On his way to a costume party in Paris, Alejandro Jodorowsky found a faux cheetah tail in a garbage can and attached it to his rear. That night he met several surrealists with whom he would become intimately connected.

Soon after, Maurice Chevalier came to find him in a car with cheetah-skin seats, which Jodorowsky took as a sign. During the next several decades he learned from other masters besides Chevalier, such as Ejo Takata, Erich Fromm, Pachita (a Mexican sorceress), Carlos Castaneda, the artist Topor, and the playwright Fernando Arrabel. Each pushed Jodorowsky in his search for the spiritual knowledge he has inserted in work that is meant to touch, transform, and change the audience.¹

In his capacities as a director, screenwriter, playwright, actor, author, producer, tarot card reader, and composer, Jodorowsky has demonstrated an ambivalent attitude toward art as commodity, leaving the sale of his work to others and proclaiming, “I have always had a horror of business matters. When someone presents me with a contract, I do not discuss

His film Holy Mountain (1973), a hallucinogenic romp through the modern search for enlightenment, peels back layer after layer of ideological illusion: religion, the state, war, beauty, film, the self, and so forth. The lactating breast scene pictured here was restaged in 2010 by A-list editorial photographer Mario Sorrenti for the New York issue of V 67. There in glossy color, a sexy model, Natasha Poly, shoots milk from jaguar breasts onto a naked man (see Sauers 2010). Although one gets a sense of Sorrenti’s admiration, this postmodern citation practice-all image, no content-is distinctly commercial and works well in juxtaposition with Jodorowsky’s critique of the commodity. This image in fact would not be bad on a box of milk.

25. Zteven Zangbang, layout for Ad for Liquid Gold-Humilk, 2015. Courtesy of the artist.

Nell pulled six-month-old Mary out of her car seat and stuffed her into a Moby Wrap before zipping quickly through the Whole Foods parking lot to avoid the rain. Inside she selected three gorgeous pears out of an artfully balanced pyramid and placed them in her cart, adding squash, kale, and sweet potato, all organic. Rounding the corner, she noticed that the breast milk area had been relocated to the frozen nutri-tionals section. Stopping to examine a new brand, she considered how well Mary had done with Pamalat’s A Mother’s Love and Nobisco’s less expensive Chubby Baby product. She saw that the Holy Mountains brand White Gold, Organic was back. Nell checked her wallet, then grabbed all of the boxes left on the shelf, wondering how long the shortage would continue.

5 Economic Matters

Breast milk, that most ancient and fundamental of nourishments, is becoming an industrial commodity, and one of the newest frontiers of the biotechnology industry.

When I was learning about sharing, I found out that breast milk was undergoing a process of commodification. By mid-2012 a few potential donors had suggested that we purchase their milk. This situation presented a quandary: I could see that these women needed money, but buying milk went against community standards. Then again, was I exploiting my donors? Is a buying relationship really all that different? Shouldn’t they be compensated?

Breast milk and its various simulated and synthetic counterparts are subject to the processes of commodity capitalism, but the process does not go uncontested.² Debates about whether and how to commodify, regulate, or oversee milk are entertained by sharers and increasingly by those representing scientific, governmental, and corporate institutions.

We know that capitalism must continuously seek new markets. It requires us to find ways to extract or translate life itself into capital; the contemporary form of this practice is known as biocapitalism (see Helm-reich 2008). The patenting of genes is but one example. A refusal to participate in the commodification of milk by insisting on donation, rejecting the reduction of life to capital, constitutes a resistance to biocapitalism. Both donating and commodifying milk can be understood in this context.

Gifting is a highly ritualized, culturally specific activity. As opposed to the way many societies view the gift, Americans tend to view a gift with strings attached as not a real gift. We tend to define it somewhat idealistically: it should be neither in return for a previous gift nor in anticipation of a future recompense. The recipient should not perceive it as an exchange that requires repayment, nor should the giver view it in terms of a reciprocal cycle.

What functions might the gifting of breast milk have? Is not the act of indebting, and of accepting the debt, the crux of the matter when it comes to gifting? Certainly replacing bags or giving someone vitamins for their donation might discount it as an act of disinterested exchange, but it does not rise to the level of barter or sale since there are no explicit terms, temporal expectations, or punishments for failure to comply. Mothers say they would give milk without receiving anything in return: I was told on numerous occasions that items I offered were appreciated but not required or even desired.

Marcel Mauss (2016) posits that the difference between a commodity and a gift has to do with the kind of expectations people have as a result of participating in an exchange.³ The strings attached to a gift, rather than being reviled as self-serving or sneaky, might be celebrated as an index of trust: the strings attached are like outstretched hands, reaching out to a receiver who has the power to accept (or reject) them. This metaphorical linking of hands constitutes the warp and weft of a community.

These connections are not just niceties but necessary to the functioning of a society so thoroughly entrenched in market activity, like that of the United States. Gifts, even of things acquired through purchase, tend to operate with such high degrees of social salience that I frankly have to wonder if a market economy could exist without a gifting foundation underneath it to underscore common interests and futures.

Many of our belongings are acquired through purchase with no, or virtually no, implied future obligations, and while these purchases do make dense contributions to the reproduction of political and economic dynamics, they contribute less to personal relationships. Breast milk sharing, insofar as it takes place between willing families, does have the benefit of weaving a community together.

When we accepted milk, our “debt” was nebulous: it seemed to contain a commitment to care, to good parenting, and to community making. Donors redirected talk when I offered them milk bags or flowers or children’s books. Karen told me, for example, “Thank you, but I just think it is so wonderful that you are taking all of this time to give your baby what he needs,” and Elsa said, “We [moms] have to stick together and help each other out.” At first I was confused by these remarks, but eventually I realized that some donors were more concerned about the meanings of the gift than with recompense, which was appreciated but superfluous.

The movement of milk from a lactating mom to another family corresponds with an anthropological notion of the gift, insofar as, unlike a market transaction, it creates and maintains social relationships. Even when my sister gave us milk, it benefited my child, but, and perhaps what is more important, it made visible and strengthened our kinship ties.

Gifting also has a temporal dimension. How much time should pass before you give something back? There is a delayed response, and how much time passes until the responsive act is culturally variable. When my sister gave us milk, there was no request or expectation of immediate or near-term reward. But as partners in a long-standing reciprocal relationship, we often give to each other. Breast milk slid rather easily into the back-and-forth movement of shoes, gossip, books, jewelry, and favors that has been taking place all of our lives.

Of course different conditions apply in stranger-to-stranger shares. When there is an immediate return (in the form of bags, flowers, or other items), it might begin to look like a barter, a less socially charged transaction. But these relationships are not cut and dried; they may fall anywhere on a continuum. One donor asks for a swaddling blanket or set of teething rings. Another pumps five to ten ounces a day to give to a friend in exchange for yoga lessons. One donor asked me for a specific type of herb, with a precise brand and bottle size, to be purchased at Happy Day, our local, expertly stocked, but somewhat expensive health food store (and I was glad to oblige). Another donor asked if we would buy her an expensive electric pump (suggesting that if we paid for it, she would pump for both her child and ours). Of course the difference between gift and barter is somewhat heuristic, with expectations of further interaction significantly lowered under barter conditions that specify remuneration. But when milk is priced according to the principle of supply and demand and when money changes hands along with milk, there is no pretense of bartering, much less gifting. The milk becomes, in an anthropological sense, a commodity (see Kopytoff 1986).

As a commodity, milk has a monetary value. But how is the price established? Is some milk more expensive than others? If so, why? How might an economist analyze the market for milk? I was fascinated to read in Susan B. Draper’s (1996) “Breast-Feeding as a Sustainable Resource System” that although breast milk is usually ignored in national resource inventories, it could significantly impact national portfolios, as well as national medical and environmental costs.

Institutions use an algebra of value to price their milk. Milk banks adhere to a hierarchy of neediness, but even insurance companies recognize that it costs less in the long run to provide Nicu patients with expensive banked milk enhanced with fortifier than it is to allow them to consume cheap formula. So although shared milk is free, milk also already has a market value. It is routinely sold by milk banks and companies and at times commodified by private individuals. I would be surprised if more stringent legislation for this market is not on the horizon, but as is true for other areas of the law, legal guidelines regarding breast milk are poorly understood by the general public. Under what circumstances is it legal to buy and sell milk? Can sellers, website owners, or buyers be held responsible for trafficking in tainted, damaged, or adulterated milk? Given the significant amount of milk circulating, how might federal or state governments use tax codes to regulate sales?

As I mentioned in chapter two, milk is not included in the National Organ Transplant Act, which regulates the sale of organs, and many states exclude replenishable materials such as sperm or plasma from laws regulating the sale of bodily materials. Debates about whether we can or should sell bodily materials rarely center on breast milk. Laws in states that do regulate milk sales (California, New York, and Texas) pertain only to milk donated to a licensed milk bank, not to individual sellers participating in what David (2011) calls a “gray market.”⁴

So under the current state and federal laws informal milk sellers may be liable only under limited circumstances, namely by engaging in fraudulent or negligent misrepresentation. Tort law could be brought to bear in cases of selling milk known to contain hiv or to be adulterated with other substances, but given the perishable nature of milk and the fact that most buyers have no way to test it upon receipt, it is unlikely that buyers would prevail in potential lawsuits (David 2011, 211).

In exploring how regulatory law might be used, Lori Andrews (cited in Waldeck 2002) notes that given the expected insolvency of providers of bodily materials, tort liability has little practical consequence; she suggests that criminal liability might be an effective means to ensure the quality of bodily materials offered in the marketplace. And in February 2010 a Tennessee lawmaker introduced a bill that would have made it a misdemeanor to sell human milk through informal channels such as the Internet, but the bill never made it out of committee review (David 2011, 165).

Why all the legal interest in sales of breast milk? An article provocatively titled “Bodies Double as Cash Machines with U.S. Income Lagging” (Stilwell 2013) reports that in all but two quarters since 2011, “hair,” “eggs,” or “kidney” have been among the top four autofill results for the Google search query “I want to sell my . . . ,” according to Nicholas Colas, chief market strategist at New York-based ConvergEx Group, which provides brokerage and trading-related services for institutional investors. Kidney sales are illegal, but hair, semen, milk, and eggs can be sold, and in the context of neoliberal America people are looking for creative ways to make ends meet. Debating whether or not breast milk should be commodified is by now a moot point. We can still ask, What does it mean to describe the body as a cash machine? And what are the responses, meanings, and consequences to the push for body farming or industrialized, biocapitalistic milk commodification? What, if any, are the possibilities for a progressive politics within such a landscape?

Is wet-nursing a form of body farming? With the considerable pressure on mothers to breastfeed and make a living (goals that are incompatible at times), a wet nurse revival might be in order. I have in fact noticed

an uptick in the frequency of ads offering wet-nursing services in Georgia on sites like Only the Breast. Here is an example:

Healthy, organic, clean, gluten free, mostly vegan, water from a spring. Wet nurse: No Adult Wet-nursing, No Pictures, No Videos, No Checks accepted, and No Scams. Donation to a baby only! If you do not have a needy baby and cannot pay via paypal then do not reply. I am a 25 year old mother of a 5 year old daughter and am expecting a baby in April 2015. My daughter nursed until she was four simply because I allowed her to self wean. My diet for the last four years has been organic, gf [gluten free], clean, and 90% vegan. I do eat eggs that come from our chickens that are feed [sic] organically in our back yard. I was looking for a nanny position but, then I thought becoming a wet nurse for another baby would be such a beautiful process. The value of breast milk is incredible but the actual breast nursing provides probiotics that aid in healthy digestion for life. If the situation is conducive I may be willing to relocate for the time your bundle of joy is nursing.⁵

So even as there are wet nurses looking for employment, the American public has yet to embrace wet-nursing, perhaps because of the idea that affection between baby and mother may be diminished by wet-nursing.⁶ (Or maybe the cost is prohibitive: the annual salary requested for this “healthy, organic, clean, gluten free, mostly vegan, water from a spring” wet nurse was $97,000.) Perhaps the future is in farmed or even manufactured breast milk.

From our earliest evolutionary inception we have been tool-using cyborgs, organo-technological hybrids. If we compare the externaliza-tion of force through early choppers and scrapers with our ability to transform the global biome using fossil fuel technology and advanced genetic manipulation, we can see that the line between nature and culture is, and has always been, both ideological and dubious.

In fact Wired magazine has reported that an interdisciplinary team at the Counter Culture Labs (a diy bio-lab) in Oakland, California, used mail-order dna to trick yeast cells into producing a substance molecularly identical to cow’s milk, a substance that they plan to turn into a kind of vegan cheese for people who do not want to consume animal products (Wohlsen 2015). The procedure can be used to synthesize milk from any mammal: the team is also planning to develop a version of what is known as Real Vegan Cheese that would be made with synthetic narwhal milk. And not surprisingly, human milk. The idea is that this “vegan” human cheese could be consumed by those with allergies to nonhuman dairy products. (The fda, however, has placed a temporary kibosh on the human cheese experiment, citing concerns about autoimmune reactions). Author Marcus Wohlsen (2015) admits that vegan human cheese might not seem like a best-seller, but he notably avoids any discussion of human cheese as something perfectly consumable already (a point to which I return below).

This outlier science reflects an expansion of biotech interest in human breast milk that might one day challenge milk sharing, which until quite recently remained a relatively quiet practice. Transforming in real time from pressures originating both within and without, making it difficult to study and analyze but exciting to track, milk sharing is changing and becoming louder (and more visible). As I have depicted it, sharing by a counternetwork coalescing around a social-technological assemblage circulates milk along with knowledge and meanings attached to it. It is also within this counternetwork that milk comes to matter.

Matter is a special word. It can be used as a verb, as in something that matters; its transitive use means that something matters relationally, to someone. Matter can be used as a noun, to describe material, as in vegetal or dark matter, as stuff. Matter can be made plural, as in matter(s): materials, or issues to consider. Matter has a perceptual aspect, where out of all the many, even infinite, possibilities, we specify attention to this or that set of things or ideas. We say, “We have several matters to cover today,” to mean a group of issues, items significant or dear. Or the opposite, as in, “What is the matter? What is wrong? What is the problem?” To matter, as a verb or as a noun, is to appear in some sense, to relate to, to become an object of perception, to affect.

In studies of material culture, matter is never a given but something that emerges. Some “thing” comes to matter, arrives as significant, because of circumstances, because of the relationships around it. We intend ourselves into the world through our interactions with matter. Matter, as hui, is a fundamental medium of knowing the world, relating to each other, and thinking about ourselves. This act of intending ourselves into and receiving the world, what we might call living, can be accomplished with milk or diamonds or cars or cities or even through what Timothy Morton (2013) has called hyperobjects, things like fossil fuels or the English language or other entities of such vast temporal and spatial dimension that they defeat traditional ideas about what a thing is in the first place. And crucially, a distinctly political semiotic question asks which matter counts, for whom, and how.

Matter can elide into a gerundlike form, matter-ing, that attracts and repels. It invites, and it orders (in both the categorical and imperative senses of the term) behaviors, relationships, sensations, ideas, values, and actions, of people, technologies, and organizations of every stripe. Matter-ing is implicated in the production of networks, counternetworks, or scenarios. Matter-ing, as the artist Joseph Beuys has shown us, shifts the world into focus in particular, and quite directed, ways.⁷

The avant-garde artist Guy Debord and the group Situationist International knew this. Their situations (which combined dadaist and surrealist art to critique the triumph of commodity culture) matter-ed. As a practice, anthropology has a similar bent. Milk sharing also casts questions into relief by enacting an alternative to the hegemonic world; sharers do this by refusing to snap to grid and by resisting the hyperobject of advanced neoliberal capitalism, with its profit motive, rationalized social relationships, denial of the aleatory, and marketization of every aspect of life.

Matter is also implicated in infrastructures, delivering water or electricity, for example, as well as for those less obviously but equally engaged in producing the starkly unequal arrangements of cultural subjects. This might be opaque matter, like milk or seeds, or wispy matters, such as identity or knowledge. And of course there are technological, economic, and political underpinnings that determine what and how things come to matter and, by the same token, how what comes to matter enables or frustrates citizenships, policies, or styles of resistance.

Scholars have considered matter-ing in their examinations of human-nonhuman relations and looked for ways that agency might be distributed across social fields and material culture. I see the concept of distributed agency resembling the use of the term “matter” in astronomy, where it can be recognized by the effects exerted on other entities that may or not share its nature. For us terrestrials matter is exercised within a superlocal universe: the presence of a gun, or a green space, or a plaque, or a dripping breast, does things; it exerts itself.

So matter, like milk, is an event, is action oriented. It is a process. We can think of milk exerting an influence on other entities around it. Good anthropology has a history of calling out what matters, of matter-ing, by exploring the exercise of political power, the construction of hierarchies, the transformation of institutions, processes of subjectification, and interpretation of policy. Thinking about the frictions of matter as it moves through the world, pulled or repelled by other entities, casts light upon these questions by revealing how power is aimed at, shunted through, constituted or resisted by the experience of material objects, and vice versa. What are the crucial points of contact between the material and the political? How is matter enrolled in the execution of or resistance to social and moral regimes? Anthropologists try to figure out how political ideologies exerted through design, education, law, and management reproduce power structures or create opportunities for critique, if not dissent, in a variety of contexts. As I am presenting it, matter has a complicated ontological status, but just because something relates, acts, and interacts with other things in the world does not yet allow us to give it agency.

As I understand agency to work, that is to say, in cahoots with subjectivity if not intentionality, it seems very counterintuitive (given the worldview into which I have been deeply socialized and from which I am now writing) to characterize shoes or rocks or cords as agentive beings (even though at times it seems like, and I even behave as if, they are trying to trip me up) as is sometimes done in work that interrogates or collapses a subject-object dichotomy.⁸

It’s unremarkable to back-engineer agency on the part of milk sharers: I assume they, like me, have subjectivities and that those subjectivities, like mine, include intentions (or at least what feels like intentionality) that seem to motivate various (apparently) goal-oriented actions. In contrast, when I think about a glass of milk, I do not immediately project an underlying subjectivity, although as an explorer I am more than happy to consider the possibility that my own worldview is just ideology, and

I admit to having ruined more than one family gathering by arguing with my brother about the consciousness of carrots, partly for sport, partly in seriousness.

Luckily the question of whether material objects have agency of the kind I usually believe humans might have is not one I need to answer right now. What is at stake here is a pragmatic rather than a theoretical question, because material culture like milk has real effects. It limits and/or encourages other entities (those with intention and those without) to have relationships or interactions with it. And in this interactive sense we might say that material culture acts in the world. This seems to be what Bruno Latour and other actor-network theory (ant) scholars are keying into when they use the term “actant” or “agency.”

In a fascinating critique of ant Tim Ingold (2008) argues against the notion of symmetrically distributed agency, in which elements of an assemblage operate in relation to each other, none having more agency than another, by valuing instead the role of attention and responsiveness that accompany the developing nervous system in emergent life. He writes, “To attribute agency to objects that do not grow or develop that consequently embody no skill and whose movement is not therefore coupled to their perception, is ludicrous” (2008, 215). For the purpose of analyzing milk sharing, I find Ingold’s critique, summarized by what he calls spider (an acronym for skilled practice involves developmentally embodied responsiveness), useful for examining differently abled social agents: some spiders (social agents) have large powerful webs, while others are shy and tend to stay hidden; some spiders can and do kill and eat their mates, while others will attack and consume anything that moves.

In human society “skilled practice” (or power) is unevenly distributed. Within an anthropological context, discerning different kinds of power is essential to understanding both the reproduction and the disruption of the status quo. Sometimes this power is institutional; at other times it is physical, creative, intellectual, charismatic, or economic. Milk sharers wield all of these, with differing degrees of success, to get milk to matter.⁹

When I explained milk sharing to my own mother, she had questions. Having seen a news report about samples acquired via the Internet being cut with cow’s milk, she said, “What are you trying to pull here anyway? This researcher proves that there is no telling what is in donated milk, so is it a really good idea to tell people how great it is and that they should go and get it?”¹⁰

I understood where she was coming from. I clarified that my intention is not necessarily to encourage people to seek donated milk but to describe how and what it means that parents already share.ⁿ I also explained that Keim’s 2015 study collapses milk bought anonymously online with milk donated locally/² Nevertheless it is true that any milk could be contaminated or adulterated; not all milk is the same, which becomes apparent once we open questions about source, storage, and processing. We can begin to tease this out by considering the contours of distribution. And we must analyze shared, donated, and commodified milks separately and identify who has access to what.

My mother pointed out that although access to donated and commodified milk is shaped by race, class, and gender, people can generally buy and sell what they like as long as they have the means. So why, she wondered, if it can be adulterated or contaminated, wouldn’t the state step in? The state could regulate it, tax it to pay for the oversight, and then make sure all of those who need it have it, and have it safely. Why not promote state control? These are perfectly reasonable questions, but for sharers any state control may be unwelcome for a variety of reasons.

For one thing the interests of stakeholders in milk distribution do not all coincide: individuals, milk banks, the state, and commercial entrepreneurs have different goals. People oppose the commodification of milk for a variety of reasons. It may be viewed as a sacred substance, profaned through commodification. Mothers may be willing to give it to a baby but will not sell to a company that plans to turn around and sell it at a profit. Others are completely at home buying and selling milk in any context.

Donors, donees, doulas, and milk bank personnel I spoke with were sensitive to the ways in which commodification and state regulation bring new questions and pressures to bear. I remember feeling unpleasantly suspicious when we received cold calls for milk sales. If I were truly desperate for cash and could sell my own milk, it might cross my mind to add water, formula, or cow’s milk to the supply. With breast milk bringing up to three or more dollars an ounce, deception might make sense under certain circumstances: maybe I could get a higher price by fudging information about drug use, alcohol, and caffeine consumption, organic food intake, the age of my own baby, or the length of time frozen and type of freezer used, or other factors that might affect the quality or taste of the milk. These possibilities may not occur to everyone, but I would be surprised if no one considered them.

Similar to the way that sharers use the Internet to find donors or donees, people looking to buy or sell breast milk use Internet sites such as Craigslist or Only the Breast.¹³ A recent Craigslist ad titled “Breast milk, not just for babies,” bragged that “breast milk is one of the healthiest things you can drink, even for adults. Many star athletes drink it to boost their healthy calories and benefit from the antibodies. If you’d be interested in the . . . health benefits that breast milk has to offer then contact me and we can discuss. Just to clarify, I am happily married and not looking for anything sexual. I am looking to sell frozen breast milk to men or women who are interested in the health benefits.” Interestingly this ad appears in the “strictly platonic” area of the personals section aimed at adults, not mothers and their babies.

Another Craigslist ad aimed at parents of infants states, “Pumped breast milk . . . $2.50 an ounce . . . have never smoked I don’t drink. I don’t used [sic] drugs of any kind. I have a healthy one month baby.” It is impossible to say how successful these pitches were, and there are few Craigslist ads selling milk in my area (usually fewer than two per day). But otb is extremely active, featuring thousands of postings; the home page says it all:

Buy, sell or donate breast milk with our discreet classifieds system in a clean, safe and private way. Want to donate breast milk to a fellow mother? Considering selling or donating to a needy baby? Need natural breastmilk for your growing baby? Do you believe breastfeeding is best? Are you over producing and want to list your liquid gold for sale? Looking to make a few extra bucks while clearing out your freezer? Post a free ad and help babies get Only The Breast.1⁴

otb offers classified sections for donation and wet-nursing, but it is geared for sellers and buyers. Ads promoting sales are subdivided by baby age, discounted or bulk sales, milk produced by mothers with fat babies, fresh milk on demand, bank-certified and screened milk, local and fresh milk, milk produced by moms with special diets (vegan, gluten free, etc.), and moms willing to sell to men. Subdivisions of buyers mirror these categories, with additional ones for premature and sick babies. Most milk is priced between one and three dollars per ounce.

Like posts on donation websites, a typical seller’s ad describes the mother’s location along with details about diet, smoking and drinking habits, vitamin intake, reason for selling the milk, whether blood work is available, and how milk was procured (“I pump into sterilized bottles and immediately freeze the milk into freezer bags” and so forth). Sellers sometimes provide details about personal beliefs and practices not apparently related to milk production: This seller practices karate. That seller is Christian. This pediatric rn donor has more than three hundred ounces of frozen milk. otb ads often contain photographs of the mother, the baby, or the freezer stash. Sellers may specify preferred buyers, as in, “I want to help a mom who doesn’t have enough milk, or is unable to breastfeed.” Another seller posts, “I am willing to sell to men.” A typical ad reads like this:

Very healthy new mother of a i-month-old girl. I am pumping more breast milk than my little one can drink. She is exclusively breast fed, no bottles. I have been taking prenatal vitamins for over 2 years. I’m a nonsmoker, nondrinker, and I do not take any medication. I always pump my milk in sterilized bottles and freeze in 5oz breast milk freezer bags. My milk is really fresh as she is only 1 month old so I pump everyday all day. I only deal in frozen milk. I’m asking $2.00 per oz. You pay shipping and cooler/dry ice costs ($30-$50). No Adult Wetnursing, No Pictures, No Videos, No Checks Accepted, and no scams! Pay Pal Payments only!

In my community attitudes about commodification at times shifted depending on the recipient. Some mothers were willing to sell to bodybuilders or to adults who want to use breast milk in the course of erotic play. Warnings to parents and bodybuilders alike about buying milk refer to various studies by Keim (2013, 2015) and suggest people purchase it from banks (see Bakalar 2013). Insofar as the state has (re)discovered the benefits of milk for ensuring optimal outcomes and biopolitical governance, it has little tolerance for rhizomatic communities like a breast milk sharing counternetwork. Acting outside of easy surveillance and circulating a bodily substance coming to be seen as having greater and greater economic value, sharing and banking are not surprisingly attracting more federal interest. The U.S. Surgeon General’s (2011) call to action on breastfeeding recommends a systematic review of the safety and health benefits of banked milk, the development of evidence-based guidelines for the use of milk, and establishment of federal guidelines for regulation and financial support of donor milk banks.

While administrators of Internet sharing sites welcome federal guidelines and resources for parents without access to banked milk, banks that are part of the Human Milk Banking Association of North America and acquire (free) milk from donors worry that sharing and for-profit companies (like Prolacta, Glycosyn, Jennewein Biotechnologie, Glycom, and Medolac) that pay for milk may be siphoning off valuable resources. In response hmbana has turned to the persuasive power of concerns about ethics and safety, as seen in a press statement asserting support for unpaid donations: “relying on volunteer donors is the only ethical way to collect and distribute the human milk donations critically ill infants desperately need” (hmbana 2014, 2). Proponents of donation also worry that greater commodification may result in a higher incidence of adulterated milk and to women “farming” their milk, possibly increasing output unsafely. An additional concern is that companies buying breast milk may coerce poor women into selling their milk instead of giving it to their own hungry babies.¹⁵

The commodification of milk by both institutions and individuals is increasing/⁶ Prolacta Bioscience, maker of Prolact+ h2mf, started paying mothers about $1 per ounce in 2014, processed an incredible 2.4 million ounces, and aimed to process 3.4 million in 2015 (as compared to the 3.5 million ounces handled by the combined efforts of all nonprofit hmbana banks). Their fortifier, which provides extra calories, fat, and protein to babies, is manufactured in a 67,000-square-foot pharmaceutical-grade facility in Los Angeles that reportedly cost more than $18 million to build; with Prolacta pushing insurers to cover product costs (its product sold for about $180 an ounce in more than 150 national Nicu units, with a total cost of approximately $10,000 per hospital stay per baby), there is a lot at stake. Prolacta pushes insurers and hospitals to pay by arguing that they will save money in the long term because research, in Prolacta-sponsored trials, suggests that fortifier wards off necrotizing enterocolitis (Lopez 2013; Pollack 2015).

Not surprisingly Prolacta has received more than $45 million in investments from life science venture capitalists who believe that breast milk, like blood plasma, can serve as a foundation for “valuable medical products”; Prolacta’s ceo has explained that milk is “brimming with potential therapeutics, not only for babies but possibly for adults, to treat intestinal or infectious diseases, like the bowel ailment known as Crohn’s disease” (quoted in Pollack 2015).

otb cofounder Glenn Snow also saw gallons of white gold flowing through his site. He started his own (rather deceptively entitled) International Milk Bank to buy and process milk from his own site to sell to hospitals, explaining “it’s a fascinating industry, and it’s brand new” (quoted in Pollack 2015).

We are now witnessing the creation of new commodities from existing forms of life. Biocapitalism represents a fundamental shift in our understanding of boundaries between nature and culture and between human and nonhuman. This is the monetization of life, bodies, and body parts. When considering milk in this context, we would want to identify who is benefiting from its circulation, whether distribution is fair and equitable, what the relevant laws require of participants, how suppliers are being treated, and how issues of class are addressed in resource collection and distribution.¹⁷

To explore these questions the performance artist Miriam Simun staged The Lady Cheese Shop est. 2011. Having tracked the rise of artisanal foods at farmers’ markets in New York City, she became interested in the politics of class, labor, and consumption. By making and serving cheese made from human milk, she engages her audience in a critical conversation about food and highlights politics surrounding the body.

“I tried to find a cheese maker to help me, but no one would touch this with a ten-foot pole! But then I found Heather Paxton’s [2010, 2012] work. She is an anthropologist at mit who works on artisanal cheese production and the role of bacteria, so I ran with her ideas,” Simun explained. To use bioart to critique biotech, she produced different cheeses based on the diets of women from whom she procured milk. Her cheeses were blends: “I used cow or goat milk to augment the human milk because it does not coagulate on its own . . . the casein content in human milk is not as high in concentration,” Simun explained. “I made a bleu cheese, for example, using a combination of human and cow milks, and a ricotta from a human and goat milk blend.”

Simun’s work targets the growing focus on, and concomitant pricing of, organic and artisanal foods, as well as what she calls “grand language” about hyperlocal and hypernatural foods (the same language, incidentally, used to create value in online posts to donate milk). She explains, “One thing I was interested in was the construction of terroir as ‘an established character of a place.’ I used this idea to reflect upon the obsession with local food in the urban environment: wild, the natural, the urban all coming together.”

Food pairings at the Lady Cheese Shop opening were based on terroir, a term usually associated with fine wines, tea, or foie gras. She made a bleu cheese using milk from a mother living in Chelsea who liked apples, the farmers’ market, and oatmeal cookies; the bleu was served with an oat cracker smeared with apple butter. The woman whose milk was used to make the ricotta cheese was Chinese, and she liked sweets; the ricotta was accompanied by black tea, orange cake, and ginger.

Tastings were free and public interest in the show was intense: “there was a line out the door, and [it got] a lot of varied reactions.” To get a sense of what participants thought about the show, Simun offered comment cards to participants: “Some loved it and felt like it was adventurous, and wrote that I was dialing into eating as a next new thing. . . . Lactivists who are working on the normalization of breastfeeding, vocal critics of the fact that breastfeeding has to be hidden or the idea that babies should have their face covered when they are feeding, are fighting a perception that breastfeeding should be done in private and that it should be all hush-hush and at home. They were really appreciative of the concept, [suggesting that] it popularized the idea of accepting human milk.” But not everyone, she explained, was a fan: “Some [people] were freaked out. . . . Adding value using terroir, a strategy that

creates the possibility for people to demonstrate an ability to discern, to make ever finer distinctions between otherwise virtually identical commodities, for human milk is just going too far.”

A second dimension of the Lady Cheese Shop project addressed effort and commodification. “For me,” Simun said, “it is about the labor.” Before finding local donors, she bought milk on the Internet; she paid $2.50 an ounce (plus a bit more for blood tests and shipping costs) to a seller in Wisconsin (a state well known for its cheeses). This made sense because selling sites like otb offer highly territorialized milk—that is to say, the milk is located in a particular place and attached to a particular person who has a specific diet and lifestyle. Terroir is used, per Simun, to add value, to create distinctions between hyperlocalized human milks. In her work, breast milk cheese is offered as a quasi-artisanal product in keeping with practices of social sorting within advanced commodity capitalism of the kind Bourdieu (1984) outlines. The effect is to both encourage and make strange the entire process.

(and contested) in recent culinary applications. The Telegraph (2008) has reported that a hullabaloo erupted when a major Swiss restaurateur posted ads asking for human milk, which would be used at Storchen, his restaurant at an exclusive resort in Winterthur. Hans Locher planned to offer stews and sauces made with human milk, which he (like Simun) said needs to be blended with whipped cream for consistency. His plans were foiled, however, by the Zurich food control laboratory because human milk is not on their list of approved species, such as sheep and cows.¹⁸ Soon afterward New York chef Daniel Angerer of Klee Brasserie reported that his “phone was ringing off the hook” when it became known that he was cooking with his wife’s breast milk, “so I prepared a little canape of breast-milk cheese with figs and Hungarian pepper.” Although some were too squeamish to try it, public feedback was generally positive. The response by the Department of Health was not: “the restaurant knows that cheese made from breast milk is not for public consumption, whether sold or given away” (quotes from Cartwright 2010).

Some entrepreneurs have been more successful than Locher and Angerer. Icecreamists, an ice cream shop in London, began selling a new flavor called Baby Gaga in 2011 (bbc News 2011). Baby Gaga is made with breast milk blended with Madagascan vanilla pods and lemon zest.

Perhaps its success can be explained by the fact that it is served in a martini glass with liquid nitrogen and rusk (and whiskey upon request) by a costumed waitress. (Could this be read as a more playful version of the Korova Milk Bar scene in Stanley Kubrick’s dystopic A Clockwork Orange, in which “moloko plus,” a drug-laced milk, is served from the nipples of furnishings shaped like naked women?)¹⁹

Decidedly less sexualized but similarly modern, milk distributed by banks and commercial businesses is also blended and standardized; it is deliberately deterroirized.²⁰ Commercial milk products are uniform and cannot be traced to any one mother. Milk banks also aim for a standardized product because they operate within a universe of hospitals, insurance companies, and customers who demand a standardized, deter-ritorialized product.

But even standardized milk needs to be placed within a landscape of interpretations. Jane Khatib-Chahidi (1992), for example, shows that milk kinship, which ritually achieves all kinds of objectives (from making peace between tribes, to consolidating clan unity, to preventing marriages, to creating clients) may operate beyond a nursing woman’s own interests. Ideas about milk’s ability to produce kinship may result in an aversion to consuming banked milk in the United States, where banks may mix together milk from three or more anonymous donors. How would one know who and where their new kin are?

We might imagine a future in which the captains of biocapitalism construct milk as a valuable national resource and call on ecological qualities such as climate, humidity, wind, temperature, or dew, which give varieties of pate or Darjeeling tea their various price points.21 One might imagine branded milks that do not identify individual moms but do highlight diet (lactose free), exercise (yoga), environment (country living), mental health, or intelligence (high iq) in recalling age-old ideologies about ideal characteristics of wet nurses. Branded milks could not only be stamped with approval by the state, perhaps by the fda, but would easily slide into established commodity consumer practices.

This step would mark the elision of milk into a full-fledged market commodity, like branded chocolates or wines, that Simun’s Lady Cheese Shop implicitly questions. Who, under current economic conditions, could be surprised to see branded milks sold at various price points that would allow consumers to enact class- or other identity-based performances similar to those in place for other baby goods such as strollers, diaper cream, and shampoo? “Home-made” milk may even come to be derided as a cozy and nostalgic but lesser foodstuff, an unfortunate alternative for those who cannot afford biocapitalized milks. With biotechnologists already hacking yeast cells to produce synthetic mammalian milk, the need for women to make any milk at all could be eradicated. One might even imagine specially engineered “supermilks” becoming the nutrition of choice for babies and adults alike.

By way of considering this hypothetical, I found it interesting that some of Simun’s audience had responded, as she explained, to Lady Cheese Shop “by calling it ‘cannibalistic’ [on the response cards].” Simun then suggested that this response is “of course, . . . highly irrational, but in saying this, people are reflecting a struggle, and they were searching for the right words to describe their feelings.” This struggle, really against the abject, has also been taken up in popular films. For example, Richard Fleischer’s film Soylent Green, released in 1973, is a whodunit set in a dystopian future (in the year 2022) in which jobs and food are scarce; most people live on wafers said to contain ocean nutrients. Detectives working to solve the murder of an elite with access to “real food” discover that the wafers are made from the only available form of protein left: human bodies. They urge everyone to recognize that “Soylent Green is people!”

More recently, and more in keeping with the construction of human milk as white gold, the giddy fourth installment in the postapocalyptic Mad Max film series shows human breast milk on par with gas and water as a vital, coveted substance to be farmed from women and for adult consumption. Most characters in George Miller’s 2015 film Mad Max: Fury Road are experiencing what Giorgio Agamben calls “bare life,” as bodies that may (or may not) be called up by those in power to be used as soldiers, as “blood bags,” or milk makers to uphold, or to expand, the status quo. While Fury Road is a caricature, the implied critique of a biopolitical state that regards people as resources for maintaining the state rather than as subjects with inalienable, natural rights is clear. In bare life whatever agency people have left is exerted by and at the site of the body, their very life being the only card they have left to play.

Critics of commodified milk worry about the consequences of farming that we see sketched in Fury Road. But the shock value of milk as it appears in Fury Road is gained in part from Miller’s gamble that his audience would view this portrayal as beyond the pale. Ironically milk’s abject status, in which drinking it is viewed as “cannibalistic,” may be what protects it from moving into large-scale branded industrial production.

Sharers often mentioned the commodified body in interviews. Jodi told me that she had “even nursed two friends’ babies, and they nursed mine. It is just not a big deal even though some people think that it is weird. And why? I mean think about it: milk is for babies!” She went on to discuss breastfeeding a baby as sacred labor:

I mean, I am not a vegan, but I am intrigued by it, and I feel like it is bizarre that we drink cow’s milk or milk from other animals. But then, we think human milk is weird! My experience as a lactating mammal has given me a new perspective on this whole thing, about what is weird, or what is gross. I mean pumping is not a big deal and I was happy to do it, but it is not that it is so great either. It can be uncomfortable or even hurt. It makes me think of cow’s milk as being more of a big deal than I ever thought it was before. Put it this way: we were at a petting farm, and there was a dairy guy there doing an exhibit about his cows and the process of milking and everything, and so, the cow was hooked up to a pump. And my friend and I were like, “Oh my god, what if that were us, hooked up with a bunch of people ogling at us!” It is just not respectful. It’s terrible. And it’s not respecting the miracle that milk is. I think few people really stop to consider it like that.

It is hard to imagine people like Jodi, who was both a donor and a donee, accepting industrial milk commodification. But in response to growing pressures HM4HB Facebook administrators remind users that “our site is for donation and needs only. Selling milk on our page is not permitted. We encourage our community to ask questions publicly and call out those who are found to be selling. Thank you for your cooperation. Ps. Bartering is a form of commerce and trading milk for other items is prohibited. Asking to replace milk bags is acceptable” (hm4hb 2015).

The larger power dynamics were not lost on Issa, our doula. She explained that her concerns were with “profit-motivated meddling with women’s work. Because, of course, now the ‘institution’ is moving to regulate breast milk. So who can donate milk and how is under more scrutiny, and really, right now we are at a crux, a cross in the road. This is a shifting time, because we see big business on the horizon. It may be that donors will become part of that business, with government regulation, and then milk will come only from donors who are underwritten by those entities. This is what happened with midwifery.”

She explained how midwifery became institutionalized and medical-ized in ways that have been both helpful and harmful, but very much controlled by men: “Now having said that, all around here there are ‘underground midwives.’ One in particular is absolutely terrific, but she is not licensed, not legal, but you can be sure that people come from miles around to go to her. So I am guessing that donation may also become more controversial, that is to say less ‘authorized,’ and end up going somewhat underground. Right now is the time to look at this shift.”

Being someone who thinks a great deal about access and knowledge, from the rational and scientific to the local and intuitive, Issa is sensitive to changes in women’s motivations to sell or gift: “You can see how if breast milk starts to be a more saleable item, people might feel like they should sell their milk. And maybe that’s not so great. . . . As a donee, you would have to have really good insight if that starts to happen. Being a commodity can change it, but I see that as more of a continuum. It may be that milk that is sold can still work in a personal relationship, but yeah, you definitely have to consider a lot of other things when we go from donation to sale.”

Part of the conversation we were having about commodification was also a dance around sociality and payment. We had hired Issa to provide what might have been, in another time or place, provided by family members—mothers, sisters, or aunts. Issa was my doula, and believe me, we were more than happy to pay her to help us because I was totally clueless about how to take care of a new baby, and although unbelievably excited, I was also kind of terrified. She came to help me again with our second child, but over the four years we have now known each other she has visited with us, we have been to her home, and we run into each other around town. As we discussed the commodification of breast milk, there seemed to be an unspoken comparison—what about a doula?

I was happy that we could talk about these very questions: Does paying for something always mean that business interests rather than personal ones reign? To what extent is human feeling diminished if payment is involved? Perhaps relationships enabled by commodified versus donated breast milk could work on a continuum, some participating in it strictly for the money while others do it for the emotional satisfaction or, for some, a bit of both. After all, both donors and donees I spoke with described a range of sharing relationships: some were deeply personal while others had little sociality.

An adventure is an enterprise with no known outcome or destination. On the adventurous nature of his Light Pavilion in the Raffles City complex in China, the architect Lebbeus Woods (2011) wrote, “Whether it will be a pleasant or unpleasant experience; exciting or dull; uplifting or merely frightening; inspiring or depressing; worthwhile or a waste of time, is not determined in advance by the fulfillment of our familiar expectations, because we can have none, never having encountered such a space before. We shall simply have to go into the space and pass through it, perhaps more than once.”

I often felt like this myself, wondering where milk sharing would take us, and I learned to see it as an adventure in living, partly thanks to my reading of Woods, a topic that I will take up in the next and final chapter.

29. Lebbeus Woods, architect, American (1940-2012), Untitled (AerialParis), 1989. Graphite on paper, 9W x 12W inches. Previously unpublished. © Estate of Lebbeus Woods.

6 Free Space

Now there is no choice but to invent something new, which nevertheless must begin with the damaged old, a new that neither mimics what has been lost nor forgets the losing, a new that begins today, in the moment of loss’s most acute self-reflection. lebbeus woods, Radical Reconstruction

Milk sharers from different walks of life become entwined in an emergent, negotiated community shot through with technology, ideas, and materiality. This community is powered by an explicit, and rather selfconscious, “us-them” critique of official policy. While sharing breast milk does reproduce some of the values it seeks to resist, for example, ideas about gender, this practice remains a transformational “site,” with small acts by many people having the potential to make a big difference. Milk sharing and the ideologies that power it infuse a larger cultural context. As Law (2009) has pointed out, patterned practices, once they are established, can reproduce themselves, spreading realities from site to site in forms that hold their shape. As a patterned socio-techno-material practice that is reproducing itself, milk sharing becomes ever more mainstream each day but still promises an array of undiscovered critical possibilities and outcomes.

The local sharing community functions as grassroots action. Families respond to authoritative medical discourse and commercial advertising with a refusal to abdicate. They have created an anarchistic heterarchy, one in which not only breast milk but also ideas about children, parenting, capitalism, and society are exchanged. This adventure in living together well is a mode of dissent. And just as the shift toward decentralized forms of organizing, networking, education, and exchange using social media may ensure the sustainability of the experimental Free University, the Occupy movement, Greece’s barter economy, and other sociopolitical explorations, the fact that the population sharing milk is shifting and nebulous enhances the counternetworks’ ability to avoid, and even resist, surveillance or regulation from above.¹

Milk sharing is based on want and surplus, but participants also describe how a desire for self-sufficiency; a longing to avoid commercialism associated with babies; a mistrust of the pharmaceutical, medical, and food industries and governmental bodies; and a commitment to support local communities drive participation. But what are the broader implications of sharing? How might an examination of sharing help us to develop other radical imaginations? Where can we look for alternative visions?

It is crucial that we invent strategies for seeing the familiar differently. If we rely solely on seeing it in familiar ways, we will only be able to reenact what we have already done and confirm what we already know. lebbeus woods, Slow Manifesto

Because art and anthropology have the power to unsettle knowledge-producing practices (Buckley 2016; Maskovsky 2013b), anthropologists and artists have worked together to make the world visible in particular ways and to envision new futures. As an art form aimed at designing the world we inhabit, architecture in particular has much to share with anthropologists. But how might we incorporate the work of collectives like Superstudio and Ant Farm or that of individuals like Michael Bene-dikt, Victor Papanek, Juhani Pallasmaa, and Lebbeus Woods into ethnography or theory?² How might these architectures shape an anthropology of the future?

The future is only and always a construct that animates the present, helping us to picture utopian or critical design solutions to human problems—political, ecological, social, or material. Considering the future can encourage us to envision living in new ways. Architects, like urban planners, community leaders, and even Wall Street Occupiers, are tasked with placing themselves into an imagined future when developing strategies for meaningful intervention, all the while knowing that they may fail. But what futures are at play and how might the contours of these futures shape contemporary action or theory? Future play in art and design can operate as meaningful critique, as has been demonstrated in the work of Victor Papanek and Buckminster Fuller, both of whom have inspired lasting transformations.

The value of visionary work is not always immediately apparent. Papanek (1971), an erstwhile ethnographer, was once ostracized for using recycled materials and promoting design solutions for poor people but is now celebrated as a great father of sustainability studies and design. Fuller made it his mission to enrich human life through energy-efficient designs that were also trenchant critiques of wasteful consumption. His iconic geodesic domes and use of what he called “design science” have been replicated all over the world. The architect Lebbeus Woods advanced a similarly radical aesthetic that can enrich the anthropological imagination.

I came to link design with anthropological futurity from an admittedly oblique angle, one that suggests a methodology for looking at future-oriented activities. As a project, this is an adventure, in the sense that it has an uncertain outcome, but the act of exploring, of trying, of looking to exceptional thinkers in parallel fields has in itself always strengthened the anthropological effort.

So besides recognizing Woods as an exceptional artist and thinker, I have had my eye on his work for some time as a key to understanding milk sharing in the context of a speculative anthropology of the future. It occurred to me to do this because of the long-standing dialogue between art and anthropology, from French ethnology’s relationship with 1930s surrealism, the rise of phenomenologically inspired ways of looking and theorizing the body in the 1970s (Merleau-Ponty 1964), the avant-garde inspired experiments of the “writing culture” debates in the 1980s (Clifford 1988; Marcus and Fischer 1986), and most recently what Hal Foster has called the “ethnographic turn” within the arts themselves (Strohm 2012; Foster 1996). Most borrowings move from anthropology to art, but as Arnd Schneider and Christopher Wright (2006, 2010) argue, art practices can invigorate our scholarship by suggesting new ways of seeing. What’s more, this attention to the aesthetic realm should not simply be taken as an appendix to knowledge making, as several anthropologists have recently pointed out.

Rupert Cox, Christopher Wright, and Andrew Irving (2016) argue that insofar as different sensory experiences are implicated in knowledge making, we need to develop creative forms of representation that diverge from correspondence theories of truth. Ingold (2013) also calls for a recalibrated relationship between art and anthropology: while there is a long and venerable lineage of the anthropological study of art, it has, not unlike the discipline of art history, taken art as an object, symptomatically, as an index of cultural or political configurations. That’s a dead end. Why not activate an anthropology with art, where both are taken as practices that reawaken the senses to allow knowledge to grow from the inside of being (Ingold 2013, 8)? Could art, Ingold writes, not be regarded as form of anthropology, albeit “written” in nonverbal media? Here I would suggest that anthropology can itself be a form of art, not in the sense that it might contain nonverbal expressions like sketches, poems, or musical compositions or that it is expressed through visual media like film or photographs, but that anthropology is art in the best sense of art, as a technique.

There are many definitions of art, some more interesting than others. I recently attended a talk at a museum in which the visiting artist, Anne Ferrer, announced that art should be pretty and make her feel happy. The remark elicited applause. This is not what I mean when I say that anthropology can be art. What I mean is that anthropology, like art as described by Viktor Shklovsky, can have a dehabitualizing effect; it can make the familiar strange. In “Art as Technique” (1917) Shklovsky wrote that “art exists so that one may recover the sensation of life; it exists to make one feel things, to make the stone stony. The purpose of art is to impart the sensation of things as they are perceived and not as they are known. The technique of art is to make objects ‘unfamiliar,’ to make forms difficult, to increase the difficulty and length of perception because the process of perception is an aesthetic end in itself and must be prolonged. . . . Art removes objects from the automatism of perception” (quoted in Kolocotroni, Goldman, and Taxidou 1999, 19).

An excellent example of anthropological work with a dehabitualizing effect, what Shklovsky called ostranenie (orepairemfe), is Horace Miner’s classic about the “Nacirema” (1956). Here Miner presents American society through the lens of a purportedly ethnocentric other so that Americans can see themselves anew. Like good art, successful anthropology makes the familiar strange and the strange familiar. The experience of ostranenie has a lasting impact on our perception, on our insertion in the world. Successful anthropology should not only be defined by representational accuracy or the production of elegant theory; it should stick to you. It transforms your mind. It adheres to the bottom of your feet, changing the way you feel and think as you walk through the world. It makes you recover the sensation of life, of being alive.

True story: this happened when I was reading Paul Stoller’s Stranger in the Village of the Sick (2005), a book about different ways of being in the world, about remaining open to fieldwork, and about illness and sorcery. My husband and I were taking a friend to a nearby U.S. military base. I knew from visiting there previously that everyone in the car would need to show a government-issued id to enter the base, but I had forgotten to bring my purse. I silently commanded the soldiers not to see me sitting in the backseat: “I am invisible to you.” As expected, we were stopped at the gate. The guards opened the doors and checked the documents of the passengers in the front seat. Then one of the guards opened the back door. I sat as still as a stone. He did not see me (or if he did, he pretended not to). I felt like the sorcerers’ magic was working through me. I felt an extraordinary sense of possibility and of being alive.

Fieldwork in Niger changed Paul Stoller. His book changed me, altering how I understand and move in the world. Same with Michele Stephen’s A’aisa’s Gifts (1995) and Vincent Crapanzano’s Tuhami (1980). I could list many other books, some ethnographic, others theoretical, that have had a profound effect on me. These anthropologies are, I submit, works of art, not the happy, pretty kind but the kind that dehabitualizes. For me, good anthropology, like good art, is an experience.

Art in all media—painting, literature, sculpture, and architecture— can do this. I am especially interested in architecture, as the discipline shares with anthropology a concern for exploring creative processes that give rise to the environments we inhabit and to the ways we perceive them (Ingold 2013, 10). Both are invested in changing the world for the better and have benefited from at times painful, internal critiques about reflexivity, representational practices, and colonial histories.

The rise of the architectural critique developed in the 1960s when architects, in an attempt to redress problems associated with modernism, began integrating social context into theory.³ This critique resulted in the rise of community design, user-centered design, sustainable design, and so forth, which depart in significant ways from traditional paradigms.⁴ Today many well-known practitioners engage in activities that are both defamiliarizing and imaginative, producing designs that provide innovative, pragmatic solutions to pressing problems.⁵ In this sense architecture (like anthropology) shows itself to have both diagnostic and therapeutic tendencies. Work by Lebbeus Woods certainly falls within this domain. (I am sure you are by now wondering what happened to breast milk. Please stay tuned. I will get back to that.)

War is architecture. I am at war with my time, with history, with all authority that resides in fixed and frightened forms. lebbeus woods, War and Architecture 1993

Lebbeus Woods, a master of architectural ostranenie, was born in 1940 and died in 2012, not long after he wrote his last blog entry, entitled “goodbye [sort of],” in which he presciently announced that his days of regular posting were over.⁶ He had studied engineering at Purdue University and architecture at the University of Illinois before working for Eero Saarinen Associates from 1964 to 1968 and then teaching at Cooper Union (and many other schools) until the end of his life. Obituary headlines described him as unconventional, visionary, and futuristic.⁷ And although Woods’s work was rarely realized, was indeed unrealizable, he stated, “I’m not interested in living in a fantasy world. . . . All my work is still meant to evoke real architectural spaces. But what interests me is what the world would be like if we were free of conventional limits. Maybe I can show what could happen if we lived by a different set of rules” (quoted in Yardley 2012).

A desire to suggest what these different rules might be seemed to animate much of Woods’s work. Explicitly concerned with issues of justice, freedom, and human creativity, he was critical of the role of capital interests in producing violence of all kinds: structural, military, economic, bureaucratic, and symbolic.

Reflecting upon conflict and crisis as forces within which architectural forms take shape, Woods (1993) wrote, “Social justice is not an issue of masses, but of individuals. If the mass is satisfied with its salutes, but an individual suffers, can there be justice, in human terms? To answer ‘yes’ is to justify oppression, for there are always people willing to lose themselves in a mass at the expense of some person who is not willing to do so. To construct a just society, it is precisely this lone person who must first receive justice. Call this person the inhabitant. Call this person yourself.” It is the job of the architect to not only be that person but also to design for that person. Much of Woods’s work is, then, in dialogue with architecture itself, an exploration of ethical practice.

Woods spent a great deal of time designing for landscapes that had suffered war, economic siege, and natural disaster and for the “people of crisis” living in places like Berlin, Sarajevo, Cuba, San Francisco, and even New York. Woods viewed human life as sets of small movements that can have a cumulative effect, with urban sites serving as vectors of activity that could become infused into the larger political matrix. The potential for cultural change is thus located in agents operating within highly designed spaces, usually created by architects who are charged with upholding institutions of authority rather than liberating inhabitants in any real way.

Woods’s liberation aesthetic is particular and recognizable, especially once you see examples of his illustrations for novels and poetry.⁸ His work, featured in a retrospective at the San Francisco moma and at the Drawing Center in New York, is hand drawn and collagelike in a world in which architectural renderings are usually accomplished using computer programs such as Revit or AutoCAD and then peppered with premade digital “scalies” (images of people that give scale, populate, and suggest functionality in computer-rendered images of buildings or cityscapes). Such software snaps projects to grid, by which I mean they become legible in terms of hegemonic political, economic, and even cultural ideologies and underpin the increasing homogeneity of global design.

Most scalies are well behaved and attractive. They have a tendency to be clearly gendered and of the middle and upper classes. They are used, for example, to confer an emotional or even aesthetic appeal to developers and other viewing publics. Rarely does one encounter scalies that appear in any way that might be considered ambiguous, critical, or ugly. You can be sure that there are few women scalies with visibly leaking breasts or engaged in breastfeeding, except perhaps in art projects that are explicitly using scalies as a raw material or that are addressing the ideological use of scalies.

In this vein the artist James Bridle (2013) places scalies within the category of what he calls “render ghosts,” or “people who live inside our imaginations, in the liminal space between the present and the future, the real and the virtual, the physical and the digital . . . in space which exists only in the virtual spaces of 3D computer rendering software, projected onto billboards, left to rot and torn down when the actual future arrives; never quite as glossy or as perfect as our renderings of it would like it to be, or have prepared us for.” Render ghosts are simultaneously ideological and utopian; they foster the status quo as imagined by those who are designing it.

Participants in Rob Walker’s (2015) Hypothetical Development Organization subvert the hegemonic use of scalies in all kinds of ways: for example, a scantily clad scalie solicits johns outside a Loitering Center, and a paramilitary-style guard rides a Segway around a fortresslike Reading Room. This work shows how scalies operate as visual rhetoric, tied to seducing viewers into embracing a renderer’s pitch rather than simply depicting actual use. It is too bad that Walker’s plan to create a set of “off” scalies, such as panhandlers, obnoxious tourists, or menacing police officers, was never realized, as it would provide a toolkit for students to engage in architecture as critique.

I have seen few scalies in Woods’s work, and when they do appear they are hand-drawn figures that reflect his overall project; scalies shopping or kayaking (apparently a popular trope in contemporary rendered backgrounds that imply trendy sustainability, “green” architecture, and an engagement with nature) have no place here. Were you to examine his work, you would find that neither prefab scalies nor digital software alone could accommodate Woods’s imagination.

In his War and Architecture (1993), Radical Reconstruction (1997), and elsewhere Woods designs alternative realities. While most architects operate on the assumption of stability, he embraces change and the uncertain path of the human condition. He offers provocations to problems caused by political, structural, and natural violence and calls for energized engagement. For Woods architecture is “an instrument for the invention of, ‘in Marcuse’s words, new modes of existence with new modes of reason and freedom,’” instead of a link in the chain of command whose most important task is to design “spaces with ‘functions’ that are actually instructions to people as to how they must behave at a particular place and time” (Woods 1997, 22). We can look to the horizon but should refrain from programming future behavior.

In keeping with the idea of design for change Woods draws fascinating philosophical connections between notions of meaning and value under various political, scientific, and artistic regimes. Among his most fruitful is the observation that just as chaotic motion and self-referentiality—anathema to respectable science less than a century ago—have been incorporated into traditional logic systems and are even yielding practical results, there is no reason why the paradoxical space of uncertainty cannot also be dealt with “logically” within architecture (Woods 1997, 26). This celebration of uncertainty is related to another line of inquiry in which Woods, following Nietzsche, identifies the role of the poetic in evoking and resolving the paradoxical, without losing the creative potential that lies therein (22). In engaging not just technological innovations, such as computer-aided design, but also new conditions engendered by crisis and then by life in a postcrisis society, cultural activity can work not only as a mirror but also as a transformational lens through which we understand ourselves anew. Through making the familiar strange and the strange familiar, we have a chance to live in a different and, we hope, better way.

Woods’s embrace of open-ended change and the (sometimes violent) energies that drive it as the essence of existence results in designs that draw on a set of provocative conceptual tools. Some of his tools are based on metaphors of the self-healing body, for example, scab, tissue, and scar. These can all be integrated into an anthropological lens, but I find the notion of free space to be the most useful.

Are we ready to live fearlessly in the present—accepting a future governed by probability—and to hone our minds and bodies to a degree of poise and agility that history has not known before? Or will we deny the imperatives of these understandings and sink back into the illusory comforts of mere history?

One of the most provocative sites of uncertainty is Woods’s “free space,” introduced in his 1990 Berlin Free-Zone project (Woods 1991). In contrast to modernist “universal space” (which is actually a kind of disguised multifunctional space), free space has no function, or “program,” identified in advance. It only suggests a set of potentials for occupation arising from material conditions. In the Berlin project the material conditions were a kind of hidden city, with unlimited, free access to the communications and networking equipment usually reserved for government or commercial use. In free space inhabitants are unfettered by the conventions of behavior usually enforced by these institutions.

In the design, free spaces are like special interstices discovered by chance or only by those who are looking for them. For those who make the choice, free spaces offer a terra nova, a new ground of experience, new modes of reason and freedom, and an instrument of critical transformation. What is gained is not necessarily an answer but rather an articulation of the creative potential of paradox and the poetic. And in order to participate, Woods argues, the practice of architecture must itself be reconstructed, just as the architecture required by the changed conditions of living must be invented anew.

This work can provide a scaffold for both an analysis of the present and an anthropology of the future. One way we can do this is to look at how we are already inhabiting free spaces, spaces that, as evoked by Fernando Coronil (2011, 235) in his thinking on the future of Latin America, “appear to oscillate between the malleable landscape of utopian imaginaries and the immutable ground of recalcitrant histories.”

This would mean seeking out postcrisis landscapes, be they political, social, structural, or natural, in which we find collaborative interactions

30. Lebbeus Woods, architect, American (1940-2012), City of Fire. From Four Cities, 1981. Graphite on board, 6 x 11 inches. © Estate of Lebbeus Woods.

taking place under the radar of the state or outside the gaze of authoritative institutions, which are both critical and seeking to enact an alternative. Analyzing what is happening in these real free spaces, how they shape and are shaped by relations of power, specifically with regard to questions of race, kinship, commodification, human-animal relationships, climate change, and so forth, will provide lessons both methodological and theoretical. By examining participation in extant free spaces we may find new ways to mobilize knowledge and to sketch workable models for future research, representation, and organization (see Maskovsky 2013a).

One such free space for participation is the subject of this book: breast milk sharing. This almost-hidden counternetwork invigorates a community of erstwhile strangers who share a critique of food, medical, and pharmaceutical industries through an Internet- and technology-enabled exchange system that circulates information and milk and in some cases produces kinship. A refreshing example of relationship building, breast milk sharing exists parallel to, and perhaps because of, commodity capitalism. It is both a critique of and an experimental solution to problems posed by contemporary parenting.

What I find intriguing about this free space is the formation of what Woods, recalling Crumley (1995) and McCulloch (1945), calls a “heterarchy”: a spontaneous, lateral network of people responding to an evolving situation, here represented by the profit motive as applied to the body and to childcare. As the breast milk sharing free space has become more visible between 2010 and 2016 (through news reports, newspaper articles, and Internet chatter), there is greater pressure for conformity to the larger society, to commodification, with more donees setting price points for milk rather than offering a relationship.

As breast milk sharing becomes better known, and thus available, the critical edge of this practice will be challenged. There is a sweet spot between the visible and the invisible, in which large numbers of participants creatively negotiate alternative relationships and operate parallel to hegemonic formations. But even if it is short-lived, I suspect that milk sharing will have long-term empowering effects on participants.

Here the architectural model provides a lens for the study of “people of crisis.” Woods’s free-space framework allows anthropologists to systematically identify and compare small-scale experiments in living and community making, as well as experiments in attempts to find local, workable, organizational responses to encroaching political, structural, and natural crises of a larger order. Some of these experiments will be successful, some will be nasty, and some will last longer than others, but all will operate in dialogue with the larger status quo, casting that status quo’s critical points into relief. These are, however, hit-and-run solutions, constantly in danger of being absorbed by the maelstrom of capital and crisis and therefore inherently ephemeral.

Milk sharing is an experimental form of living together in free space and is thus under threat from ambient cultural environments, in this case capitalism and its ideologies of risk and total motherhood. Free spaces may ultimately provide only a brief respite but, when occupied, may enhance our ability to imagine, enact, and refine alternatives to a capitalism that not only sequesters knowledge about the rudiments of human life and health but that is actively destroying the very environment upon which human life depends.

I don’t think this short-livedness would have bothered Woods, a person for whom equilibrium would have meant death: life, real life, is always emergent, responsive, and in flux. It requires taking a leap into the unknown. It requires not knowing the outcome in advance. It requires trusting each other. This valorization of the unknown is an affront to Enlightenment mandates to know and shows us Woods the maverick. I was gratified but not surprised to read Eric Owen Moss reporting that “‘outside-the-box thinking has become a cliche used in advertising, corporate strategy and politics, but Woods took it to another level. There’s another box, and he’s outside it. He’s outside all the boxes.’”⁹ But as innovative as he was, we will eventually need free spaces beyond even those he imagined. Woods viewed his own work as pointing to a horizon beyond which no one could see. What does the milk horizon look like? Hacked yeast cells, milk farming, and branding will surely continue to challenge community sharing.

Sites like Only the Breast and companies like Prolacta do provide some revenue that many women need, but they also undermine the critical discussion encouraging and encouraged by milk sharing. There

is something else happening in the daily thickening and thinning of this counternetwork, however. Milk sharing is powered by a politics of pragmatics, guided by a desire to meet specific goals, not to generate theory. In this sense sharing can look serendipitous, even idiosyncratic, at times. As a responsive, “live” practice, participants respond to each other as people trusted to be responsible for one other. In this sense breast milk sharing is a refusal, a resistance to, a rebuff to the demand to abdicate competency woven into contemporary regimes of governance. Sharers reserve the right to trust their own instincts; to identify, evaluate, and respond to risk; and to make decisions by and for themselves with unknown outcomes (see Goodman and Goodman 1960). As these competencies are increasingly given over to the state, to corporations, and to authoritative institutional others, one starts to wonder, What is the point? What does it mean to be alive? Where is the adventure? Where is the element of choice and open-endedness essential to the construction of an ethics? One way to be alive is to be radically embedded in a community of people whose fates are linked. And really, that’s everyone.

milk sharing will be in a better position to appreciate how experimental practices and how people squatting in spaces designed for maintaining the status quo, showcasing hierarchy, and entrenching the values of capitalism might be embedded in the everyday.¹⁰ By living a different present, these erstwhile squatters make imagining a different future seem possible.