and was compelled by law to offer a translation of this word. What did they come up with? 'Chicken' is a 'fried preparation of poulet', where a poulet, in turn, is conceptualized as an integral animal.

As we see with anthropomorphized hot dogs and the like, animals rendered into pure masses can then be reconstituted into something that is conceptualized as an integral being. But chicken, in the continental European sense, seems to be essentially a mass. The implications of this sort of example are tremendous, I think, for the way language shapes our conceptualization of the community of beings (a conceptualization that is ontological and moral at once).   

Comments

[Simon Lavery]

David Crystal, as usual, has sensible advice on these matters; how and when animals, fowl, etc., are treated as count nouns or not varies considerably - it's less clear cut than this post suggests. For example you might go to feed 'the ducks' in the park, but go shooting 'duck'. In fact as soon as a creature is hunted it becomes a generic mass noun: 'we're hunting lion'. Of course there are well-known exceptions to the normal plurals: sheep-sheep; deer-deer. What about fish-fishes? Language is full of grey areas and shifting conventions. Doesn't of course preclude the kind of 'folk ontologising' advocated by Mr Smith - I found the piece interesting. No use railing against invasive foreign loan-words, though: think Cnut and the tide...

[Simon Lavery]

Sorry for this postscript: the Crystal text I had in mind was his 'Rediscover Grammar' - an excellent introductory guide to the vagaries and inconsistencies of English grammar - he's refreshingly unprescriptive.

[Simon Nom]

Ah, chicken as mass. It's really a "breaded concoction that includes chicken." When I think of the word prepare in english, it seems more like what fried chicken really is. Préparation AU poulet, suggests that it is a mixture which includes chicken as an ingredient, but not necessarily the main one -ever more suspect, yes indeed. And it probably includes the chicken-stuffs of which we dare not speak, coming from multiple chickens, perhaps from multiple farms, or even multiple countries. Every chicken with his own language, accent and cultural references.
Quick is definitely lively. Have you ever watched a French kid run after a free pink balloon with multiple origin chicken-stuffs stuck to his greasy fingers on a Wednesday afternoon in Quick? Fun stuff. Lively indeed. Anyway, thank you. I enjoyed reading this.

[Christianebailey.wordpress.com]

In French, "poulet" refers both to a mass or an individual depending whether we say "UN poulet" (an individual) or "DU poulet" (a undifferentiated substance).

You talk about "anthropomorphized hot dogs", but I think acknowledging animals as individuals is not to "anthropomorphize" them (this would imply that only humans are individuals), but to personalize them, to think of them as person is the largest sense of the word.

As you said in a recent paper "A FORM OF WAR. ANIMALS, HUMANS, AND THE SHIFTING BOUNDARIES OF COMMUNITY," "the default assumption throughout most of human history has been that animals are themselves people, if not exactly in the same way we are."

(Excellent paper, btw).