Duke University Press Porkopolis: American Animality, Standardized Life, and the Factory Farm

In the 1990s a small midwestern American town approved the construction of a massive pork complex, where almost 7 million hogs are birthed, raised, and killed every year. In Porkopolis Alex Blanchette explores how this rural community has been reorganized around the life and death cycles of corporate pigs. Drawing on over two years of ethnographic fieldwork, Blanchette immerses readers into the workplaces that underlie modern meat, from slaughterhouses and corporate offices to artificial insemination barns and bone-rendering facilities. He outlines the deep human-hog relationships and intimacies that emerge through intensified industrialization, showing how even the most mundane human action, such as a wayward touch, could have serious physical consequences for animals. Corporations' pursuit of a perfectly uniform, standardized pig―one that can yield materials for over 1000 products―creates social and environmental instabilities that transform human lives and livelihoods. Throughout Porkopolis, which includes dozens of images by award-winning photographer Sean Sprague, Blanchette uses factory farming to rethink the fraught state of industrial capitalism in the United States today. Review "There are many angles from which to approach Alex Blanchette's sweeping, paradigm defining and redefining, and prescient ethnography.... Porkopolis will assuredly become essential reading in many areas of anthropology." --Carolyn Barnes and Peter Benson "Anthropological Quarterly" (10/1/2020 12:00:00 AM) "Alex Blanchette's Porkopolis is an incredible ethnographic achievement.... The book's commitment to an ambitious theoretical project, its inviting prose that balances precision and readability, and its sharply described ethnographic insights all work flawlessly."--Andrea Rissing and Nicholas C. Kawa "Culture, Agriculture, Food and Environment" (3/18/2021 12:00:00 AM) "Blanchette's ethnography ... demonstrates the ways in which the modern pork industry has reshaped the rural American workforce as well as economic and social relationships.... Porkopolis is a masterful piece of multi-sited research."--Jon Wolseth "American Ethnologist" (1/24/2021 12:00:00 AM) "Porkopolis is a triumph. It is exceptionally readable and engaging in spite of the gravity of its subject matter. It is also creative and challenging in the most haunting and curious ways."--Claire Bunschoten "Social Text" (1/19/2021 12:00:00 AM) " Porkopolis is very well written, powerful, and provocative and is an exceptionally insightful look at industrial capitalism through the lens of human-animal relations. It offers a truly unique perspective into the world that industrial farming has made and remade."--Steve Striffler "American Anthropologist" (11/4/2020 12:00:00 AM) "The book obliges the thoughtful reader to ponder how this remarkable departure from normal biological life could ever have come about--all for the sake of cheap meat and profit--and what we might need to do (if ever we could) about changing it. Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates. Graduate students, faculty, and professionals."--J. A. Mather "Choice" (11/1/2020 12:00:00 AM) "An even-handed exploration of an issue usually dominated by extremes. . . . That said, even Blanchette's moral generosity and even-handed treatment of the pork industry cannot powder and perfume the everyday horrors contained within. . . . Blanchette may not have set out to write an argument for de-industrializing pigs, but he achieved it."--Jennifer Graham "The Hippo" (7/30/2020 12:00:00 AM) "The clarity and analytical power of Porkopolis are impressive achievements. . . . It is not surprising to learn that Blanchette's peers consider him one of the finest ethnographers of his generation. The book is crafted with a perspicacity and empathy reminiscent of Munro's short stories."--Troy Vettese "Boston Review" (7/23/2020 12:00:00 AM) "What is remarkable about Porkopolis is that Blanchette never makes the p