Anthropological Quarterly

ABSTRACT:

This article examines how Thoroughbred trainers in Kentucky learn, experience, and practice the embodied tradition of horsemanship within the economically declining and ethically fraught American horse racing industry. I explore how horsemen are inculcated into this tradition of agrarian masculine knowledge in orientations and attunements. I also consider how the particular practice of “puttin’ eyes on horses” evokes affective tones and ties between horse and horsemen that are said to enable trainers to “listen to horses,” facilitating partial knowing and compelling forms of care. In an agrarian industry that brands itself in terms of nostalgias, good horsemanship is valorized at the same time as economic constriction and consolidation marginalize and undermine many trainers’ expertise and social roles. Even as horsemen know this life with horses is unsustainable, I demonstrate that they feel trapped on what they call “the merry-go-round” of racetrack life. In contrast to much contemporary anthropology that narrates human-animal ties in terms of the transformative and open possibilities of continual becoming, I find that the affective force relations and associated social roles in animal care compel relationships that entrench people into agrarian lives and livelihoods that they know they are economically and socially problematic. This article thus speaks broadly to the precarities and difficulties experienced by swathes of middling workers and managers in stagnating contemporary middle America.