Rethinking "Area" through Appetite for Hot-Fresh Meat and the Cross-Border Cattle Trade Conditions

Jiraporn Laocharoenwong

doi:10.17351/ests2025.3055

Jiraporn Laocharoenwong

DOI: https://doi.org/10.17351/ests2025.3055

Abstract

This “engagement” rethinks “area” as a set of multispecies entanglements linking humans, cattle, chemicals, and cultural tastes across borders rather than as a fixed geographic or political space. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork along the Myanmar–Thailand frontier between 2021 and 2023, the article traces the journey of retired oxen from Myanmar’s Central Dry Zone through Thailand’s feedlots to Chinese hotpot tables. Rather than a bounded geopolitical space, “area” emerges as an entangled process shaped by metabolism, pharmaceutical interventions, and a chain of care and transformation that connects borderlands via commodity chains to consumers. These interconnected practices—of feeding, medicating, transporting, and consuming—reveal how areas are continuously made and unmade through human and non-human entanglements.

References

Barua, Maan, Thomas White, and David Nally. 2020. “Rescaling the Metabolic.” Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities, Cambridge University (CRASSH) Blog, October 1, 2020. Accessed December 3, 2023.

https://www.crassh.cam.ac.uk/blog/rescaling-the-metabolic/.

Bruun Jensen, Casper, and Fadjar Thufail. 2025. “Entangled Areas: Reactivating Southeast Asia in the Anthropocene.” Engaging Science, Technology, and Society 11(2): 5–19.

https://doi.org/10.17351/ests2025.2887.

Dooren, Thom van. 2014. Flight Ways: Life and Loss at the Edge of Extinction. New York: Columbia University Press.

Gillespie, Kathryn. 2018. The Cow with Ear Tag #1389. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

⸻. 2021. “The Afterlives of the Lively Commodity: Life-Worlds, Death-Worlds, Rotting-Worlds.” Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space 53(2): 280–295.

https://doi.org/10.1177/0308518X20944417.

Haraway, Donna J. 2008. When Species Meet. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Laocharoenwong, Jiraporn. 2022. “Cattle Hotels and Infrastructures of Care.” Roadsides (8): 10–16.

https://doi.org/10.26034/roadsides-202200802.

Li, Xiang Zi, Chang Guo Yuan, and Lin Sen Zan. 2018. “Current Situation and Future Prospects for Beef Production in China—A Review.” Asian-Australasian Journal of Animal Sciences 31(7): 984–991.

https://doi.org/10.5713/ajas.18.0212.

Marchant-Forde, Jeremy N., D. C. Lay Jr, Ruth M. Marchant-Forde, K. A. McMunn. 2012. “The Effects of R-Salbutamol on Growth, Carcass Measures, and Health of Finishing Pigs.” Journal of Animal Science 90(11): 4081–4089.

https://doi.org/10.2527/jas.2011-4423.

Smith, Polly, Nancy Bourgeois Lüthi, Li Huachun, Kyaw Naing Oo, et al. 2015. Movement Pathways and Market Chains of Large Ruminants in the Greater Mekong Sub-Region. Bangkok: World Organization for Animal Health. Accessed September 29, 2025.

https://rr-asia.woah.org/app/uploads/2019/10/livestock_movement_pathways_and_markets_in_the_gms__final_.pdf.

Thai Department of Livestock Development. 2020. “ปริมาณโค นำเข้าจากเมียนมาร์สู่ไทยประจำเดือนตุลาคม 2561” [Numbers of Imported Cattle from Myanmar to Thailand (October, 2018)]. aqi.dld.go.th. Accessed December 2, 2023.

https://aqi.dld.go.th/webnew/images/stories/report/cow-im-ex-October61.pdf.

Thompson, Daniel U., Guy H. Loneragan, Jamie N. Henningson, Steve Ensley, et al. 2015. “Description of a Novel Fatigue Syndrome of Finished Feedlot Cattle Following Transportation.” Journal of the American Veterinary Medical Association 247(1): 66–72.

https://doi.org/10.2460/javma.247.1.66.

Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt. 2015. The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins. Princeton: Princeton University Press.