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CHAPTER 1
finncattle: biowealth as national life
Is it surprising that prisons resemble factories, schools, barracks, hospitals, which all resemble prisons?
— MICHEL FOUCAULT, DISCIPLINE AND PUNISH
Cows are not just cows; they are (bio)technological artefacts, and their scientific study has produced considerable knowledge-power.
— SARAH WILMOT, "FROM 'PUBLIC SERVICE' TO ARTIFICIAL INSEMINATION"
About six hundred kilometers north of Helsinki and three hundred kilometers south of the Arctic Circle lie two central prisons — the Pelso and Sukeva correctional facilities. The prisons are in cold and swampy areas, some one hundred kilometers apart, making them geographically isolated and hard to reach even from each other. The nearest town, Kajaani, is about a forty-minute drive away, and the nearest city, Oulu, twice as far. My first visit to these prisons was in October 2006 when I accompanied the national coordinator of the Animal Genetic Resources Programme, Juha Kantanen, on one of his yearly visits to the important genetic conservation sites.
The Pelso and Sukeva prison facilities keep quite nontraditional inmates: a threatened bovine breed that is considered indigenous to Finland, Finncattle. This special breed comes in three distinct colors, or subtypes, each said to indicate a specific geographical point of origin. A white coat designates Lapland, for it resembles the snowy conditions of northern Finland; the uniformly brown animals come from western Finland; and the third type, sporting a playful dappling of white and brown, originates from eastern parts of the country. One can readily spot this morphological difference by walking around the prison cowsheds and associated grazing areas. In their distinguishably colored coats, the cattle are an interesting sight behind the prison fence as they mingle with their keepers, the prisoners.
The two prisons double as national gene banks for the national bovine species. They serve as a refuge for the last surviving live animals of the breed, amounting to three thousand individuals of the western type and about five hundred each of the two other types in 2009. Only a marginal population of live animals can be found outside the prisons, scattered around the country in small herds, and a small amount of their reproductive material, sperm and embryos, is cryopreserved in ex situ gene banks by Agrifood Research Finland (I will return to the issue of gene banks and cryopreservation in chapter 3). Without the constant care provided by the prisoners, the breed would soon wither away. In a story stretching back many years, such a threat of extinction dovetails with the claims of the breed's nativity to give it special status as nationally significant genetic resources.
There exists an easier way to meet Finncattle than to visit these remote prison farms. In attempts to promote flourishing of the breed, Finncattle have been included on the short national list of indigenous species in Finland. In this connection, the breed has gained international status, too, as a threatened one worthy of conservation-related attention, and, as was noted in the introduction, this breed was one of the first agricultural animals to be presented as being in danger of genetic erosion and extinction in the late 1960s. Although the breed has been considered native to Finland since the country first became independent, the tools of comparative genetics have only recently allowed identification of its actual genetic relationship to other breeds, though only in the present day. The research has enabled the breed's placement on a map in terms of its genetic distance from other European bovine breeds to show its "territorial belonging."
The worldwide Domestic Animal Diversity Information System (DAD-IS), accessible through the World Wide Web and maintained by the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations, now holds this and other vital information on Finncattle in its global archives. Here, one can browse through various physical characteristics of the breed along with digital images of its representative members, typical uses, performance data, and the contact information for the organizations monitoring developments related to the threatened cattle. If the breed becomes extinct in its corporeal form, the archives will provide immortality for it as a digitalized memory of a form of life that once contributed to the biodiversity on planet Earth. The difference between the digital and corporeal sites and the modes of conservation they represent reveal something important about the Finncattle as well as about larger, global politics around the management of nonhuman populations. In a telling way, the two stand as mutually connected techniques for ordering life in the twenty-first century.
The first is focused on local care for individual animals at particular sites, illustrated by the two prisons. The traditional practice of animal husbandry in this case is relegated to Finnish correctional facilities, localities that are removed and geographically distanced from civil society and its knowledge-related practices such as the science and the laboratory that once assigned the animals there. Threatened forms of life need special care and high visibility for those responsible for their management, thereby requiring nonhuman animals to be incarcerated, to be individually indexed and monitored. The second technique operates at the level of national or international species indexing and the production of extensive bioinformation on the species, with the data available to all internet users through the right keywords typed into Google. The digitalization of threatened species and breeds (Whatmore 2002) in these archived collections helps them transcend local boundaries and circulate in international networks of science, bioeconomy, and politics over nature. Here, this widely accessible bioinformation is easily made a commodity (Parry 2001) while simultaneously the digitalization augments conservation scientists' vision (Roth and Bowen 1999) of taking on a global scale, and it rearticulates the political territorial boundaries through the life of indigenous species as it is translated into "genetic resources" (CBD 1992).
Alongside these two forms, corporeal and digital, and forming another thread in the complex contemporary problems they raise about nonhuman life in the fields of economy, science, and politics, the third way to encounter Finncattle is through the breed's genealogy. This is a method of teasing out the historical relations that once made the animal an embodiment of national biowealth and of tracing the trajectory that later reconfigured it as a national genetic resource. This also serves as a practical way to lay ground for later chapters, which examine more closely the differences between the production of national natures before and after the assumed "molecurization of life" (as discussed by, for example, Kay 1993; see also Rose 2007) effected through advances in biotechnology and by new political divisions of nature such as those formed in Rio de Janeiro in 1992.
This chapter analyzes the politics of nonhuman belonging created through Finncattle's service of pronouncedly nationalist purposes in Finland from the late nineteenth century until the close of the 1950s. More specifically, I ask in this chapter how Finncattle as a class were created and how they served as a corporeal nexus of the ambivalent natural and cultural identities of the nascent Finland. The central empirical argument in the chapter is that this breed, as a national bovine population, has acted as an important national intermediary in naturalizing human populations called "the Finns" and has in itself been a constitutive form of life for several of the central cultural developments in the making of the Finnish nation. Simply put, these animals have been coproduced with the life of the nation itself, a national "nature" that is symmetrical with and inherently connected to the creation of the national "culture."
In the course of the chapter I also start tracing how changing technologies of the management of nonhuman life — from ecological to institutional arrangements, from type definition to enhanced reproductive control — have historically been central to the body politics of a nation. I do not analyze these techniques merely to demonstrate a change in them and the associated development in the knowledge practices of animal industry (this has been done before in a much more detailed manner). Rather, my aim is to show how a strong national interest — indeed, an interest of creating a particular nonhuman nationhood — has become steadily embodied in and through the matter, life, and flesh of Finncattle. The purpose of this analysis is to provide tools for starting to question the anthropocentricity of the theory of nations analyzed in chapter 4 by showing how nonhuman populations are important in naturalizing national human populations and, more broadly, the cultural idea of nationhood itself, not just as representations of nature but also as corporeal beings. Here, Finncattle serve as a perfect animal guide both to the historically intimate ties in the creation of Finland and to the current forms of power in use to maintain particular nonhuman populations as genetic resources.
EARLY FORMS OF NATIONAL BIOWEALTH
Among the earliest letters issued from the first institutionalized office of Finnish agriculture — the Grand Duchy of Finland's Board of Agriculture established in 1892 — was a plea addressed to the Senate, which was the highest political institution of the day, overseeing both economic and judicial issues of the grand duchy. The board requested an additional budget for developing a systematic breeding program for agricultural animals. The reasons proposed for the betterment of livestock were conveyed with a pronouncedly nationalist tone, setting the work put into animal breeding equal to that devoted to other economic activities that increased the prosperity of the nation. The letter boldly stated that domestic animals were, in fact, the basis of the national wealth.
It read, "A major portion of our national wealth consists of domestic animals, and, within those, horses and cattle are definitely the most important ones. All actions that aim at the betterment or breeding of domestic livestock, or that more or less improve their output or value, must in the same proportion thus add to our national wealth." The Senate granted a significant amount of money, 18,000 marks, for establishing a program of betterment to be overseen by the board.
The grant made possible a state-led shift in systematic breeding work and paved the way for new, national cattle types. Over the next few decades, the breeding of a national cattle type was systematized: the ecology of the countryside, cooperatives and professionalized institutions, and a national economy based on dairy products started weaving together a network that was embodied in and by one domestic animal. This animal was a national breed distinct from other countries' animals. It was to be called Finncattle.
Three interconnected developments had led the Board of Agriculture to pursue the idea of developing a national — Finnish — breed: an impetus for creating a new national culture, the development of international markets, and cattle-breeding experiments and cattle disease.
The first can be traced to ideological, or perhaps more accurately, nationalistic, aspirations. Finland had been annexed as a war cession to the victorious Russian Empire in 1809 after being a territory of the Swedish Crown for six centuries. At that point, the territory was granted autonomous political existence and became known as the Grand Duchy of Finland. The autonomous status made Finland fertile ground for the emergence of widespread nationalism as could be seen in so many other European countries in the nineteenth century. While early conceptions of the German romantic ideas of organic nations (see von Herder [1789] 1968) had gained some support earlier, the society, granted autonomous status and administratively set apart from direct Russian governance in 1809, developed a growing sense of national identity in the second half of the century. The ideological aspirations in the creation of a distinct Finnish culture were given form with the question of language as "Finnish nationalists found in language the binding element of nation" (Kirby 1975, 2). The promotion of the Finnish language as an official language of Finland — a status granted in 1863 with the language edict of Alexander II — was not, however, enough for the nationalists. The Fennomans, as they were called, also demanded novel forms of Finnish economy.
The Board of Agriculture was led by well-educated men who were driven to prove nationalistic ideas, such as Nils Grotenfelt. With his good knowledge of agricultural practices and even better connections with members of high society, he managed to reach the most exalted position in agricultural governance. In 1892 he was appointed as the first director general of the newly formed national Board of Agriculture. This board was in charge of every official decision made in the area of agricultural development in the Grand Duchy of Finland. The position granted him great institutional authority and economic means to decide on the direction of Finnish agriculture, and his choice was to start developing "landrace" cattle breeding (Lähdeoja 1969, 15–19, 41–50).
The second major development was the opening of international markets, especially for agricultural products. In the late nineteenth century Finnish agriculture was on the brink of major rearrangements with the other countries of Europe. International markets began to reform on account of a change in the doctrines of political economy wherein most countries were moving from mercantilist policies to self-regulating markets of a liberal economy (e.g., Polanyi [1944] 2001). Until then, Finland's primary agricultural product had been food crops: mainly barley and rye, which had been cultivated in the fields for centuries. Domesticated animals were kept only in small herds, and none of the species — cattle, pigs, horses, or poultry — had a major economic role in wider agricultural exchange networks (Rasila et al. 2003–4). Indeed, agriculture involving cattle did not even make an appearance in the Finnish Society for Economics list of the thirty most important national economic questions in 1820 (Nylander 1906).
To cope with new international trade, the Senate first gradually relaxed previous mercantilist taxes and export bans in 1852 and 1859. Later, in 1864, the Senate finally removed all agricultural duties for an indefinite period, thereby adding Finland to the long list of European countries to adopt liberal economic policies in the second half of the nineteenth century (previously, duty-free trade in grain and export for agriculture had been possible only with the Russian Empire). This liberal movement was a reaction to the continuous pleadings of farmers, who demanded more freedom in their agricultural trading and believed in overseas grain-export opportunities. However, what they did not expect was that duty-free grain trade with other countries would see Russian, German, and American food crops quickly come to saturate Finnish markets. Consequently, in just over ten years (in the 1880s), the price of crops dropped to two-thirds of its initial level, and imported grain became available year-round. The changes in tax policies in connection with international agricultural markets, alongside the developments in the availability and price of food crops, resulted in a crisis of Finnish agriculture, which was then heavily based on cereal cultivation. At the beginning of the 1880s it was starting to become obvious that the domestic cultivation of grain could never reach competitive price levels again because of the imported grains. Cereal cultivation became an economic impossibility. Instead, cattle breeding and a dairy economy started to look economically viable to the agriculturalists. By the early 1890s dairy farming, especially trading in butter, was hailed as the savior of the Finnish economy. Government actions were strongly directed toward developing this new direction for the agricultural economy, and a time of "butter fever" ensued. In 1903 cattle- and dairy-based income accounted for around 90 percent of all sales of agricultural products for the (landless) farmers (Peltonen 2004, 83), and dairy products amounted to 90 percent of total Finnish exports between 1905 and 1909 (Simonen 1949, 133; Peltonen 2004).
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Excerpted from "Biogenetic Paradoxes of the Nation"
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