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Becoming bovine: Mechanics and metamorphosis in Hokkaido's animal-human-machine
Hansen, Paul Simon
Hansen, Paul
© 2013 Elsevier Ltd. NOTICE: this is the author’s version of a work that was accepted for publication in Journal of Rural Studies. Changes resulting from the publishing process, such as peer review, editing, corrections, structural formatting, and other quality control mechanisms may not be reflected in this document. Changes may have been made to this work since it was submitted for publication. A definitive version was subsequently published in Journal of Rural Studies,33,2014, http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jrurstud.2013.02.001.
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.
Pergamon Press
2014-01
eng
journal article
http://hdl.handle.net/2241/121235
https://tsukuba.repo.nii.ac.jp/records/29548
10.1016/j.jrurstud.2013.02.001
0743-0167
AA10644297
Journal of rural studies
33
119
130
https://tsukuba.repo.nii.ac.jp/record/29548/files/JRS_33.pdf
application/pdf
648.5 kB
2014-05-09