Ecology, Conservation and Management of Wild Pigs and Peccaries

Chapter 5: Space, time and pig

53

natural complexity (the mature peasant landscape) into the arti-
ficial complicatedness of a self-destructive dystopia.
The Cheju Island pigsty–privy I first observed and experi-
enced in 1973 was an achievement of the mature subsistence
peasant landscape, but doomed to failure by the deliberately
disruptive government-implemented Saemaul Undong ‘New
Village’ movement in an industrializing, modernizing South
Korea. The hard-earned mature peasant landscape shaped over
many centuries by its age-old productive subsistence peasant
agro-ecosystem is now extinct.

Pig–Human Relations: A Cosmological Casualty

of Modernization in East Asia

The feng shui (K. p’u n g s u) surveying compass along with the
Neo-Confucian ideology and cosmology that it embodied are –
along with profound pig–human relations –also simultaneous
victims of Modernity in East Asia, in South Korea, and on Cheju
Island. It is instructive and a profound exercise for the purpose
of contemplation on pig–human relations to overlay the face of
the feng-shui compass (Figure 5.4) upon the achievement of the
‘Mature peasant landscape’ depicted in Figure 5.3.
The overlay offers some cross-cultural insights into the pro-
found significance of the compass to Neo-Confucian peoples
in East Asia prior to their Modernization. Space, Time, and the
Myriad Things are united as a single comprehensive, integrative,
cosmology symbolized on the compass face. Sus scrofa is prom-
inently displayed there, not as-pork but as a force to be reck-
oned with in conjunction with space and time toward achieving
success in the human search for ideal habitats to nurture their
‘sincerity’ and ‘virtue’.
Note that the axis mundi in the mature peasant repre-
sented in Figure 5.3 is represented by ‘The Well’ at the centre
of the feng shui compass, and that the symbol of Sus scrofa from
the Chinese zodiac is in close proximity to ‘The Well’, implying its
significance in relation to the search for human perfection. ‘The
Well’ conceptualized from a Neo-Confucian 3D perspective

connects Heaven and Earth and thus comprises a conduit for

‘heaven’s breath’ to infuse Earth with potentially propitious sites

whereby, once located by a compass-wielding feng shui expert,

a potentially propitious habitat for humans on Earth is ‘born’.

So, in the context of a traditional agrarian Neo-Confucian

cosmology, how would a ‘virtuous’ peasant inhabiting a ‘sin-

cere’ landscape on Cheju Island treat a pig? The answer is: as-a-

pig; with respect, and with empathy mixed with awe: ‘Even the

prosaic pig is said to bear seven spots on its hind legs resembling

the seven stars’ of the celestial dipper (Rufus 1913).

Modernity in the West, Land-use Change, and Loss

of Living Space for Pigs-as-pork

Modernization during the Anthropocene also complicated and

rendered into extinction mature peasant landscapes that had

once evolved in Europe. Northern Europeans, and the inhab-

itants of England, for example, also deployed pigsty-privies

as integral parts of a productive pre-Modern agro-ecosystem,

although it is hard to find an educated Englander these days

willing to validate this unsavory narrative. In a nutshell, indus-

trializing humans worldwide have failed to deliberately act

successfully against their material self-interest by producing –

rather than rejecting – labour-saving devices and unmanage-

able and ecologically destructive complications (Nemeth 1987).

One outcome of this downward ecological spiral triggered

at the onset of the Industrial Revolution was to presage the

invention of pork-producing factory farming associated with

land-use change and the abandonment of any respect for the

intrinsic value of pig life. The instrumental-rational logic of

the Anthropocene redefined pigs-as-pork ‘essential’ for human

consumption and justifies the worldwide spread of pork-

producing factory farms that dramatically deprive pigs-as-pork

axis mundi

natural chaos

artificial chaos

Incipient

peasant

landscape

Mature

peasant

landscape

: site of peasant dwelling

Reverts

to

nature

Is

preserved

Becomes

complicated

TIME

Figure 5.3 Productive complexity or unproductive complicatedness? A heu-
ristic model of alternative outcomes of human agency through historic land-use
choices and policies, for example, on Cheju Island. To choose complexity would
be to choose ‘enlightened underdevelopment’ over unavoidable yet invited
complications resulting from following the path of Modernity and its disruptive
economic growth ideology; e.g. ‘collateral damages’ and ‘creative destructions’
in the names of ‘Progress’ and ‘Development’ (Nemeth 1987, p. 318).

Figure 5.4 Diagram of the face of an antique medium-size feng shui compass.

The location of the boar zodiac symbol on the compass is encircled. Photo by

David J. Nemeth.

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