The Making of Modern Sheep. The New Pastoral Regime and Its Discontents

Abstract

Although pastoralism has a special place in Romanian history and national mythology, shepherds “occupy a complicated position” (O’Brien and Crețan 2019) in contemporary technoscientific capitalism (Birch and Muniesa 2020). As their age-old shepherding routes shrink (Săgeată et al. 2022), new devices need to be adopted and associated with traditional shepherding methods to meet the new market challenges and industrialised model of sheep farming. Opting for an approach that combines science and technology studies (STS) and anthropology, our paper examines how a New Pastoral Regime (NPR) was assembled with the help of a small piece of technology: the ear tag. EU norms, market imperatives, scientific innovation, financial subsidies, political interests, and technical devices become entangled in a political and scientific network of governing nature and the future that produces different kinds of sheep as techno-natural entities. By opening the black box of ear tagging technology our paper reveals what was left ou

Keywords

• shepherding
• ear tags
• assetization
• new pastoral regime
• improvementality