Tense Animals: On Other Species of Pastoral Power

In Dolly Mixtures: The Remaking of Genealogy, the anthropologist Sarah Franklin places the birth of the cloned sheep within a longer line of "biocultural" practices at risk of being disconnected from the present by those who view the transgenic event of Dolly as historically unprecedented (2007, 3). Just as striking as Franklins efforts to trace a genealogy for Dolly, however, is the rapidity with which her language starts to replicate the subject of animal cloning, by itself culturing a surplus of sheep metaphors. Listen to how Franklin describes her anthropological method of "following sheep around" or "theory-on-thehoof " (9): "Like sheep, this book is keener on exploratory foraging, endless rumination, and pushing over fence posts than it is on getting from the open pasture to the shearing shed so that wool can go to sale" (16). Alongside the ovine figures that begin to populate Franklins language"grazing," "open pasture," "shearing"let me juxtapose an earlier entanglement of technology, speech, and sheep that strangely enough lies buried