Making Square Oxen and the Supply Chain of Fresh Meat at the Myanmar–Thailand Borderland
Speaker: Jiaporn Laochaoroenwong of Chulalongkorn University, Thailand
Moderator: Victor Seow, John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Social Sciences, Department of the History of Science, Harvard University
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Abstract: The “square ox” is the idealized figure of meat production in Southeast Asia: a visibly muscular, legally documented, and export-ready cattle body, shaped through multiple interventions. Each year, 200,000 to 300,000 cattle cross from Myanmar into Thailand, entering as undocumented, retired draught animals—scrawny, aged, or ill. At the border, they undergo a layered technopolitical process involving health checks, vaccination, quarantine, and documentation, which transforms them into legitimate, “lively commodities” (Collard and Dempsey, 2013). This process enacts what I call a bureaucratic death and rebirth: animals are declared “dead” in Myanmar, thus shedding their illegality, and are then “reborn” in Thailand through legal inscription (ear tags, forms, and permits) enabling their reentry into regional supply chains. The border thus operates not merely as a line of control but as an infrastructural site of transformation, where animal bodies are reworked, legal statuses forged, and economic value generated. This talk sheds light on the entanglement of technology (concentrate feed, chemicals), cattle’s bodies, and care at the border, sustaining these supply chains and producing the meaty, square ox. It traces how technologies of care and food science—from cattle caretakers, concentrate feed mixes, and hormones to chemical leanness agents like Salbutamol and Ractopamine—are mobilized to engineer the square ox over 90 to 120 days of fattening. While the process is driven by market demands from China and Vietnam, its success depends on situated knowledge, embodied labor, and speculative experimentation at local fattening stations.
About our speaker: Jiraporn Laocharoenwong is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Anthropology and Sociology, Chulalongkorn University, Thailand. Her current research focuses on mobility of livestock and animal feed production, pathogens and human-animal relations in the Southeast Asian Borderland with a grant from Program Management Unit for Human Resources & Institutional Development, Research and Innovation (PMU-B). Her former research is on Spatial formation and Sovereignty in the long-term refugee camp along Thailand–Myanmar borderland.