Includes bibliographical references (pages 187-204) and index.
Contents:
Illustrations -- Series foreword -- Prologue -- Introduction -- Substitution -- Multi-species ethnography -- The anthropology of morality -- Belonging -- Pigs and people in Denmark -- Collaborative research -- The organization of the book -- Feeding : cows, pigs, and humans in interspecies kinship -- Interspecies kinship -- Danish pig breeding and pork production -- Collecting cow colostrum at the farm -- Feeding piglets in the animal facility -- Feeding infants in the NICU -- Cow colostrum for NICU infants -- Making cow colostrum bioavailable -- Killing : Pigs as Sacrificeable Beings -- Approaching life, suffering and death in experimental practices -- Getting the piglets up and running -- Caring for piglets -- Moral perils -- Granting death -- Turning piglets into samples -- Becoming and ceasing to be killable -- The temporal horizons of sacrifice -- Treating : infants at the margins of life -- Biological and biographical life in the NICU -- Kinship and the fabrication of a biographical life -- Social relations : placing the child in family and welfare state -- Time: imagining the future -- Space : tracing lives through death -- Resource discussions in the NICU -- Selective reproductive politics in Denmark -- Juxtaposing human and pig, past and present -- Metabolizing : humans and nonhumans in a global field -- Cow colostrum for China -- Unsettled boundaries -- Settled boundaries for pigs -- Settled boundaries for humans -- Porkpolitics -- Metabolizing life -- Epilogue -- Acknowledgements.
Summary:
"In the animal facility, fragile piglets substitute for humans who cannot be experimented on. In the neonatal intensive care unit, extremely premature infants prompt questions about whether they are too fragile to save or, if they survive, will go on to lead a life of grave disability. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork carried out on farms, in animal-based experimental science, and in hospitals, Mette N. Svendsen redirects the question of "what it means" to be human to "what it takes" to be human and to forge a nation. The near humanness of preterm infants and research piglets becomes an avenue to unravel how neonatal life is imagined, authenticated, extended or eroded, and how societal belonging is evaluated, confirmed or ended when beings are at the margins of life and death. This courageous multi-sited and multi-species approach cracks open the complex ethical field of valuating life and making different kinds of pigs and different kinds of humans belong in a nation"-- Provided by publisher.
Series:
Medical anthropology : health, inequality, and social justice
This resource is supported by the Institute of Museum and Library Services under the provisions of the Library Services and Technology Act as administered by State Library of Iowa.