LARGE-SCALE LIVESTOCK FARMING: Talking about Alice, or A Classic Example of Boomorphism

This series NON-HUMANS, HUMANS, CLIMATE, MACHINES views large-scale livestock farming as an area primarily related to ethics and animal rights, but at the same time draws attention to the fact that large-scale farming is a capitalist mechanism, and is the result of economic and power-related interests and pressures that allow and normalize slaughter on a large-scale. The texts try to identify a network of actors, agents and relationships that are involved in large-scale farming and present them as a complex problem.

The series is published in parallel with the ongoing campaign All Farm Animals Deserve to Roam Free. We call to end this inhumane practice by banning all cages for farmed animals. Cages are cruel.

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The author of the eighth contribution to our series is Lucie Žeková.

Her text Talking about Alice, or A Classic Example of Boomorphism was published in the book entitled “Ethnography: Improvisation in theory and field practice” (Slon – Sociological Publishing, 2014). The text “Talking about Alice, or A Classic Example of Boomorphism” was written in 2013 as a chapter of the book Etnografie; improvizace v teorii a terénní praxi (Ethnography: Improvisation in Theory and Fieldwork; Tereza Stöckelová and Yasar Abu Ghosh, eds.), and its original aim was mainly to point out the anthropocentrism of ethnography as a method of both researching and writing about a topic.

Lucie Žeková is a cultural anthropologist studying the interspecies ethnography of Czech agriculture.