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"PORKOPOLIS is an ethnographic account of hog production in "Dixon," a 15,000-resident agribusiness town in the Great Plains. In Dixon, where nearly 5,600,000 hogs are killed a year, human life has been reorganized around the life and death cycles of porcine production. Alex Blanchette accounts for the totalizing force of hog production by arguing that towns like Dixon represent a reinvestment in 20th-century notions of industry in a post-industrial United States. In practice, this means not only the taking up of industrial stock images, organization forms, and identities, but also an intense desire, on the part of agribusiness corporations, to achieve standardization-to create the "perfect" pig. To achieve standardized results, agribusiness corporations have implemented systems of full "vertical integration," in which they directly own and engineer every stage of a pig's life and death cycle. The result, Blanchette argues, is more than just an effort to create the perfect pig, but rather a calibration of human life and affect to meet the needs of porcine production. Drawing on his ethnographic fieldwork as a worker in a hog factory, Blanchette illustrates how methods of vertical integration and standardization in agribusiness factories work to transform hogs-and humans-into tokens of capitalist animality. The book is divided into five parts. Part I, "Boar," examines how corporations manage the threat of porcine diseases, and the biopolitical protocols that corporations enact in workers' homes to protect hogs. Part II, "Sow," draws from Blanchette's own experiences working the artificial insemination line, where workers are encouraged to "become the boar" with their hands to imitate mating. This part theorizes interspecies and labor politics that arise from situations in which workers are only intimate with one dimension of pigs-in this case, porcine sexual instincts. Part III, "Hog," explores the consequences of standardizing animality, where genetic refinements ^create litters too large to supply adequate nutrients in uterus. Part IV, "Carcass," examines the vertical integration of human workers' bodies on the assembly lines. Part V, "Viscera" explores the biological "excess" of porcine production-bones, feces, fat, livers, lungs-and corporations' desires to use "all" of the pig. This section examines how the fully integrated factory farm depends on modes of consumption that extend beyond what can be supplied by human eaters alone. This book will be of interest to scholars of anthropology, animal studies, neoliberalism and globalization, capitalism, and social theory"-- In the 1990s a small midwestern American town approved the construction of a massive pork complex, where almost 7 million hogs are birthed, raised, and killed every year. In Porkopolis Alex Blanchette explores how this rural community has been reorganized around the life and death cycles of corporate pigs. Drawing on over two years of ethnographic fieldwork, Blanchette immerses readers into the workplaces that underlie modern meat, from slaughterhouses and corporate offices to artificial insemination barns and bone-rendering facilities. He outlines the deep human-hog relationships and intimacies that emerge through intensified industrialization, showing how even the most mundane human action, such as a wayward touch, could have serious physical consequences for animals. Corporations' pursuit of a perfectly uniform, standardized pig—one that can yield materials for over 1000 products—creates social and environmental instabilities that transform human lives and livelihoods. Throughout Porkopolis, which includes dozens of images by award-winning photographer Sean Sprague, Blanchette uses factory farming to rethink the fraught state of industrial capitalism in the United States today. --

Swine industry --- Swine breeders --- Factory farms --- Agriculture --- Economic aspects --- Animal factories --- CAFOs (Farms) --- Concentrated animal feeding operations --- Confined animal feeding operations --- Factory farming --- Factory-sized livestock farms --- Farm factories --- Industrial livestock farms --- Livestock factories --- Mega-livestock farms --- Animal industry --- Livestock farms --- Meat industry and trade --- Livestock breeders --- Swine trade --- #SBIB:39A4 --- #SBIB:316.334.2A520 --- Toegepaste antropologie --- Organisatiesociologie: arbeidssituatie en arbeidsomstandigheden: algemeen --- Swine industry - United States --- Swine breeders - United States --- Factory farms - United States --- Agriculture - Economic aspects - United States

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Alex Blanchette explores how the daily lives of a Midwestern town that is home to a massive pork complex were reorganized around the life and death cycles of pigs while using the factory farm as a way to detail the state of contemporary American industrial capitalism.

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We now live on a planet that is troubled--even overworked--in ways that compel us to reckon with inherited common sense about the relationship between human labor and nonhuman nature. In Paraguay, fast-growing soy plants are displacing both prior crops and people. In Malaysia, dispossessed farmers are training captive orangutans to earn their own meals. In India, a prized dairy cow suddenly refuses to give more milk. Built from these sorts of scenes and sites, where the ultimate subjects and agents of work are ambiguous, How Nature Works develops an anthropology of labor that is sharply attuned to the irreversible effects of climate change, extinction, and deforestation. The authors of this volume push ethnographic inquiry beyond the anthropocentric documentation of human work on nature in order to develop a language for thinking about how all labor is a collective ecological act.

Nature --- Human ecology --- Environmental degradation --- Environmental economics --- Effect of human beings on