February 19, 2024  18:00 JST

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Concept

Hokkaido Dairy Farm offers a historical and ethnographic examination of the rapid industrialization of the dairy industry in Tokachi, Hokkaido. It begins with a history of dairy farming and consumption in Hokkaido from a macro perspective. It then narrows the focus to examine concrete changes in a Tokachi-area dairying community, with shifts in human relationships alongside changes in human and cow connections through new technologies. In the final chapters, the scope is further narrowed to a detailed history and ethnography of a single industrializing dairy farm and the morphing cast of individuals attached to it, centering on their idiosyncratic searches for economic, social, and ontological security in what is popularly considered a peripheral region and industry. The culmination of over fifteen years of ethnographic, policy, and historical research, Hokkaido Dairy Farm argues that the dairy industry in Japan has always been entwined with notions of Otherness and security seeking, notably in terms of frontiers (SUNY Press 2024).

Paul Hansen is professor in the Department of International Resource Sciences at Akita University in Japan. He is a socio-cultural anthropologist with a focus on Japan and Jamaica, social theory in relation to identity, affect, embodiment, posthumanism, cosmopolitan studies, ecology and animal-human-technology relationships. He is also interested in food and musicology. Having published extensively on these topics in anthropology journals, he is co-editor (with Blai Guarné) of the book Escaping Japan: Reflections on Estrangement and Exile in the Twenty-First Century (2018, Routledge) and co-editor (with Susanne Klien) of a Special Issue of Asian Anthropology titled Rural Japan as Heterotopia (2022).