The beef cattle market: “modernizing” techniques, cattle and people

Abstract

Transformations in the beef cattle raising are analyzed by Social Sciences in order to understand how new socio-economic relations are fanned from the modernizing efforts of the sector, and at the same time how the so-called traditional relations are impacted, also with regard to human-animal relations. Among this debate, it will be reflected how the assumptions which guide the search for the modernization of beef cattle raising are constituted, and how they’ articulate and dismantle practices and relationships between humans, cattle and the environment. In order to do so, publications by researchers and government agents, who I called “agents of modernization”, were used in this article. Through the qualitative analysis of these works, it was possible to understand how the modernizing impulses unbalanced the human and animal interaction systems, inasmuch as they’ establish the condition of effectiveness as an absolute value and presuppose the rejection of the standards considered as inefficient.