Near human : border zones of species, life, and belonging

Author/Creator:

Svendsen, Mette N., author

Publication/Creation:

New Brunswick, New Jersey : Rutgers University Press, [2022]

Resource Type:

Book

More Details

Additional/Related Title Information

Full Title:

Near human : border zones of species, life, and belonging / Mette N. Svendsen

Series Titles:

Medical anthropology : health, inequality, and social justice
Medical anthropology (New Brunswick, N.J.)

Subjects/Genre

Subjects:

Medical anthropology--Denmark
Animal experimentation--Moral and ethical aspects--Denmark
Pork industry and trade--Denmark

Description/Summary

Table of 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"--

Language:

English

Physical Type/Description:

xiv, 212 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm.

Additional Identifiers

Catalog ID (MMSID):

9937385678502486

ISBN:

9781978818217
1978818211
9781978818224
197881822X

OCLC Number:

1243039544

Barcode:

010003484567
050000092243