This paper considers the relationships between peasants and their homegrown pigs in two villages in northern Romania. I analyse the private rearing, their quasi-religious slaughter and consumption before Christmas, showing how pigs influence their owners’ daily activities, gender roles and attitudes to agricultural and social politics. Pigs are cheap to keep and fatten, their meat is notionally Romania’s national food, making a unique contribution to peasants’ empowering status as ‘traditional’ agriculturalists. I argue that pig rearing has helped peasants cope with their exclusion and misunderstanding by successive political establishments.
This qualitative study of pig rearing, killing and consumption is based on a month of fieldwork in rural Bistrita. With twenty ‘gospodari’ (householders) in the two villages, I observed and participated in household-related activities, pig care and feeding. I assisted in three pig killing rituals, in which four large white pigs were killed for Christmas and the year to come, observing distinct techniques of care, killing and meat-making. I conducted interviews with the men who killed the pigs, with the women who prepared the pork products and with two prominent Orthodox priests in the region, who have extensive influence over the communities in my study. I also held a self-reflexive journal, which revealed the politics of hospitality and commensality involved in my perception and role in the community. I did archival research about farming and animal rearing in Bistrita, during the twentieth century, exploring agrarian policies as experientable realities by peasants.
I concluded that the pig was the animal of the disenfranchised, rural and multitasking human. I critique the view that the countryside is backwards, arguing that there is no intelligible apparatus for modernisation to disapprove of peasants' traditionalism in Romania. Domestic pigs form affective, corporeal and social bonds with their owners, playing significant roles in their daily struggles, and this is especially played out in the pig slaughter ritual. I contend that a more meaningful collaboration between individuals, and the legislative, regulatory and religious institutions would empower both peasants and their pigs.