A Review of Alex Blanchette, Porkopolis: American Animality, Standardized Life, and the Factory Farm. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2020, 320 pp.

Аннотация

The book is devoted to a large-scale experiment in the industrialisation of the pork industry in the supposedly post-industrial USA. The author demonstrates how thanks to new forms of labour and sociality at the very heart of the Global North, corporations are engaged in creating and maintaining the life of a standardised factory-produced pig, out of which over a thousand kinds of goods can be produced. “Porkopolis” introduces the reader to the workplaces of the factory farm, which changes the everyday life of the workers, disrupts the hierarchy of species, and opens the possibility for humans to reinterpret their common life with each other. The rich ethnography, equally sensitive to the phenomenology and the political economy of labour, calls into question some propositions of contemporary Euro-American common sense. Industrialisation as a key aspect of the capitalist mode of production still plays a fundamental role in agriculture, and it is impossible to change the basis of industrial food production by means of the transformation of individual practices of consumption.