Absent Interests: On the Abstraction of Human and Animal Milks

How does milk become cow milk, donkey milk or human milk? When one closely explores this question, the species differences between milks is not as stable as one might initially assume, even if one takes an embodied perspective. To show this, this book takes readers through an ethnographic comparison of milk consumption and production in Croatia in a range of different social settings: on farms, in mother-infant breastfeeding relations, in food hygiene documentation and in the local landscape. In doing so, it argues that humans actually invest considerable work into abstracting and negotiating milks into their human and animal forms.