Ethnographically, ''fecal free'' is a lexical marker that invokes a form of industrialized swine husbandry used in large-scale confinement hog production. Using participant observation and interview research with Illinois contract hog producers, I explore the basis of this husbandry in the biological fragility of confinement hogs. Rather than biology being a simplistic ''state of nature,'' as it was in early neo-Marxist and populist studies of the 1970s, the frailty of confinement hogs suggests that industrial hog biology is a socially constructed state that justifies the use of contract-based hog production units and their coordination with animal processors. The frailty of confinement hogs results from their genetic characteristics, from the conditions in which they are raised, and from a production rationality that equates animal health with production efficiency. I detail the multiple-site methods, confinement technologies, and contract-based production organization required to raise biologically fragile hogs. And I link hog biology directly to the unequal contract-based relations between actors in industrial pork networks. My study emphasizes the relevance of ethnographic analyses within a political economy of agriculture by describing specific relations of inequalities in local and regional production units and distribution networks that form the building blocks of larger global agro-food systems.

Live U.S. hog market prices were unstable in the 1990s and crashed in the fall/winter of 1998 99. I situate the 1998 99 crash in the context of ongoing long‐term integration of a U.S. pork filiere and, using ethnographic data collected from Illinois contract hog producers, describe the role of market and production contracting in the unstable livehog markets of the 1990s. Production and market contracting in the 1990s linked large animal producers and large packers through new nonmarket channels. As a result, unstable markets and then the 1998 99 crash affected smaller, spot‐market‐selling hog producers more severely than it did larger producers. My analysis speaks to the structure of power in agricultural markets where contracts are used and warns against economistic understandings of markets that do not consider how different actors are related to commodity markets.

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A Museum Anthropology summer, 2008 AN Contributing Editors struggle mightily to catch-up on news when taking up their column writing after the summer hiatus, for the warm season means extra out-of-class accomplishments for anthropologists: ethnographic and archaeological fieldwork and other research, sequestered report and grant writing, and conference attendance. Anthropologists in museums tend to spend busy summers welcoming vacationers to new exhibits and programs that they helped plan and produce over many previous months. Curators, collection managers and researchers

•Student Paper Award 
 •Pennsylvania Backs Off of Ban Labeling Milk as Monsanto Hormone‐Free 
Suzan Erem, E Paul Durrenberger