Cargando…

Becoming bovine: Mechanics and metamorphosis in Hokkaido's animal-human-machine

The fieldwork for my doctoral degree was carried out over nineteen months, a year of which was spent working on an industrial dairy farm in Hokkaido, Japan's northernmost Island. As in much of the industrialised world, dairy farming in Japan is rapidly changing. Many farmers are forced by neo-l...

Descripción completa

Detalles Bibliográficos
Autor principal: Hansen, Paul
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Elsevier Ltd. 2014
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7127193/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/32288170
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jrurstud.2013.02.001
_version_ 1783516307206963200
author Hansen, Paul
author_facet Hansen, Paul
author_sort Hansen, Paul
collection PubMed
description The fieldwork for my doctoral degree was carried out over nineteen months, a year of which was spent working on an industrial dairy farm in Hokkaido, Japan's northernmost Island. As in much of the industrialised world, dairy farming in Japan is rapidly changing. Many farmers are forced by neo-liberal agricultural policies to shift from small family operated farms to high-tech, high-speed, and high overhead industrial operations. This paper focuses on the history of dairy farming in the Tokachi region; more specifically one farm and the shift over a generation to a rotary parlour milking system. It addresses the linkages this mode of production has cultivated amongst humans, dairy cows and industrialized space. The parlour system at Great Hopes Farm allows five workers (aided by three more stall staff) to milk over 1000 cows, fifty at a time, three times a day. The impetus behind moving to parlour technology is that it increases productivity through mechanically enhanced observation and control. However this recent mechanical separation of human and cow during the milking process has led to affectively shared interspecies and inter-human alienation. The technology of the parlour system sets daily rhythms for bovine and human alike, and separates both from a process formerly dependent upon, specialized knowledge, affective empathy, and embodied knowledge. Human and bovine experience the systemic violence of the machine and what remains is a complex bio-politics of interspecies affect and the separation of “bare” and “political” life.
format Online
Article
Text
id pubmed-7127193
institution National Center for Biotechnology Information
language English
publishDate 2014
publisher Elsevier Ltd.
record_format MEDLINE/PubMed
spelling pubmed-71271932020-04-08 Becoming bovine: Mechanics and metamorphosis in Hokkaido's animal-human-machine Hansen, Paul J Rural Stud Article The fieldwork for my doctoral degree was carried out over nineteen months, a year of which was spent working on an industrial dairy farm in Hokkaido, Japan's northernmost Island. As in much of the industrialised world, dairy farming in Japan is rapidly changing. Many farmers are forced by neo-liberal agricultural policies to shift from small family operated farms to high-tech, high-speed, and high overhead industrial operations. This paper focuses on the history of dairy farming in the Tokachi region; more specifically one farm and the shift over a generation to a rotary parlour milking system. It addresses the linkages this mode of production has cultivated amongst humans, dairy cows and industrialized space. The parlour system at Great Hopes Farm allows five workers (aided by three more stall staff) to milk over 1000 cows, fifty at a time, three times a day. The impetus behind moving to parlour technology is that it increases productivity through mechanically enhanced observation and control. However this recent mechanical separation of human and cow during the milking process has led to affectively shared interspecies and inter-human alienation. The technology of the parlour system sets daily rhythms for bovine and human alike, and separates both from a process formerly dependent upon, specialized knowledge, affective empathy, and embodied knowledge. Human and bovine experience the systemic violence of the machine and what remains is a complex bio-politics of interspecies affect and the separation of “bare” and “political” life. Elsevier Ltd. 2014-01 2013-03-14 /pmc/articles/PMC7127193/ /pubmed/32288170 http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jrurstud.2013.02.001 Text en Copyright © 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. Since January 2020 Elsevier has created a COVID-19 resource centre with free information in English and Mandarin on the novel coronavirus COVID-19. The COVID-19 resource centre is hosted on Elsevier Connect, the company's public news and information website. Elsevier hereby grants permission to make all its COVID-19-related research that is available on the COVID-19 resource centre - including this research content - immediately available in PubMed Central and other publicly funded repositories, such as the WHO COVID database with rights for unrestricted research re-use and analyses in any form or by any means with acknowledgement of the original source. These permissions are granted for free by Elsevier for as long as the COVID-19 resource centre remains active.
spellingShingle Article
Hansen, Paul
Becoming bovine: Mechanics and metamorphosis in Hokkaido's animal-human-machine
title Becoming bovine: Mechanics and metamorphosis in Hokkaido's animal-human-machine
title_full Becoming bovine: Mechanics and metamorphosis in Hokkaido's animal-human-machine
title_fullStr Becoming bovine: Mechanics and metamorphosis in Hokkaido's animal-human-machine
title_full_unstemmed Becoming bovine: Mechanics and metamorphosis in Hokkaido's animal-human-machine
title_short Becoming bovine: Mechanics and metamorphosis in Hokkaido's animal-human-machine
title_sort becoming bovine: mechanics and metamorphosis in hokkaido's animal-human-machine
topic Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7127193/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/32288170
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jrurstud.2013.02.001
work_keys_str_mv AT hansenpaul becomingbovinemechanicsandmetamorphosisinhokkaidosanimalhumanmachine