Paper short abstract:

Anthropological research on milk fermentation in two pastoral communities of different gender ideologies, followed by a bibliographic research on the writings of Aristotle and Francesco Redi, to the theories of Pasteur on microbes and Bruno Latour, form the basis of this presentation.

Paper long abstract:

Is fermentation a gendered process? This paper sheds light on the panel's questions about how do people live with microbes in fermentation or how boundaries of human and nonhuman bodies are un / made by the bacteria that flow between environments and bodies.

Anthropological research on milk fermentation in a matrilocal society of the Cyclades, Greece, followed by a bibliographic research which ranges from the writings of Aristotle and Francesco Redi, to the theories of Pasteur and Bruno Latour, form the basis of this presentation.

During my fieldwork, milk fermentation came out to be a highly microbiopolitical process informed by discourses concerning vital force, the generation of life, fertility and reproduction. Although the process remains the same in a Basque pastoral society, it becomes the object of a different narrative on the agency of ferments, due to the different gender ideology of the community. I suggest that the representations of vital processes, the ethno-theories of life growth, regeneration, reproduction or decay and the causes that produce them are reflected in and reinforced by gender ideologies.

The two different theories of milk fermentation highlighted by the Greek and the Basque communities create two different materialities of milk: lively and active or inert and passive.

There is however a blind spot in these different optics towards materiality: the different gender ideologies which inform these optics rely on the existence or not of the dichotomy between spirit and matter, dichotomy that, as through a kind of epistemological fate, confines matter to inactivity.