Cattle talk: creation, technology, and politics

Abstract

This text introduces the dossier “Bovine Conversations: Rearing, Technology, and Politics,” which proposes exploring—through various ethnographic and theoretical perspectives—the relationships between humans and cattle in Brazil. Highlighting “bovine conversations”—a term coined from a short story by Guimarães Rosa—serves as an analytical exercise to examine practices of rearing, economics, politics, technology, and knowledge production. It is also a way to situate the growing importance of cattle ranching within contemporary anthropology, without overlooking its historical presence in Brazilian social thought or the fact that Brazil must be understood as a hub of the modern global meat industry. Organized into two sections, the articles address contexts involving Indigenous peoples, quilombolas, and peasant communities, as well as cowboys, rodeos, futures markets, meat-processing chains, sociotechnical devices, cattle breeds, cheese production, and dairy farming. Together, they demonstrate that steers, cows, and bulls cannot be reduced to mere commodities, productive resources, or elements of rural landscapes; rather, they participate in the constitution of forms of value, knowledge, affects, memories, territorialities, property regimes, and political disputes. At the same time, they are integrated into circuits of accumulation, calculation, classification, exploitation, and violence. The dossier thus proposes focusing less on a transparent translation of animal speech and more on the effects of the bovine presence and the relationships through which humans and non-humans produce, contest, and imagine worlds. The expression “more cattle than people” encapsulates this centrality, illustrating how cattle participate in the everyday making of the country, its inequalities, and its possibilities.