Pigs R Us

Hog Ties: Pigs, Manure, and Mortality in American Culture. By Richard Horwitz. New York: St. Martin's Press. 1998. 312 pages. $27.95.

Richard Horwitz's book weighs in with a wealth of pig lore, science, and first-hand experience, as well as a method for examining the stuff of which American studies is made. Not accidentally, and with self-conscious humor, Horwitz regularly reminds the reader of the connections and disconnections between agricultural and academic work. "Shit happens," as one chapter title reminds us, in both places. How it happens and what it means in American studies is another matter; it is a fertile pile indeed waiting to be turned, and Horwitz has handed us the fork.

Horwitz is primarily an ethnographer for whom responsible work begins with real participant-observation. In this case, he is actually working on a hog farm, but he never loses sight of his other role as academic. He takes wry advantage of the opportunity to compare one arena with the other, a gesture that significantly sets the tone for the entire book. Horwitz approached the task of cleaning a farrowing house, for example, as a "break from the sweeter-smelling but too-familiar shit at the university" (15). The farm work Horwitz contributed to his neighbors' operation--which provided a set of original questions for the book--was rewardingly real in a way that academic work could not be; moving between them could be disorienting. The "shift from shit-covered floors to ivied walls and from hired hand to professor" could take painfully ironic turns, as when a plumbing emergency on the farm might, as he notes, "affect my ability to finish rereading a book that students had to discuss that afternoon. Since the book was about rural life in America, I was in the odd position of trying to limit my experience with the subject so that I could teach it better. That irony and the press of the moment were too extreme to be amusing" (121). If excremental connections between academia and a hog house are perhaps predictable, others are more telling, about hogs and universities to be sure, but about Horwitz's approach as well. Regarding his disinclination to see vertically integrated, corporate producers of pork as "the bad guys" in driving small pork producers out of the business and despoiling rural neighborhoods with large scale hog confinement systems, he writes: "my own university is itself an analogue--a vertically integrated student confinement system--but I would like to think it has redeeming value, much of it precisely because it is big" (66).

Mingled with Horwitz's sometimes acerbic commentary on academic work and life is a genuine interest in the world of pork producers. He is curious about the daily routine of hog farming and the ideas informing swine science, and he describes them in great detail. He is proud of his hands-on accomplishments, reminding readers humbly that his abilities might match those of an early adolescent farm kid; he is eager to engage his neighbors/employers/informants in conversation about the meaning of their work and carefully reports and interprets their occasional reluctance to do so. The hogs themselves--as livestock, edible pork, and cultural symbols--suggest avenues of inquiry to follow away from the particular farm Horwitz himself knows. Big questions of the significance of agriculture in American culture, the controversy surrounding vertical integration of agricultural industries, the meaning of disease in American science and culture, and the ways in which Americans resist looking at and understanding mortality as part of life, spin away from the hog lot in waves of investigation that enlist but also challenge Horwitz's skill as a reader of material objects (like hogs, but also pig tchotchkes), as an interpreter of popular and scientific writing, and his work with informants. His allusions to Moby-Dick at the beginning of the book, including a catalogue of desultory porcine material like the one Melville's sub-sub librarian provides, are not entirely misplaced. Hog Ties...