| Title | Anticipatory Vectors: The Politics and Poetics of Non-Domesticated Pigs in Denmark and Texas |
|---|---|
| Contributor | Michael Eilenberg(author) |
| Jason Cons(author) | |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.33134/HUP-30-6 |
| License | http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ |
| Publisher | Helsinki University Press |
| Published on | 2025-03-26 |
| Long abstract | This chapter brings together two heterogeneous cases of non-domesticated pigs to theorise the notion of anticipatory vectors. In both cases, non-domesticated pigs conjure both epidemiological concerns (pigs as vectors for a range of non-zoonotic and zoonotic diseases) and imaginaries of pigs as harbingers of other kinds of social and demographic collapse. In Denmark, a fence constructed along the Danish–German border intended to prevent the spread of African swine fever (ASF) to domestic pig farms provokes debates about the re-inscription of anti-immigrant nationalism in the wake of Europe’s migration crisis. In Texas, the rapid spread of feral hogs provokes often violent imaginaries that tie pigs to the threat of invasion by non-white Others. Non-domesticated pigs, in both cases, prompt responses that blur boundaries between biosecurity and biopolitics. Wild and feral pigs thus serve as vectors that concentrate anxieties about the future and mobilise often lethal responses to forestall it. |
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Michael Eilenberg is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Aarhus University. His research focuses on issues of state formation, sovereignty and agrarian expansion in frontier regions of South East Asia, Europe and North America. He is the author of At the Edges of States (KITLV Press/Brill Academic Publishers, 2012) and co-editor with Jason Cons of Frontier Assemblages: The Emergent Politics of Resource Frontiers in Asia (Wiley, 2019) and with Mona Chettri of Development Zones in Asian Borderlands (Amsterdam University Press, 2021).
Jason Cons is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Texas at Austin. He is the author of Delta Futures: Time, Territory, and Capture on a Climate Frontier (University of California Press, 2025) and the co-editor with Michael Eilenberg of Frontier Assemblages: The Emergent Politics of Resource Frontiers in Asia (Wiley, 2019).