Event overview
Abstract
Rapid industrialisation of livestock farming since the 1950s has been accompanied by public and legislative concern directed towards a range of issues, including food safety and the negotiation of risk, and also the ethics attached to the care, slaughter and commodification of unprecedented numbers of animals in large scale production. This paper resists the idea that industrialisation and the technological interventions associated with intensive livestock husbandry methods inevitably produce increased ‘distance’ between stockmen and livestock. My fieldwork has suggested instead that articulations between traditional forms of animal husbandry and new varieties of knowledge, technology and embodied practice work in unanticipated ways to promote close relationships between pigs and pigmen.
Ethnographic data generated by long term fieldwork on intensive pig units, my own photographs and the firsthand accounts provided by stockmen are drawn together to describe how pigs are routinely produced now. In considering the ways in which such production effects reciprocities between the ‘making’ of both pigs and people, I reveal aspects of the hidden human-animal relationships which prevail on twenty first century pig production units.
Biography
After gaining a BA from Bath Academy of Art and an MA from Norwich School of Art and Design, Kim Baker combined production of her own creative work with a teaching career, contributing to undergraduate and postgraduate courses. Visual work has been exhibited in the UK and Japan. The MRes in Visual Anthropology at Goldsmiths offered the opportunity to undertake in-depth reconsideration of the inhabitants of the area of rural Suffolk which has been Kim’s home for three decades. Since 2007 her MPhil / PhD research has focused more precisely on the human-animal relations produced within intensive livestock production in East Anglia. Study for the research degree has been supported by funding from the Arts and Humanities Research Council.
Dates & times
| Date | Time | Add to calendar |
|---|---|---|
| 19 Oct 2011 | 4:00pm - 6:00pm |
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