Fascist Pigs: Technoscientific Organisms and the History of Fascism by Tiago Saraiva (review)

Perhaps it's because they are so smart, or maybe just because they are the source of bacon. Whatever the reason, our porcine friends inspire scholars to come up with great titles when writing about them. For example, over the years I've reviewed good books with titles such as Hog Ties (by Richard Horwitz) and Pig Tales (by Barry Estabrook). Now, along comes Tiago Saraiva with Fascist Pigs, a great title for a terrifically ambitious and provocative book.

In his study, Saraiva skillfully employs his expertise in the history of technology, history of science, and STS to provide eye-opening, extremely creative, and often brilliant reinterpretations of a variety of subjects we thought we knew well: modernity, fascism, and colonialism (not to mention the powerful and revelatory relationships among them). In so doing, he contributes to recent ontological debates in STS, most notably to those exploring the ways in which the "entanglements between humans and nonhumans"—particularly scientific and technological entanglements—produce "new social collectives" (p. 13). The key collectives at issue in the book are the modernist fascist formations that developed in Germany, Italy, and Portugal, wherein plants, animals, and colonies played important, even constitutive roles.

As Saraiva's subtitle suggests, the author is interested in getting at the above concerns through the study of technoscience and technoscientific organisms, that is to say, in the particular ways in which the science deployed in fascist regimes to produce plant and animal organisms not only transformed organismal design but also contributed to and expressed the social and ideational design of what he calls the "Fascist organic collective" (p. 14). This "organic collective"—and in a formal sense it does not matter if we are talking about Germany or Portugal or Italy—was based not on traditional or reactionary principles, as is often assumed. Rather, it is more properly viewed in the modernist idiom, albeit an alternative form or variety of modernism than we are used to considering. Through Saraiva's biopolitcal lens, then, "[m]ass mobilization, new state structures, organic communities, and imperial expansionism—important parts of the fascist world—were imagined and enacted through … [the breeding of] new organisms: wheat, potatoes, pigs, sheep, coffee, rubber, and cotton" (p. 14). As such, to study breeding practices—which the author construes broadly so as to include cultivation prescriptions, agricultural policy, land use, trade policy, etc.—is in a sense to study fascist ontology. A technoscientific approach will not tell you everything about fascism—Saraiva admits this—but technoscience was sufficiently constitutive of the regimes in question as to tell you many important, indeed, fundamental things about each.

Fascist Pigs is divided into two main parts, bookended by an excellent table-setting introduction and a satisfying, digestiflike conclusion. In Part I, consisting of four, dare I say, meaty chapters, Saraiva treats various technoscientific plant and animal-breeding schemes—involving wheat, potatoes, and pigs—devised and implemented by the three fascist states under examination. Although there are many interesting takeaways from these chapters, one of the most memorable (and convincing) to this reviewer is the importance of food security to the architects of the techno-scientific policies and programs in each of the fascist states in question. Here Saraiva's work corroborates the rich work of historians such as Adam Tooze and, more recently, Tim Snyder, who come at the security question from other angles.

Few readers will be surprised to learn that the action in Part I takes place in Europe. In the two chapters of Part II, though, Saraiva boldly shifts terrain—and the "geography of the imagination," as it were—by analyzing the imperial dimensions of fascist technoscience as revealed and enacted in breeding schemes in Africa (Ethiopia, Mozambique, and Southwest Africa) and, in the German case, in "colonies" envisioned in eastern Europe, largely in the areas Snyder refers to as the "bloodlands." Each of the organisms focused upon in Part II—coffee and cotton in...