Full Description
Argues that the dairy industry in Japan has always been entwined with notions of Otherness and security seeking, notably in terms of frontiers.
Hokkaido Dairy Farm offers a historical and ethnographic examination of the rapid industrialization of the dairy industry in Tokachi, Hokkaido. It begins with a history of dairy farming and consumption in Hokkaido from a macro perspective, mapping the transition from survival to subsistence and then from mixed family farms to monoculture and "mega" industrial operations. It then narrows the focus to examine concrete changes in a Tokachi-area dairying community that has undergone rapid sociocultural upheaval over the last three decades, with shifts in human relationships alongside changes in human and cow connections through new technologies. In the final chapters, the scope is further narrowed to a detailed history and ethnography of a single industrializing dairy farm and the morphing cast of individuals attached to it, centering on their idiosyncratic searches for economic, social, and even ontological security in what is popularly considered a peripheral region and industry. The culmination of over fifteen years of ethnographic, policy, and historical research, Hokkaido Dairy Farm argues that the dairy industry in Japan has always been entwined with notions of Otherness and security seeking, notably in terms of frontiers.
Contents
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. A Conceptual Scaffolding
2. Toward Modernity: The Forming and Reforming of a Northern Frontier
3. From Traction to Teishoku: Tracing the Human-Bovine Trajectory
4. Problems Protecting the Japanese Dairy Industry
5. Farm Structures
6. The Birth of Grand Hopes
7. Dairy Farmers: Being, Becoming, and Making
8. From Teat to Tot: Following Flows
9. Producing and Pumping
10. Keeping It All Working
11. Locals, Lo-siders, Outsiders, and No-siders
12. Assembling Communities: Two Genders and One Religion
Conclusion: On the Frontiers of Animal-Human-Technology
Epilogue
Notes
References
Index
