Milk, Modernity and the Making of the Human: Purifying the Social

Milk, Modernity and the Making of the Human undertakes a critique of the pervasive notion that human beings are separate from and elevated above the nonhuman world and explores its role in the constitution of modernity. The book presents a socio-material analysis of the British milk industry in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It traces the dramatic development of the milk trade from a cottage industry into a modernised and integrated system of production and distribution, examining the social, economic and political factors underpinning this transformation, and also tracing the important roles played by various nonhumans, such as microbes, refrigeration technologies, diseases of cattle, and even cows themselves. These nonhuman agencies meant that milk as a substance posed deep social and material problems for modernity, being hard to transport and keep fresh as well as a highly fertile environment for the growth of bacteria and the transmission of diseases such as tuberculosis from cows to humans. Milk, Modernity and the Making of the Human demonstrates how the resulting insecurities and dilemmas posed a threat to the nature/culture divide as milk consumption grew along with urbanization, and had therefore to be managed by emergent forms of scientific and sanitary knowledge and expertise. This involves a detailed examination of the emergence of milk inspection, showing how the commodification of milk and the growth of the large dairy corporations was made possible by the earlier work of local health officials, milk inspectors, veterinarians and medical officers of health. Working through original historical source materials, the analysis draws critically upon actor network theory in order to present a sustained critique of modern knowledge-practices, and particularly of the humanist discourse which assumes that human beings inhabit a unique domain incommensurable with the nonhuman world. The book systematically challenges this by tracing how the separation of humans and nonhumans is continually accomplished and reproduced in everyday life, so that it represents a critique of modernity worked through milk itself.