The broiler chicken and the Anthropocene: Using critical nexus thinking to unpack the geographies of Gallus gallus domesticus

Abstract

A key scientific publication demonstrates that the bio-physical composition of the broiler chicken (Gallus gallus domesticus) represents a signal of the Anthropocene. This finding contributes to a wider body of evidence that locates the beginning of the Anthropocene in the mid-20th century, and is part of a broader intellectual project that seeks to establish and demarcate the Anthropocene as a new geological era. This paper takes a different tack. Treating Gallus gallus as an objective corollary for the Anthropocene, it positions the broiler chicken and the Anthropocene as an ontologically emergent nexus comprised of social–spatial relations, materialities, and practices. The paper then adopts critical nexus thinking to trace out the key relations and materialities, and their points of convergence, and underpinning extractivist ontologies that assemble into the chicken's body. Relations of particular concern include the processes that embody surplus value into the corporality of the chicken; the rationalisation and transformation of territories and landscapes into productive units of space, and the tightly coupled, interconnected flows of relations, materials, and coordinating technologies that comprise the ‘supply chain’. It argues that by using critical nexus thinking to identify and articulate these relations that assemble into Gallus gallus, it renders the Anthropocene legible. Such legibility in turn fosters geographical awareness and responsibility that might lead to the changes necessary to address the large-scale spatial inequalities from which the era stems and redress the consequences that the era might otherwise engender.