khoj özeeri

The limits of my language are the limits of my world.   
-Ludwig Wittgenstein

I saw this quote while I was walking past an NYU building on LaGuardia Place the other day.  It reminded me of an article I recently read in the National Geographic magazine called Vanishing Voices.   The article discussed the disappearance of small  or endangered languages in favor of big language like English, Mandarin and Spanish.  Among other things, the article asks us to reflect on what is potentially lost when a word disappears. I was particularly affected by one of the examples the author, Russ Rymer, used.

The article begins in Tuva in southern Siberia with the Mongush family as they prepare to slaughter a sheep for dinner.  Rymer is reflecting on words that are untranslatable from the Tuvan language such as,

“…khoj özeeri, the Tuvan method of killing a sheep. If slaughtering livestock can be seen as part of humans’ closeness to animals, khoj özeeri represents an unusually intimate version. Reaching through an incision in the sheep’s hide, the slaughterer severs a vital artery with his fingers, allowing the animal to quickly slip away without alarm, so peacefully that one must check its eyes to see if it is dead. In the language of the Tuvan people, khoj özeeri means not only slaughter but also kindness, humaneness, a ceremony by which a family can kill, skin, and butcher a sheep, salting its hide and preparing its meat and making sausage with the saved blood and cleansed entrails so neatly that the whole thing can be accomplished in two hours (as the Mongushes did this morning) in one’s good clothes without spilling a drop of blood. Khoj özeeri implies a relationship to animals that is also a measure of a people’s character. As one of the students explained, “If a Tuvan killed an animal the way they do in other places”—by means of a gun or knife—“they’d be arrested for brutality.”

I didn’t write this post today to comment on animal rights, but  because it is astounding to realize how much language forms our reality.  When I was reflecting on khoj özeeri, I thought about the horrors of factory farming and how badly animals used for food are treated in the States.  There is no word, at least that I know of, in the English language that equates slaughter with compassion, which is probably at least in part why the factory farming system is so horrific.  I imagine a lot of people would find it awkward to put those two concept together and as I am writing about this apparent oxymoron, I am reminded of  Temple Grandin.

Temple Grandin is an American doctor of animal science and professor at Colorado State University, bestselling author, and consultant to the livestock industry on animal behavior. She is a person with high functioning autism and ardent supporter of animal welfare.  Because of the way her brain processes information as an autistic person, she is able to understand the world through the eyes of an animal.  She is famous for, among many other things, developing what she calls humane slaughter.  Some animal activists find this repulsive as it seems to be contradiction in terms (opposing view). How can someone who identifies with the perception of animals and believes that animals are feeling beings devote their life to developing methods to slaughter them? We don’t have language to conceptualizes this in-between space and I don’t think that it is simple to create this middle ground. It is a complicated question to come to terms with, especially when I don't have words to develop this train of thinking, although allowing for the idea of khoj özeeri , will be helpful.