Cheap Meat Essay

744 Words3 Pages
ANTH2302 10/18/12 Education: The Key to Change One of the oddest behaviors of the human race resides in the tendency to impregnate part of one’s identity in an object. People associate objects, tokens, and other seemingly meaningless items with historical events, personality traits, and even entire persons. Take, for example, an American teenager’s bedroom, decorated with many assorted nick knacks. The posters decorating the walls, the little cheap trinkets lining the bookcases—these all may seem like pure décor, but most of the time these objects hold memories for the teenager. A past event, a good friend, a favorite song: all of these abstract ideas and more may be brought to life by a solid, tangible piece. Now, instead of just one person assigning an idea to an object, take a whole group of people who back something, like food, with cultural significance. That is what the Pacific Island nations have done with sheep flaps in the book Cheap Meat by Deborah Gewertz and Frederick Errington. However, because sheep flaps have become imbued with cultural meaning, they are now the center of controversy. These fatty meats symbolize the ongoing relations of inequality between first and third world countries, and the answer of “banning flap meat” all together will not solve the schema associated this food item. Instead, the infrastructure of the Pacific Islander’s culture must change in order for any equality to be realized. To begin this drastic change in culture for the Pacific Islands, the surrounding first world countries, like New Zealand, must first accept and integrate the third world country as a true area to “manage distribution” and use them in “reciprocity, redistribution, and market exchange” (Heider 204). As of present, New Zealand traders mentioned in chapters 2 and 3 of Cheap Meat explain that the industry shifted from a trade in whole carcasses to
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