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Paper long abstract:

According to a popular tale, during Fascist rule, Benito Mussolini went on a short tour of the most modern farms in Italy to witness with his very own eyes the technological, agricultural, breeding, and land remediation accomplishments of the regime. The story goes that after visiting some labor cattle, then some dairy cattle, and finally some breeding cattle, Mussolini realized that he had been shown the very same bovines in all places. As in all Fascist totalitarian endeavors, propaganda, ideology, racism, and technology were all mixed together and, sometimes, even incorporated into human and non-human bodies.

With this paper, I want to reflect upon the ways in which Fascism saw, conceived of, intervened upon, and incorporated in bovine bodies the ambiguous technophile and conservationist ideas and practices that nurtured Fascist ideology. Societal, cultural, and scientific practices and visions, as well as racism, were all key elements of the totalitarian effort of remediation and transformation of land (bonifica in Italia, literally meaning “rendering good or productive”), society, and race that lied underneath Fascist ideology. By combining STS, history of science, and environmental history perspectives and methodologies, and focusing on bovine bodies and zootechnical journals, I am to present a few stories testifying to those attempts to transform socio-natures and to remediate (bonificare) society and nature in Fascist times.