| In this dissertation I examined the historical development of hog-human relations, with special attention to the trajectory of the Illinois swine industry, in order to illustrate the mutual construction of social and natural agents. The creatures called swine and human were traced from the Pliocene epoch, seven million years ago, to the year 2001 by the Gregorian calendar. During that time, the specific practices that comprised the relationship between hog and human changed many times, as did the physical entities themselves. New social and material forms emerged from the interactions in unpredictable alignments as the heterogeneous assemblage of the swine industry grew from small-scale extensive farms to large-scale intensive confinement modes of operation.; I argued for a new hybrid ontology in environmental sociology that drew upon the strengths of agrarian studies and science, technology, and society studies and enabled an analysis of the social and physical contours of our world in which many human and nonhuman agents participate. The theoretical argument was supported through the use of face-to-face semi-structured interviews with a variety of people involved in a number of different aspects of the swine industry, the opposition organizations, and university scientists. An assortment of documents was also used including newspaper articles, a trade magazine, published books and articles contemporary to each time period, and documents created by advocacy and opposition groups.; I concluded that large-scale swine facilities, as the dominant manifestation of the current US swine industry, were a temporally emergent phenomenon—they were something new and unforeseen that involved the active participation of many social agents (such as farmers, consumers, laws, neighbors, land grant universities, capital investments, government agencies, agricultural companies, and grassroots organizations) and physical agents (such as swine, bacteria, building materials, medicine, and transportation technologies). All of these agents have interacted with one another in multiple and irreducible ways over the years to create a swine industry assemblage that is as much natural as it is social; thus environmental sociology would be better served if our work decentered the human and instead attended to all the agents. |
