Dairying is a deeply embedded form of cultural heritage spanning the geological era of the Holocene in western Europe, especially in the Alps. Meanwhile, agricultural industrialization of dairy and meat are found to have produced so much methane gas and carbon emissions, it is characterized as having a hefty “ecological hoofprint” instead of a “carbon footprint” following Tony Weis. In this contemporary context of climate breakdown, how is the deep co-evolutionary history of European dairy farming narrated and remembered, especially when we consider today’s market decline in dairy consumption within Europe as well as the pressure exercised on dairy farmers to adopt new and expensive technologies to increase yields in the name of sustainability? This talk approaches the long history of human-cow co-evolution in western Europe through an ethnographic and bio-cultural-historical approach.

 

 

 

Juno Salazar Parreñas is an Associate Professor of Science and Technology Studies and Feminist Gender and Sexuality Studies at Cornell University (USA). She is the author of Decolonizing Extinction: The Work of Care in Orangutan Rehabilitation, which received the 2019 Michelle Rosaldo Book Prize from the Association of Feminist Anthropology.