Outside the Henhouse. Ethnography of poultry labour on a neo-rural farm

Resumen

In industrial poultry systems, animal subjectivity is fully subordinated to the logic of productive efficiency: hens are confined, monitored, hybridized, and rendered vulnerable on multiple levels – immunological, spatial, and reproductive. According to Keck (2020), the biopolitical infrastructures created in the name of biosecurity often generate the very crises they claim to prevent, as in the case of avian influenza. While epidemics expose the limits of such systems, the concept of spillover has been used in anthropology to emphasize the entanglement among companion species (Barad 2007; Haraway 2003). Building on this paradigm, the article presents an ethnographic reflection on a neo-rural farm (van der Ploeg 2009) in the Sabina region of central Italy, where laying hens live outdoors day and night, without a coop and in contact with wild fauna. The absence of centralized control allows animals to reclaim body, time, and space, expressing a situated ethology that enables a form of autonomous, recognized labor. Within a broader inquiry into contemporary neo-rurality (Giancristofaro, Villa 2023), this study explores the practical implications of an ontological reconfiguration of non-human labor (Povinelli 2016). By blurring the boundaries between domestic and wild, the farmers cultivate practices of care extended to all species inhabiting the landscape – plants, predators, microbes – assuming responsibility for the local biocenosis. Participant observation reveals how non-human work operates as a relational and metabolic process, challenging anthropocentric notions of productivity and efficiency. Ethnography thus returns non-human labor as an ethological re-emergence that interweaves affective, ecological, and metabolic dimensions of production, suggesting applications in agro-ecology, animal welfare, and multispecies cohabitation policies.