Animals that feed nations and nations that feed animals: industrially farmed pigs as nation-building resources in Catalonia

Abstract

This paper examines industrially farmed pigs in Catalonia, a stateless nation within Spain and a major pig meat producer, to expand existing understandings of how animals make nations and how, in turn, nations make animals. The paper accomplishes this by bringing together two seemingly contradictory analytical perspectives on farmed animals: as resources and more than resources for the nation. In doing so, the article argues that pigs become the arena in which rural scarcity is transformed into national (animal) abundance. First, the paper analyses how industrially farmed pigs can be considered resources in the making of today’s Catalonia. This allows us to understand how (1) pigs are made as resources for the nation, enabling rural development strategies, and (2) how they are themselves made through resources for the nation, such as the soy they are fed. This further reveals critical intersections between the resource-oriented and developmental nation-making projects of countries exporting soy and those of Catalonia. As more than resources, the paper examines how pigs and their bodies are impacted and remade by state- and nation-building projects, evidenced, for instance, by increasingly more efficient feeding technologies. Ultimately, this paper contributes to understanding the often overlooked yet critical spaces that industrially farmed animals occupy within the nation, in turn advancing scholarship working towards critical and less anthropocentric conceptualisations of who or what can constitute a resource.