Lately I have become more interested in environmental history and how the economy epistemologically affects nature. Nature in general and animals in particular have been at the center of my attention. The reason for this is that the existential question, what it is to be human, is routinely answered by answering another question: what it is to be non-human, that is, an animal. By zooming in on the time of early industrialization during the long 19th century, I seek to answer the question of how animals previously used for production itself became industrial products and how this, possibly, was related to an emering view of what it meant to be a modern human. The question is therefore how animals, which previously were considered part of the farm or the household economy, were commodified and seen as input and output in the rational production processes.

Of all research on animals, few have paid attention to cattle and draft animals, especially the ox. That is somewhat surprising if one considers the importance of this animal for the economy. Oxen together with other draft animals, like horses and mules, have shaped the economy over many centuries. By styduing one paradicmatic animal, the ox, I will be able to zoom in on those who have worked with and used the ox in order to organize the rational and industrial production processes.

Informing the analysis is Claude Levi-Strauss, who, in an oft-quoted passage in Totemism, wrote that the totem animal is primarily not a cipher of the human relation to the animal, but rather a concept that is “good to think” with (Levi-Strauss, 1963, p 89). The literature on Claude Levi-Strauss is vast, but as I do not intend to contribute to the understanding of his works, I limit myself to use his ideas as input to study how animals have contributed to the organization of work. In addition to the growing field of animal studies, which heavily draws

upon Levi-Strauss, a more politically engaged stream of research has emerged since the mid 00’s called critical animal studies. It seeks to situate the human relation to the animal in the context of global capitalism and its dense fabric of consumption and production. A methodological challenge with this approach is that it draws upon and seeks to include at least two relatively unconnected fields of research: research on processes of commodification and research on animals in the context of work. The challenge with this is that it goes against

the idea that greater specialization of knowledge leads to a more advanced level of research. Although disciplinary boundaries have meant more specialization, it has also meant the establishment of  compartmentalized and isolated historical trajectories of different kinds of societies, organizations and species. Going beyond established disciplines need not imply that the research will suffer from shortcomings. Rather, it is by combining two (or more) areas of research a more advanced level of research may be reached, and that’s what this what I’m seeking to do in my current work.