Agrarian Ecology, Animal Labour, and Species Hierarchy in George Orwell’s Animal Farm

Abstract

This study explores Animal Farm (1945) as a political allegory to examine how ecological relations among land, labour, food, and animal bodies reproduce hierarchical power on the farm. This research aims to show how the revolution against Mr Jones not only changes the form of political power, but also the situation in which the domination is maintained, thereby expanding the allegorical interpretation of power toward an ecological critique of power. The study analyses the windmill project, food rationing, and the exploitation of Boxer through close textual analysis Using Wolfe’s (2010) posthumanist theory, Michel Foucault’s (1978, 1995)  concepts of biopower  and biopolitics, Giorgio Agamben’s (1998, 2004) biopolitical theory, and Huggan and Tiffin’s (2010) postcolonial ecocriticism as its theoretical frameworks, as all of them are expressions of the inequality between political authority and agricultural production and between human and animal life. The analysis shows that the administrative control of the pigs is based on the differential valuation of animal body and the other animals are exposed to laborious work and suffer from hunger, injury, body exposure and environmental hardship. Boxer embodies the transformation of the animal body to become a disposable means of production whose value lies in its capacity for labour. Finally, this paper concludes that species hierarchy in the farm is an ecological and a political hierarchy, as power works through the ways in which bodies work, eat, suffer and survive.