Practicing Social Democracy through Cattle Breeding

By Lars Christian Risan
English

This paper examines the cattle breeding organisation Norwegian Red Cattle (nrc). nrc is unique in the Western world because this organisation has a national monopoly on cattle breeding. The paper describes this monopoly both empirically, as an example of social democratic rationalism, and as an “actor-network”, akin to how Latour described the pasteurization of France [Latour, 1988]. Latour showed us a net that grew strong by being able to standardise all the practices and technologies that it thus “enrolled”. The paper shows that nrc was able to enrol all breeding into one regime because the organisation deliberately did not standardise all breeding. nrc left room for the non-standardised.

Keywords

  • Cattle breeding
  • actor-network theory
  • plasma
  • social democracy
  • Norway
Go to the article on Cairn-int.info