Presentation short abstract

Ongoing fieldwork in the Azores examines the dairy industry through a multispecies lens, tracing cow–farmer relations, ethical care practices, and life–death dynamics in production.

Presentation long abstract

São Miguel, Azores, 2003. In the middle of a pasture where fifty dairy cows graze. Foucault, Mbembe, and a young ethnographer in Critical Animal Studies observe as the cows approach them, pressing their bodies close.

Eloïse: They are already dead.

Mbembe: Already?

Eloïse: I see their flesh removed, their carcasses leaving the slaughterhouse.

Foucault: I rather see a finely tuned modulation of bodies—an optimization of productive capacities.

Mbembe: Down to the decimal point, and according to the farm’s needs. But first: whom do we encounter? Which ontology is at play? Can we call them livestock? Corpses?

Foucault: Here, I see neither death nor full life. Beyond biopower—although it clearly operates—it is not only about deciding who lives or dies.

Eloïse: Maybe it is about engineering lives that already contain death. These dairy cows, framed by this pastoral beauty, disturb the categories.

Mbembe: Indeed—the ambivalence of “living dead.” When I touch these animals, I encounter a life whose very condition is to be consumed by death.

Foucault: A life structured from the outset toward death.

Eloïse: And I realize my ethnographic subjects are granted life so that they do not rot too soon—

Mbembe: —preserved from putrefaction.

Eloïse: Yes. Salted beginning at the embryonic stage.

Mbembe: A thanacological condition: lives unqualified as life, deaths not quite dead.

Foucault: Beyond farming biopower—toward a necro-pastoral order?

Mbembe: A pastoral death-world indeed.

Eloïse: Between hydrangeas and subtropical jungle. Between sky and soil, life and death. We have much more to think through.