Polish milk routes

Joanna Mroczkowska is leading a project aimed at examining how farmers in eastern Poland engaged in milk production and dairy cattle breeding from the 1930s to the present day. What relationships were formed within different political and social constellations and the networks of “Polish milk routes”? How have changes in agriculture and politics transformed the landscape of Polish small towns and rural areas?
The theoretical basis of the project is “multispecies ethnography,” which allows for an investigation of “how the human has been formed and transformed amid encounters with multiplespecies of plants, animals, fungi, and microbes” (Gatto, Gionata & McCardle 2019: 14, 15). This implies looking at dairy cattle and milk not as objects or passive matter, but as active cultural actors.
The research is based on ethnographic materials collected as part of grants from the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology and the National Center for Science.