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Perhaps it's because they are so smart, or maybe just because they are the source of bacon. Whatever the reason, our porcine friends inspire scholars to come up with great titles when writing about them. For example, over the years I've reviewed good books with titles such as Hog Ties (by Richard Horwitz) and Pig Tales (by Barry Estabrook). Now, along comes Tiago Saraiva with Fascist Pigs, a great title for a terrifically ambitious and provocative book.
In his study, Saraiva skillfully employs his expertise in the history of technology, history of science, and STS to provide eye-opening, extremely creative, and often brilliant reinterpretations of a variety of subjects we thought we knew well: modernity, fascism, and colonialism (not to mention the powerful and revelatory relationships among them). In so doing, he contributes to recent ontological debates in STS, most notably to those exploring the ways in which the "entanglements between humans and nonhumans"—particularly scientific and technological entanglements—produce "new social collectives" (p. 13). The key collectives at issue in the book are the modernist fascist formations that developed in Germany, Italy, and...