Urbanization’s mediator: Reassembling rural Tibetan lives through pig breed changes

• This research incorporates non-human actors into urbanization studies and emphasizes how pigs act as mediators in the urbanization process. • The article highlights how humans are shaped by the non-human entities they encounter in their daily lives. • Urbanization should not only be viewed in terms of urban spaces for human encounters but also in terms of the relationships with the often-overlooked rural areas where humans and non-humans interact in everyday life. This is a study of the reasons underlying the disappearance of a local Tibetan pig breed, as well as pigs’ role in driving urbanization. It is based on immersive participant observation in a Tibetan village in Sichuan, China. Villagers’ transition from raising local Tibetan pigs to hybrid breeds has detached pigs from households due to a decline in pig rearing duration. Simultaneously, as pigs had previously played a crucial role in connecting humans to the land, the change in pig breeds also led to a loosening in the relationship between humans and the land, stimulating population mobility and liberating time and labor for villagers to engage in urbanization. The change in pig breed has led to the continual reorganization of human life in response to urbanization, a process that involves not only human participation but also the agency of various non-human actors. Through reexamining the concept of urbanization through changes in human-nonhuman relationships, this paper speaks to the material turn in anthropology, which has provided a new theoretical perspective for the study of urbanization in China.