In the last five years since history professor and Director of American studies Brett Mizelle, started putting together his book “Pig,” he has watched his office overflow with trinkets of the portly pink animal.
On a pin board in Mizelle’s office hangs a navy blue tie patterned with hundreds of tiny pigs. Several pictures of pigs are pinned alongside the tie, and on a pane behind Mizelle’s desk is a long purple wand – an artificial insemination device for pigs.
But Mizelle’s office has not always been overrun with pigs. It started at an animal studies conference when he ran into Jonathan Burt, editor of the animal series books produced by London-based publisher, Reaktion books.
Each of the 50 books in the series focuses on a specific animal, ranging from the tiny mosquito to the massive whale, and studies their historic importance as well as their impact on humans.
Having grown up near a pig farm in Atlanta, Georgia, Mizelle said he had always been interested in the animal. Since the Reaktion animal series did not yet have a book on pigs, Mizelle said that he asked Burt, “‘Hey, can I put in a proposal for pig?'”
According to Mizelle, who was named Cal State Long Beach’s author of the month, pigs and humans have a shared history of about 10,000 years, which makes them important both materially and symbolically.
“Pigs are an important animal in the history of human’s relationship with nature,” Mizelle said. “They’re interesting because of the similarities between humans and pigs [and they] have always been interesting in terms of their intelligence.”
In his book, Mizelle talks about the natural and human-caused evolution of pigs, as well as their history, domestication and steady disappearance from cities. He also discusses the contradiction between the ways in which pigs are represented in cultural images versus the way they exist today.
“We imagine the happy pigs and farmers and everyone’s outside and it’s this kind of nostalgic, idyllic, traditional way of doing things, but it’s not.” Mizelle said. “It’s a big huge industry with animals kept in confinement, don’t really see the outsides, they don’t really get fresh air.”
For his field research for the book, Mizelle said he visited several places like the Ocmulgee Wild Hog festival in rural Georgia and the World Pork Expo in Des Moines, Iowa.
“I mean it’s really kind of this weird rigorous industry,” Mizelle said. “I met anti biotic people, I met artificial inseminators. I came back with a bag full all of this stuff. [There’s] that tension between the imagined traditional way of farming and that it was super industrial and super corporatized was really interesting.”
Chair of the Comparative Literature Department Carl Fisher, who has written an article on the representation of pigs as caricatures in politics and was referenced by Mizelle in the book, said the series touch upon an important topic.
“The way in which in contemporary society we view everything from animal rights to how we understand the narratives of our world is very much tied up in the resonance that we give all sensing beings,” Fisher said.
Nancy Quam-Wickham, chair of the history department, said she had a sneak-peak at the book before it was published and thought it was wonderful.
“They’re very interesting examinations of things that we often take for granted – animals,” Quam-Wickham said.
In the five years it took to compile the book, Mizelle has received several pig trinkets from people who now know him as the “pig guy.”
“For better or worse – I think it’s for the better – I will be associated with pigs from now,” Mizelle said. “There are worse things that one can be associated with than to be the historian of the pig.”