Familiar, paisaje, cyborg: imaginarios de vacunos en la prensa gráfica del sector agropecuario argentino (1969-2021)

Abstract

This work aims to analyze the cow imaginary in a wide circulation magazine within the Argentine agrotechnical sector during the last fifty years. Considering that visual imaginaries go hand in hand with the production and reproduction of worldviews, and that these enable “correct” and standardized appraisals of “ways of being in the world”, we propose to analyze the prominence of cattle in a magazine of the agrotechnical sector throughout the last decades of the XX until present days.

The chosen period is marked by a process of biotechnological innovation that makes it particularly interesting to ask ourselves what happens to animal bodies, the chains of beings and objects necessary to manufacture raw material and the way in which these transformations find a graphic language of expression that, on occasions, precedes its material concretion.

Through a reticular methodology, we trace how the images of “cows”are increasingly traversed by the green revolution’s local configuration. This work intends to contribute to an understanding of "cows" as multiple beings that participate in various networks of relationships with humans, objects and other non-humans; and exist non-univocally through the superposition of these chains. Beings who labor and are being labored, produce and are being produced. Through this anthropological exploration, we hope to contribute to a multivocal description of cows that inhabit Argentine grasslands throughout the last decades.