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Accepted Paper:
Multispecies Modalities for Anthropocene Landscapes: How Industrialized Pigs Transform the Ethnographic Encounter
Eimear Mc Loughlin
(Aarhus University)
Thinking with creative engagements with species, failed multimodal methods, and ethnographic wanderings, I explore how pigs and the practices that govern their lives on industrial farms in Denmark produce the industrialized pig species and how this transforms the ethnographic encounter.
Paper Abstract:
Multispecies modalities encompass a way of conducting ethnography in industrial agriculture that account for and respond to the complicated care of confinement. Initially setting out to counter dominant epistemic regimes of industrial farming, methodological challenges necessitated methodological openness, sensory attunement, ethnographic attention, and reflexive vulnerability as a way to both engage with and critique industrial logics of control. Drawing on ethnographic wanderings amongst pigs in Danish industrial farms from birth to death, I present how these encounters remake perceptions of species as homogenous and trouble the emphasis on the individual as the essential point of encounter in multispecies anthropology, which has implications for anthropology as a whole. Multimodal techniques reveal how industrial pigs move in and out of ethnographic understanding, existing between individuals and species as a porcine plurality.
Through finding and losing individuals in the stalls and on screen, I conceptualize what porcine plurality means for multispecies ethnography’s individualizing gaze, by troubling the valorization of individual encounters through the ways that individualization aligns with taxonomic categorization, despite the intimacies that individualism affords. Then, I consider how encountering industrialized species produces an intimacy with individuals who are always already of their species and explore what this intimacy means for multispecies anthropology. I conclude with a call to root around in the multiple ways we can work within these landscapes. I propose plurality as a way to hold space open between the grasping at individuals and the categorizing impetus of species, a way to hold space open for difference.