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gnrosenberg's profile
bearistotle
bearistotle
bearistotle
@gnrosenberg

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bearistotle

@gnrosenberg

Professor @DukeGSF and Fellow @NatlHumanities. I write about food, farming, and sex. Our foremost theorist of bear life. http://bearistotle.substack.com 

Durham, NC
scholars.duke.edu/person/gabriel…
Joined July 2011

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    bearistotle‏ @gnrosenberg 6 Aug 2019

    Ok y'all did it: A thread about hogs, ferality, and race in American history.

    4:32 AM - 6 Aug 2019
    • 3,957 Retweets
    • 10,428 Likes
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    134 replies 3,957 retweets 10,428 likes
      1. New conversation
      2. bearistotle‏ @gnrosenberg 6 Aug 2019

        Domestic hogs are not indigenous to North America. They were first introduced by the Spanish during the earliest phases of colonization. In fact, in many cases, hogs long preceded Europeans as the first wave of colonizers,

        7 replies 46 retweets 914 likes
        Show this thread
      3. bearistotle‏ @gnrosenberg 6 Aug 2019

        Hogs are tough, fierce, and hardy beasts. Their tusks offer ample defense against catamounts and other predators. They are thrifty breeders, producing large litters of viable offspring. And they can self-provision in forests, scrub, and grass (tho they also need shade and mud).

        8 replies 16 retweets 667 likes
        Show this thread
      4. bearistotle‏ @gnrosenberg 6 Aug 2019

        European colonizers seeded the landscape with small populations of hogs, knowing they would multiply quickly and, thus, would provide a ready supply of meat. Seeded so, hogs quickly advanced across the North American continent far faster than Europeans.

        5 replies 33 retweets 634 likes
        Show this thread
      5. bearistotle‏ @gnrosenberg 6 Aug 2019

        Indigenous populations faced an ambivalent gift in these new creatures. On the one hand, they could be hunted and provided another useful food source. Much like with horses, indigenous populations ingeniously harnessed porcine possibilities.

        6 replies 23 retweets 673 likes
        Show this thread
      6. bearistotle‏ @gnrosenberg 6 Aug 2019

        However, pigs also brought European diseases and were a vector of contagion for the epidemics that devastated indigenous populations. Hogs made life easier for settlers, and it disrupted indigenous land use. ate the crops of indigenous communities, sparking conflicts.

        2 replies 53 retweets 780 likes
        Show this thread
      7. bearistotle‏ @gnrosenberg 6 Aug 2019

        By the 19th century, hogs were consummate companions of settlers and pork was the predominant meat of Euro-Americans. Hogs didn’t need pasture and they produced ample lard (the most common cooking oil).

        2 replies 18 retweets 607 likes
        Show this thread
      8. bearistotle‏ @gnrosenberg 6 Aug 2019

        They could be pickled, barrelled, and floated down the Mississippi for the Atlantic seaboard and Europe. Cincinnati was memorably awarded the moniker “Porkopolis.” Settlers from around the Ohio River Valley drove millions of hogs there for slaughter and export.

        6 replies 26 retweets 654 likes
        Show this thread
      9. bearistotle‏ @gnrosenberg 6 Aug 2019

        In sum, settlers found pigs to be a useful way to extract calories from the landscape and to transform it cheaply into food and sometimes commodities. But this form of hog husbandry was low-intensity and rarely involved fences or enclosure.

        2 replies 23 retweets 667 likes
        Show this thread
      10. bearistotle‏ @gnrosenberg 6 Aug 2019

        In this context, the modern distinction between feral and domestic was muddier. Most hogs lived proximate to proximate to humans, some in human shelters, but they had enormous autonomy and roved freely.

        4 replies 18 retweets 603 likes
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      11. bearistotle‏ @gnrosenberg 6 Aug 2019

        This made sense early in settler colonialism, but fencing and property systems changed the story. As setters planted grains, they found roving hogs a menace who trampled and ate their crops. Similarly, fences were a form of improvement that strengthened property claims.

        1 reply 23 retweets 574 likes
        Show this thread
      12. bearistotle‏ @gnrosenberg 6 Aug 2019

        Over the course of the 19th century, fence laws and enclosure spread West from the Atlantic seaboard (with the exception of the South East and Appalachia where enclosure was contested until the end of the century).

        2 replies 16 retweets 536 likes
        Show this thread
      13. bearistotle‏ @gnrosenberg 6 Aug 2019

        In the meantime, settlers (now imagining themselves the “permanent” natives after only a generation) began to develop a different system of hog husbandry. Instead of free ranging their hogs, they increasingly confined them and fattened them on grain.

        2 replies 26 retweets 596 likes
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      14. bearistotle‏ @gnrosenberg 6 Aug 2019

        After the Civil War, the development of a robust rail system also meant live pigs could be easily transported to Chicago, which quickly replaced Cincinnati as the center of hog slaughter. This transportation network created a hog-corn nexus throughout the Middle West.

        7 replies 25 retweets 628 likes
        Show this thread
      15. bearistotle‏ @gnrosenberg 6 Aug 2019

        This different system of production also required a new kind of hog: settlers (now called farmers) wanted a hog that put on weight quickly and efficiently transformed corn into fat, not one that could defend itself and self-provision from a forest.

        1 reply 18 retweets 571 likes
        Show this thread
      16. bearistotle‏ @gnrosenberg 6 Aug 2019

        They no longer needed a lean, muscular hog with long legs and tusks capable of making a long drive to Cincinnait. They wanted a stout fat hog, with short legs, and no tusks, an animal that was docile and easily transported.

        2 replies 18 retweets 560 likes
        Show this thread
      17. bearistotle‏ @gnrosenberg 6 Aug 2019

        Enclosure meant they had the opportunity to do this. Whereas free ranging hogs were mostly left to their own mating, fences, crates, and barns meant farmers could intensively breed their pigs and determine with precision which animals should mate.

        2 replies 8 retweets 520 likes
        Show this thread
      18. bearistotle‏ @gnrosenberg 6 Aug 2019

        Ok gotta run and catch the U to get a haircut, but I'll tweet as I go, spotty WiFi and all.

        3 replies 3 retweets 399 likes
        Show this thread
      19. bearistotle‏ @gnrosenberg 6 Aug 2019

        By the 1880s, pig farmers across America endeavored to “improve” their herds by breeding in European stock. Through elaborate systems of genealogy and recording, they adapted the European tradition of pure-breeding to a settler colonial context.

        1 reply 18 retweets 562 likes
        Show this thread
      20. bearistotle‏ @gnrosenberg 6 Aug 2019

        Such farmers raved about the purity of their (animal) bloodlines, which they considered a powerful proof of the superiority of European settled agriculture and civilization. The refinement and purity of their breeds was evidence that settler colonialism was just and natural.

        3 replies 25 retweets 573 likes
        Show this thread
      21. bearistotle‏ @gnrosenberg 6 Aug 2019

        And what of “unimproved” pigs? They called these animals “mongrels”, “degenerates”, “scrubs”, and “natives.” The last term indexes the conflation of indigeneity with biological inferiority and unmanaged reproduction.

        2 replies 63 retweets 852 likes
        Show this thread
      22. bearistotle‏ @gnrosenberg 6 Aug 2019

        And much as “refined” stock proved white European superiority, “native” animals showed that those communities setter colonialism had eradicated were “degenerate” and “barbarous.”

        2 replies 22 retweets 549 likes
        Show this thread
      23. bearistotle‏ @gnrosenberg 6 Aug 2019

        It is in this context that the concept of “feral” can begin to emerge as a distinct and threatening concept to white American culture: a form of unmanaged reproduction and life that exists outside and apart from property ownership and settled agriculture.

        4 replies 174 retweets 1,423 likes
        Show this thread
      24. bearistotle‏ @gnrosenberg 6 Aug 2019

        That defense of assault weapons is almost too on the nose: hordes of unmanaged life invade domesticity and managed reproduction (the daughter) and must be culled with massive and indiscriminate violence. Six hundred years of settler colonialism is speaking in that tweet.

        16 replies 356 retweets 2,403 likes
        Show this thread
      25. bearistotle‏ @gnrosenberg 6 Aug 2019

        If you learned something from this thread, please read the work of the many historians working on agriculture who helped form my thinking. These include: Anderson’s Creatures of Empire, Cronon’s Changes in the Land and Nature’s Metropolis, and Specht’s Red Meat Republic.

        5 replies 98 retweets 1,615 likes
        Show this thread
      26. bearistotle‏ @gnrosenberg 6 Aug 2019

        Also, Logan O’Laughlin’s forthcoming work, Wood’s Herds Shot Round the World, Franklin’s Dolly Mixtures, Mizelle’s Pig, Blanchette’s forthcoming Porkopolis and many many more. Oh and read some Sylvia Wynter too! Fin.

        20 replies 52 retweets 1,090 likes
        Show this thread
      27. bearistotle‏ @gnrosenberg 6 Aug 2019

        Epilogue: I have safely returned to my office at the @MPIWG with a fresh bald fade and this thread completely viral. If you're interested in my work, some links will follow.pic.twitter.com/TwVlb3djWh

        13 replies 9 retweets 538 likes
        Show this thread
      28. bearistotle‏ @gnrosenberg 6 Aug 2019

        #1 My article, "A Race Suicide Among the Hogs":https://www.academia.edu/21787581/_A_Race_Suicide_among_the_Hogs_The_Biopolitics_of_Pork_in_the_United_States_1865_1930_American_Quarterly_68.1_March_2016_49-73 …

        4 replies 26 retweets 312 likes
        Show this thread
      29. bearistotle‏ @gnrosenberg 6 Aug 2019

        #2 My article, "How Meat Changed Sex" (on the unexpected sexual politics of livestock production):https://www.academia.edu/35295117/HOW_MEAT_CHANGED_SEX_The_Law_of_Interspecies_Intimacy_after_Industrial_Reproduction …

        2 replies 34 retweets 360 likes
        Show this thread
      30. bearistotle‏ @gnrosenberg 6 Aug 2019

        #3 My book, "The 4-H Harvest: Sexuality and the State in Rural America": https://www.amazon.com/4-H-Harvest-Sexuality-America-Politics/dp/0812247531/ref=tmm_hrd_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1564410043&sr=8-1 …

        4 replies 22 retweets 318 likes
        Show this thread
      31. bearistotle‏ @gnrosenberg 6 Aug 2019

        #4 A popular piece I wrote for the @BostonGlobe that gives you a sense of how I think about farming and rural America in the context of settler colonialism, "Fetishizing Family Farms":https://www.bostonglobe.com/ideas/2016/04/09/fetishizing-family-farms/NJszoKdCSQWaq2XBw7kvIL/story.html …

        14 replies 45 retweets 429 likes
        Show this thread
      32. Show replies

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