ABSTRACT
This chapter draws on the experience of peasant farmers to describe and analyze how the introduction of milk production technology transforms relationships and creates new subjectivities. It explores intersubjectivity tied to the introduction of a milking machine, cows, and peasant farmers as one of the fundamental features of rural experience and institutional intervention. This case may unsettle views about the "nature" of agency and the importance of people, but also machines and animals. The chapter explores the intersubjectivity that results from the gatherings when actors dismantle, (re)construct, and constitute materialities, thereby crossing through boundaries that constitute a new particularity, in this case in reference to the corporality that emerges from the interrelationships among people (technicians and farmers), cows, and milking machines. The state's absence of reflexivity when assessing peasant-farmer practices makes food sovereignty policy detached from the matter of rural life, and as such unachievable.
