So hi, everyone. Welcome to the third modern South Asian studies seminar of the still at the University of Oxford.
My name is Nico Monter. I'm the director of the Contemporary South Asian Studies Programme,
and I'm absolutely delighted to be chairing this conversation on the study of non-human animals in South Asia.
So for those of you who might be joining us for the first time, the still the series aims to build up conversations on the political,
methodological and ethical challenges of doing research in South Asia way quick note
on the format so every panellist will speak for about 10 to 12 minutes on their own.
Very exciting research projects, and we will then open it up for a Q&A.
Please feel free to enter your questions in the jury box that you can see at the bottom of the screen as we go along.
So I'm going to very quickly introduce the panel in the order in which they will be speaking.
So first to be a doctor because I was assistant professor of anthropology at the Indian Institute of Technology
in Gardena and completed her PhD thesis in anthropology at the National University of Singapore in 2016.
She was trained in both natural and social sciences with master's degrees in by life sciences from the Wildlife Institute of India,
as well as in anthropology from UCO. And because monograph tigers are our brothers.
Anthropology Wildlife Conservation in Northeast India was published very recently in 2021 by Oxford University Press.
Often become We're going to have Dr Nazarian Dubey, who is associate professor of anthropology at the University of Toronto.
She's the author of Queer Activism in India and of the forthcoming, keenly awaited indifference on the praxis of interspecies being after ness.
We're going to have Dr Radical Group Androgen, who is an Associate Professor of anthropology at the University of Washington,
Seattle Erotica is the author of Animal Intimacies, which was published by the University of Chicago Press in 2018 and Penguin India in 2019,
and articles also published very widely, including articles in American anthologies, Comparative Study of South Asia,
Africa and the Middle East, Cultural Anthropology, and how the Journal of Ethnographic Purity for Number Four is.
Dr Muhammad was a Faculty of Arts and Science Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Toronto
and Discovery Early Career Researcher Award Fellow at the Australian National University.
She is the author of Animal Enthusiasms, Life Beyond Cage and Google Pakistan,
and he's also the co-editor of a special journal issue entitled Sense Making in a Modern Human World.
And last but not least, we have Dr Bollyky Cohen,
who is a senior lecturer in anthropology and Development Studies Programme at the University of Melbourne.
Though luckily for us, she's currently 30, received a Ph.D. from the Department of Anthropology at Stanford in 2013.
Prior to that, she did her bachelor's in law from the Faculty of Law at University Hotel in 2001.
And she's also practised in the Supreme Court of India and the High Court in Assam.
Dolly has published several books and articles,
including the 2019 Living with Oil and Coal Resource Resource Politics and Militarisation in Northeast India.
So thank you all so much for being here. You know, it's absolutely incredible to have you on the same order.
With that, I'm going to hand over to girl to sort of kick off the start of the battle.
Hello, everyone, thank you so much and Nicole,
for inviting all of us and good to see you are letting go and this is fantastic news and W.M. about studying animals in South.
So I was so excited and especially about methodology and politics, of studying animals and topics.
I think this is a very, very, very exciting time for scholars to be studying this aspect of, you know, the the studying animals in South Asia.
So let's start by talking about the current project. And began, then I will.
Then you will be up. So currently, the project I'm looking at is understanding human animal relations at the margins,
and this is the follow up of the workshop that I organised with my colleague, Dr.
Something on this last month, last year, last year.
And so I'm really keen to understand how human animal relations are understood by through lived experience of the lives,
especially because I might look for a large number of years I've studied and
notwithstanding looking at indigenous groups and not just Indian tribal communities,
but I want to look at the little lives lived experience of the little lives and
how their living experiences are associated with certain kinds of animals.
And these animals are not only stigmatised, often because of association with these animals,
because of occupation or because of the everyday humiliation of flipping the lips like animals.
So, for example, using animal metaphors.
To do the talk about the let's send in another marginal communities so that this interest in oh at the margin started earlier,
but especially on a book about a specific project like that, though not the draught is not complete.
Those entrusted to look at the Vulture Conservation Conservation Alliance just because
they are declining because of the chemical that is found in the deadly carcases,
diclofenac and then the results charred declining population.
And one of the projects that governments in many other countries, especially in India, is doing, is to send a bunch of gases.
So when I heard the stomata, at first I was like, I wanted to find out more about this.
And the idea is to revive the vulture population by setting off gases not for humans, but vultures in the in a in an in in a protected aviary.
So it proves that these conservation sites do understand what is happening,
but that project is very much related to how the shows are about in the live biographies.
So I'm I'm I'm sort of I'm not comparing, but I'm looking at what is happening to one particular species who share habitat,
sometimes compete for food with the live communities. These narratives come from the biography sports, and I've interviewed some of them.
And if you look at the list biographies, certain animals, the recording references to certain animals especially,
well, it's just, you know, they come in very unexpected ways.
For example, maybe there it's time I can read like an interview from By the Liquid.
So what happens in the in the cafes is that fresh meat and contaminated meat, you know,
they had a good salad and they are actually the meat is processed and the fresh meat is fed to the bone.
Just that double check and divide the population increases. So I want to I don't know how to analyse this, but I am in the stage where I want to.
I don't know. Of course, one can easily argue that, you know, certain animals are given more priorities and humans,
but that's a very simplistic way of looking at it. So it's to make sense of how these animals, whether it is vultures, even adult dogs, pigs and rats.
Oh, so I want to read a bit. If you if I if you if we have time, for example, if you look at Omprakash one because Newton.
So he asked that why Hindus worship trees, plants, etc. but they don't like Dalits.
So often this comparison of animals with certain communities is very striking and really disturbing.
So I'm going to look at one project I'm analysing, but we're keeping up.
But that is also linked to my training as a wildlife biologist. So my first training is in biology there and I participate in wildlife conservation.
And so I want to bring that until vultures are really interesting in that particular, you know, in my study,
because there are conservation sites which are set up for what's preservation,
but then how vultures I've got in appeared and lived experiences very different.
So this is the one project that I'm looking at, but the other is continuation of my own Ph.D. work and not just in the islands.
I'm looking at the narratives about animals in folklore, especially, you know, many animals.
So that is a documentation project by ill. And but my larger interest is to make the pedagogy of environmental studies
more inclusive of gender and cos that's my long term interest in this field.
So stop. No thank you. And we can discuss this more a little.
Thanks so much. This is a go to you. Thank you.
I just want to second the thanks, Nina, go for this wonderful panel, the other people I know and haven't met yet.
For example, Dolly Umberger. So yes, nice to be in conversation with all of you.
So my project I would describe as in the book, that Monica mentioned indifference.
It's about each chapter of the text tries to answer a discrete ethical question with as much clarity and conviction as is allowed to.
An ethnographer about how humans and animals live and die in a shared world is how I would describe what the text is doing.
A major theme of the book is this concept of indifference.
In other words, what I'm interested in is the relationship between caring about things or four things and leaving them alone,
which I argue that's in the text are not counter. They don't work counter to each other, but sometimes to care for things is precisely to let them be.
In the text and in I think what I'm describing is sort of the South Asian context more generally.
So certainly in India, there are two dominant modes of leaving animals alone.
One is the fastest Hindu and through a patriarchal form that takes the name of Ahimsa,
right, which we've which tends to be valorise and romanticised as a reverence for animals.
But in actuality, there's this story that people often tell.
I don't know if it's apocryphal. It shows up in Kipling's Beast in mountain India.
It shows up in a memoir of Crystal Rogers animal welfare activist. Talk about it all this time, all the time.
And in the story, there's a bowl that's hit by a speeding lorry and falls onto a man's land.
The landowner, the bull is dying, is suffering.
The landowner doesn't want the ball to be killed on his property because he wants his hands to be clean,
and he waits for somebody else to shoot the ball. And of course, it takes hours and hours before slowly suffers and dies a painful death.
So that's a form of leaving animals alone that takes the form of what I call a propertied refusal.
It's basically a moral hygiene of keeping one's own hands clean and outsourcing killing
to other people in order to maintain this kind of fictional purity of the self.
And then I think there's another kind of leaving animals,
leaving others alone that I described as indifference to difference, and perhaps controversially, I refer to it.
I described the stance that this takes as a kind of in curiosity about others, which is to say,
not being invested in what they mean for you and what your relationship with them is.
And I describe that as a living, allowing others to live in their badness.
So in other words, I'm interested in kinds and qualities of care that are made possible in and through an ethos of indifference.
So one of the questions, then, is what does allowing others to just be look like, not farming them, not protecting them, not sheltering?
Right. So what do what does not what is allowing others to be looked like?
And could it be an ethos of in for our world, this idea of indifference of letting things be?
Or why not? And if the differences come back to the imperatives of capital, then I think it really requires us to to rethink our.
Our emphasis is on, you know, on, I guess, intimacies with animals to circle back then when I began this project many,
many years ago, I envisioned it as a project about animal activism.
But for any of you who know animal activists, I think you would agree with me that the ethos of letting others be in there,
that this is not a is not a a strong imperative, right?
And so the project is less has become less about animal activists and more about the different forms.
It's about an imaginary that that applies to me as much for those who who kill and work animals in in forms of, I guess, structural forms.
And applies as much to those who see themselves on the side of animals who take
the form of this violent intervention in the lives and freedoms of others.
So this ethos of leaving people alone, I think applies more universally,
and I'm trying to think about about the about its practises in a range of political formations.
And I'll leave it there for. Thank you, guys, thank you so much.
I think the next thing you just want to echo everyone, thanks Danica and Claire.
This is just such an amazing panel to be part of, and I'm already more interested in everyone else's work than in talking about my own.
But I'll talk briefly about two directions, new directions that I'm going in and thinking about animals,
but also animals in relation to other kinds of non-humans more broadly.
So one thing I've been thinking about recently is animal ghosts and haunted animals, so both hunting and hunted animals,
and I've been thinking about what what kinds of openness and vulnerable vulnerability and accountability hunting makes possible.
So more specifically, I think I was drawn to this by one kind of just stand alone case.
The Dutchy is not something that is ethnographic dense or rich in the sense that it repeats.
But there's one woman found a bull who had been eaten by a leopard on the side of a highway and
stopped to take a look and realise that it was a bull that she had sold to somebody a few weeks ago.
And that person had clearly taken the bull and abandoned the bull, which is an outcome of the politics of cow protection in the mountains.
And this is something I've looked at earlier, where people are not willing to transport bulls anymore for fear of being lynched by a cow.
Protection is by go rogue trucks. And so they abandon these animals on the side of the highway.
And this woman who then saw her eviscerated bull how experienced a haunting by the bull and was determined
to do something about it through the mechanisms that people usually use in the mountains to address hunting.
Except everyone told her cows and bulls don't come back as ghouls. You know, that's not a thing.
This is you. This is you dealing with your guilt. This is you dealing with the fact that you are forced to confront what, what,
what this chain looks like, right of sale of bulls in this kind of context.
And so I've been thinking about what kinds of claims to justice are activated by hunting.
And this ties in with something that I've been thinking about for a longer time,
which is what happens when animals are subject to the evil eye and or when they're hunted and what forms of exploitation that might take.
And I think this for me speaks to a larger question that a few folks are raising now,
which is why is multi-species anthropology or the anthropology of the non-human so avowedly secular?
And I'm thinking in particular of the work of Monte Fernando,
who says it's interesting that you know you can have macho culture, but not supernatural culture,
for example, and that the supernatural is something that is left out or is usually addressed as a kind of interesting cultural artefact.
But we don't take, for example, the idea that ghosts might be serious agents in the world, right?
That becomes something that has to be elaborated as a rich religious practise.
I'm trying to think with some of that, but also thinking with that in the context of India,
where one sees violent supremacist projects rooted precisely in that ideal of animated nature.
Which brings me to the second way in which my work has been going recently,
which is trying to think about what the Hindu right's incorporation of non-humans as Hindus looks like in the context of attractants politics.
And I'm writing something with Mona on who I know was on a panel a couple of weeks ago,
but we writing something on more than human fascism in the Himalaya in particular,
and how so much of the anthropology literature in particular on indigenous A.D. and the the idea
that non-humans are also indigenous agents is being picked up in some sense by the Hindu right,
which is now making claims to Hindu ingenuity and is basing that claim to Hindu
indigenous in India in the idea that its natural entities have always been Hindu.
Well before there were human Hindus. So thinking about the Himalaya, for example,
or the Ganga and cows and I'm we're trying to think about what it means then to naturalise the project of fascism.
And for me, this comes up in the context of how protectionists who, for instance,
argue that they're not the ones who who really are committed to the project of cow protection.
It's the Ganga and into the Himalaya, because the Ganga comes out of Gulmarg, which is the cows mouth.
So her very existence is dependent on this originally Hindu cow,
or that the Himalaya is quaking with rage because cows are being slaughtered in India.
And at this project then of making India Hindu is actually a more than human one.
So we've been thinking about what what it might look like to actually return front and centre to the question of politics,
particularly in a field which is so caught up in the idea of ontology as something that is beyond politics innocent?
And so that's I think, the two directions that I've been going in, but I'll stop there as well and look forward to hearing from the others.
Great, thank you so much for all the coverage. Thank you for inviting me, and it's great to be in the company of Nasdaq Erotica.
Can Dolly to learn from them and share my thoughts?
I would like to share two projects that I'm currently working on for which I'm undertaking in Toronto and the next one,
which I will be taking on next year in Canberra. The Toronto project tries to explore various meanings associated with the departure of spy
pigeons at the India-Pakistan border indicates any one of us is not familiar with this in 2010.
A Pakistani pigeon was captured in a minister in the small town near dusk near the India-Pakistan border on suspicion of carrying a secret message.
About five years later, another pigeon was captured and.
Until now, there have been incidents, so when the script was deciphered, it did not use any concrete information,
just names, phone numbers and addresses of some Pakistani origin flyers.
So this led me to take this team seriously and understand, and I've been kind of studying it and flying in Pakistan from 2008.
And I asked some of the hostages and they said that usually pigeons are stamped before their flight that if they are lost,
they would be returned back to their keepers.
And this was this time that Ben began flowing from somewhere near the Indian Pakistan border in Lahore or Silkwood.
They would land in another country, and the same stamp would consider them make them spy.
But there is another side of this arrival of foreign pigeons that I am trying to consider to understand this thing comprehensively.
And that is that those pigeons were arriving in Pakistan, not as spies,
but as European breeds that are imported in white pigeon flyers to participate in certain pigeon sign competitions.
Many which fences at a huge amount to get pigeons from Belgium and Denmark and host them.
So this led me to ask questions like what does it mean for Pigeon to come from abroad
and how mutually shared values of hospitality and hostility emerge and interplay?
When a pigeon arrives in the foreign land as an invited desk or uninvited spy?
So I brought these questions, as I said earlier in the European racing,
pigeons and the Pakistanis fight pigeons and then try to understand what it means for welcoming
and accommodating the intimate foreigner or refusing the potential threat they may pose.
So I explore this issue within the context of Punjab because most Typekit and foreign incidents are being happening in Punjab,
and I try to understand this through the Punjab value of hospitality.
Usually, some rights would be Faisal Jiyane, which means welcome audience who all who are right and I try to consider is coexistence
with the attitude of hostility or in hospitality to more the human needs direct.
Theoretically, I've been trying to build on the ethical arguments of Jects Bayda,
who suggest that the hospitality and hostility exist together in a power imbalance between
the host and the dust and shame or understanding of whom and the question of the stranger.
However, that is that paradox of hospitality and hostility may not appear applicable in the context of South Asia,
since its conceptualisation is based in in Europe,
in France in particular, where asylum seekers and refugees are ending up taking hospitality and seeking hospitality.
So to conceptualise this in the grounded Punjabi context, I take help from Punjabi footage of artists who wrote Famous of the theatre,
and I tried to conceive how what is understood hospitality and hospitality as unified as separate and
values that have distinct culture roots and generally operate through the structure of reciprocity.
So I try to merge ideas on both.
That is done by the chart to form different arguments that how hospitality and hospitality,
as two dominant modes of relating with others, are shaped by the presence and absence of reciprocity and structure.
Analogy No. Very quickly, I would like to discuss my future project,
which I'll be starting next year in Canberra that investigates the China's mega Belt and Road Initiative project in
Pakistan called the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor and how it shapes the life of millions of poor people in Pakistan.
Just a bed down is about sixty two billion dollars project that was launched
in 2015 as part of China's bright and invasions to bring economic benefits,
as well as strengthening the political and strategic relationship between China and Pakistan.
However, it is crucial that there has not been any studies that have explored this project through deep perspective
animals or the poor segment of society who are considered to be the beneficiaries of this project.
So I am focussing particularly on China's rising demand for donkeys, particularly.
Pakistani delegates will be China-Pakistan Economic Corridor and how this presents multiple challenges to the economy,
employment and social values of marginalised population, particularly the donkey keepers.
And now I see and read in newspapers that those reforms are being developed in Punjab and in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa two provinces,
and that there are plans to export hundreds and thousands of donkeys to China,
where the animals hide can be used in traditional Chinese medicine, the jail, which is believed to cure immunity, ageing and many other ailments.
So I tried to understand this donkey trade to China, to this China-Pakistan Economic Corridor to see how this grounded analysis,
cultural analysis help us to understand the lives of those people who live their lives donkeys.
I would like to end by emphasising that both these projects and also my previous is the project, which ended up in books.
They tried to equalise the enterprise of Pakistan,
which have mostly been occupied with dubious such as Islamic fundamentalism, mysticism, mentality, nationalism and so forth.
And they tried to explore humans lived experiences with more than human animals, and I tried to focus on the neglected,
the most destructive speaking people who live in the southern part of Punjab and the area that shared border with the
interior or rural parts of SIEM and or just on this area is have been highlighted as a backward area of illiteracy,
lower health facilities and bad infrastructure.
It's kind of famous,
so try to understand the meaning of life in the company of animals and how these speaking people make meaning of their lives with their animals.
Thank you. Fantastic, thank you so much, I wish.
OK, onto Dolly. Thank you so much for inviting me.
And again, hello to my families and the audience.
So I started thinking about. Animals, trauma, human rights work here and.
I think at this moment, I after reading a few pieces on animals, particularly the dog meat debate in India has really been, I think,
you know, one of the issues that I had been thinking about and dealing about and and what I find fascinating is that reaction, right?
When it comes to the dog meat debate in India, there's such a forceful reaction that, you know,
I think and there's almost like kind of like, you know, how can a human being do that kind of a response that's there.
So that's really made me think. But one of the one of the stories that I want to say is that, you know, the idea of animal.
I mean, I'm a non vegetarian and I eat meat, I eat fish very young.
I learn how to kill. And I grew up in Nagaland. I grew up in a household where you have to do your own killing.
You learn to butter fish, you learn to kill him if you want to eat a chicken.
And so I grew up in that environment, a very, very kind of, you know, I like, do it yourself and I.
I grew up never thinking that one day I'll study animals because it's it's something so close to the world that I was part of being associated.
As you know, generally, it's barbaric. I mean, tribal people don't study animals.
Do you see we should be studying folklore or we should be going to, you know, tribal studies centres to document dances?
And pretty much that was stage.
But what really kind of intrigued me was, was that the first episode I started writing after my fieldwork in the foothills of a farm in Nagaland,
and I started writing a piece for the American Anthropological newsletter called A Tasty Transgressions,
because I was really amazed how the seasons would shape the coal traders who were both Hindus,
Muslims and also Christian tribals, and how they would shoot the alliance, according to the season and where they were going.
And certain aquatic animals like snails or, let's say, the red.
And this was such very food, right? So even when they came to Assam and they would like really practise their religion,
you know, they wouldn't confess that they had all this in the Naga tribal villages.
And I started writing this even for my first book Living with oil and Coal.
I have an entire chapter on food and the hot bazaar because food becomes such an important
lens actually to understand the sociology of that of that space that I was studying.
And recently, I wrote a piece for four seminar and it's it's dedicated to a big culture and it should be coming out.
And it was about me going back to my fieldwork notes 10 years earlier and reflecting on on this process right now in my life.
Quickly, readers, right? I'm looking at my fieldwork notes and how much I erased and how easy that particularly and methodologically as anthropology
is to be courageous enough actually to go back to the woods and see what we missed out and I missed out a lot all the time.
And I think that's what the danger of ethnography and at the same time, the redemptive element that I can go back and say,
you know, these are the things I missed, but currently I'm I'm actually trying to write a chapter on on milk.
And it's part of my fermenting culture monograph, which I hope you will see the light of day one day.
And it's on this entire process of understanding this region.
And how, as one of the first things that happened after the the cease fires and the peace process started in this region
was really the emphasis on political know on social development right on on kind of like self-help groups.
And it was really once again around food. And, you know, for states like Nagaland, milk became very important.
And, you know, a lot of I think historians like Jonathan Saharawi tell us that this entire middle belt right the milk
line and how certain communities were lactose intolerant and since certain communities were not.
So I'm learning a lot at this stage. But but I feel that in the in the last six or seven years,
I've come to learn a lot from my students and I think from from my friends and especially around this really big conflict between,
let's say, animal rights activists here in India and their constant attack on tribal people.
And it really angers me, right? And you kind of.
Clear the curtain, and this is such an upper caste elitist position that they have that tribal people don't know that,
you know, they're ignorant, they always have to be taught and adopt me.
Debates centres on that. And so the my my ratings have actually also looked at kind of the legal regulation.
So what is it? Is it about safety? Can they be firm?
Is it about cruelty and how do we deal with this?
And so it's not. I always say that it's not that I propagate that everyone should be eating dogs.
But, you know, since the Dogma debate actually really pushes, I think the team beyond any kind of human right, a rational human being can do that.
It's something that I find common here, increasingly, that I'm thinking about currently is the the a more falcon project in northeast India
that's become so famous that Nagaland into this known as the Falcon capital of the world.
And and suddenly this entire and kind of position that you know,
you have to teach the tribals because they're so Burberry, you don't know what they are doing.
What I think a very, very strong underlying rationale,
even in the more feltgen conservation activities that went on and what that led to was really the accusation of the animals which were here.
And I think a lot of scholars working on animals have said that.
So even in the case of Nagaland and a more falcons, the Falcons who are, I think,
tagged with the Najib's as their fly to South Africa have Naga names, some of them have made their names.
Some of them have tasty meals and it's so naturalised. When I was doing my ethnography on oil and coal.
And then it got a lot of the geological samples have ethnic names, right?
So the hydrocarbon samples they bring from underneath the Earth.
And there's really a colonial a kind of a horan's kind of a dominating conversation that's happening.
So I think these are some of the conversations that you know are making me think,
and I've been very eager to see how and where these conversations will lead me to.
So maybe I'll stop here and take Dolly.
Thank you so much for that. This was really, really fascinating. Opening comments.
What are we waiting for people to sort of, you know, ask questions?
I was wondering whether I could sort of open it out with a couple of questions and actually just picking up from what Dolly just said in her talk.
You know, I was just wondering, how did you guys get interested in working with non-human animals? This is still an emerging field.
You know, some of the teams that you're looking at or see in the case of your previous work was on something quite different.
And I'm sort of curious to know how you sort of came to it.
An article you also mentioned, are you coming to the, you know, towards the supernatural after doing your work on animals in a way?
So I'd be just sort of curious to think about how that question opened up.
And also, you know, given that we still I mean, you know, I still think of it very much as the emerging field within South Asian studies,
but also more broadly with an anthropology or history would seem to be sort of the dominant fields, I guess.
But all anthropologists of one stripe or the other, you understand, you know,
what do you think of the methodological challenges in that in this moment?
And would it be OK if you just went in the same order? We just had the thing.
And just, yeah, so would you like to sort of look for me?
Studying animals was like a formal training because I studied my BSE was in zoology, where these two of mock up this mystery,
this series of books containing cities which will start from unicellular multicellular and then reptiles,
birds and mammals, but non non-human mammals, it stops there.
So for me, it was not studying three years of zoology at all.
And so studying animals both in the field, but also on laboratory tables,
dissecting cockroaches and worms and studying the reproductive system brain system.
And so science happened because I think in India that I know you are now studying also was to see this in the lower and the academic hierarchy.
So study science and in all the science happened like that.
And so after my bias in zoology, my interest in wildlife conservation started because when I was growing up in Gujarat and on the end of this thing,
the Marine National Park and and on, then it was, you know, I think it was more more.
I I'm not an animal loving, you know, like a animal person that way.
For me, it is more like a very formal pedagogical approach to studying and emotionally personal.
And then that led me to a messy way life sciences and Wildlife Institute.
And there are those. Studying two years of studying animals, I ended up doing a master's dissertation and studying Asiatic jackals,
really collecting them and following them so.
So I studied animals from an ecological perspective, understanding that habitat ecology feeding habits over the years to now do analysis,
get standard lab work and the least science base to work.
And that approaching animal was very, you know, in a very sort of, oh, very linear fashion.
Do you study animals and then ecological components in the ecosystem, but only non-human components?
And at that point of time, I was on that panel. You know, I was not, I didn't.
So the transition to anthropology,
maybe that happened when I visited a lot of bodies to study wildlife hunting practises and in what when was mentioning about,
you know, how you know, eating habits and everything.
So I was looking at I approached, though I didn't go to study.
I live on indigenous hunting practises, but I study human animal conflict in and around centuries.
And so when I was interviewing people living close to a live century to a live century, people would show me animal skulls and skins and more.
So for someone who studied zoology and animal wildlife conservation.
This was like, this is not how it should be. And you know, the first imperialist approach was like, No, this is illegal.
Well, why are we hunting at all? So while I was looking at wildlife hunting surveys, I was actually doing a lot of anthropological work,
sitting and listening to a lot of stories that people are telling about animals.
And that side of animals was not taught to me as a wildlife biologist student.
And that was really interesting for me, and I know, I know.
So by the time I got a little bit disillusioned with conservation approaches.
And I just put my focus to anthropology and my training and anthropology really helped and illustrating social sciences.
So, so from studying animals in in in a in a in a set up where humans met on the periphery or completely observing in Guinea,
where biology studies shifting, going from there to studying human society, that animals are on the periphery.
So what we are doing now is to looking at human society through the lens of, you know, animals.
It is interesting. So my oh, so this is why my approach to starting animals was, you know, sort of related to non-emotional,
you know, approach to looking at issues of social sciences, dimension and conservation.
So my work is largely looking at the role of what is the human dimension to damages and
conservation and looking at politics of politics of wildlife conservation is working right now.
Oh, so, so is it? Yeah, it's maybe well.
Yeah, this is this is a journey of why it's really an emotional. Yeah, maybe, yeah, I'd better listen to this.
Oh yeah. Inputs. Yeah.
Fascinating topic. I don't know many anthropologists who have actually done the whole biology and the wildlife side of it, so it's invaluable.
You know, the the sort of not knowledge systems that are combining in their work.
Thanks for that. A. Yeah.
Well, Nicole, you mentioned that my first book was on something very different. It was unclear and feminist justice movements,
but I think that's where the interest for this project on animals came from, as I was really interested in.
The the complex relationship between sort of private intimacy and feeling with an identification with animals on the part of queer,
marginalised people, but public disavowal of that, right, so I was interested in the way in which for the left in these were mostly dominant castes,
usually middle class, English speaking elite people.
For whom disavowing relationships to animals and the performance of mediating, which is actually an appropriation of a valid Muslim practise.
Right. I was interested in this,
this relationship between private intimacies with the relation with animals in public disavowal of a politics related to animals.
And so that's that's what in some ways got me on this.
It was in so many ways there were.
My project on queer lives and queer justice movements wasn't that different from what I'm working on right now, right?
Like privately, these were often like these [INAUDIBLE] who pick up animals and take them to be sterilised on
Saturdays and work at animal shelters and have animals and identify with with with street dogs.
You know, for a sense of like homelessness and not being understood and not being respected in society.
And so, yeah, I was interested in these sort of sentimental attachments with political detachments with animals.
I'll add to that, too. You know, like many of us, I write about like what I care about, right?
Like I'm a [INAUDIBLE] writes about [INAUDIBLE] and animal rights, about animals.
And so I'm interested in these things. But I also want to mention this concept of animal lover that came up earlier.
I don't love animals and I'm not into animals, right?
But I don't. But I respect them. And that's also something that I'm I'm thinking about is this relationship between.
Between love and respect, care and indifference.
Lastly, I'll just say that when I gave my opening commentary about these two different forms of leaving animals alone,
the one that comes from a kind of rabbinical outsourcing of care.
That's the one that I grew up in. And so I was interested in this kind of this hip and to call it a hypocrisies is too little.
Right? I think what I'm interested in is the way in which Brahman ism relies on.
Claims of infections of care and facts of violence that are absolutely integral,
and so the methodological problem of studying South Asia is inseparable from the political problem,
which maybe we can talk a little bit more about later. Fabulous, thanks.
I think we'll come back to the sort of political problem and the links to the metrological one in a minute.
Thanks, this radical thanks, Danica. So I think I love some animals.
I'm terrified of some animals and dislike some other animals, so I feel a whole gamut of emotions and affects around animals.
So that, I think was part of what drew me to this.
I began actually by writing a history thesis on the formation of Corbett National Park in the 1930s,
and I was interested in the politics of wildlife conservation and thinking about its colonial origins.
And I, when I was applying to graduate programmes, I was thinking that it would make that anthropology made sense because it would
allow me to think about how that past had left its imprint on the present,
which is very hard to miss, particularly with forest conservation models around Corbett and other national parks.
And I think the broadening that out to animals really came from doing fieldwork where I realised
that some of the distinctions that I was working with just were untenable in practise.
So I was thinking about the questions that I was asking in a sense about leopards training or, you know,
entering people's houses were just did not seem like they landed because people would talk about how these aren't shared spaces
and that these are not wild animals in the sense that one would think of because they're also subject to certain regimes.
So coming back to the supernatural thing, which I didn't really think about much that first project the the idea,
for example, that leopards were servants of goddesses, right?
And did their bidding as well. So one had to maintain that balance of relationships.
So I think for me that trying to think about the modelling of those categories and
thinking about the the range of spaces and with similar questions were arising,
whether it was animal rights activists and kind of saying, you know, these are wild people, right?
They have to be tamed. They have to be brought into the civilised Indian nation especially.
And in a sense, it's a very different politics. They're right because they're they're lapsed Hindus who must be brought back into a Hindu fold.
You know, I'd love to talk about the activist question leader, since that's come up for several of us, but especially there.
These were activists with tremendous political power as well, and also activists who were bringing with them people like Baba Ramdev,
right, and saying this is not a Hindu practise or on sacrifice.
And I was curious about how that how that language was resonating across multiple fields.
So I think that was what broadened an initial interest in wildlife conservation into these larger domains for me.
And I think the methodological question is it is a tricky one because, you know,
it can be a range of ways to to try and think about what it means to take animals as ethnographic actors of that is what one wants to do.
I think it's also possible actually to do animal studies without necessarily making that move.
But, you know, if that is one of the questions, I think for me,
really being imaginative and letting go of certain desires to maintain difference can be a productive move.
So thinking, you know, I've talked about this with anyone before, and I write about this in my book, but I was really struck by friends,
the Wolves idea of anthropol. denial and that his assertion that we worry too much about anthropocentric without thinking about anthropol. denial,
the idea that you know, certain emotions or something that only human animals feel and modern on humans.
So I want to think about, you know what attachment and just hate and violence and indifference look like across a range of animal actors,
both human and non-human. And I think that requires letting go of certain forms of denial, perhaps and opening up the imaginations.
I think there's room for creative play, but that also then brings with the challenges of what it means to what,
what you might be reading into someone that isn't there. But I think that's an anthropological problem at large.
So if we want to talk about that in the context of anthropology, even with humans,
I think that can remind us that this is not an animal problem or a non-human animal problem at all.
Great, thanks for the call. We should definitely come back to that.
There was a question because I think all of you look at animal rights activism in slightly different ways,
and that would be a pretty interesting comparison to make.
One way to think of this pandemic could have been through animal rights activism that, you know, to narrow it down in a way.
But I couldn't agree more with you on the point of sort of the creativity in animal studies, right?
And even if you just think of, say, the five or fewer you all approach on Ironwood's quite differently and deleted,
you're in conversation intellectually, even graphically with one another.
But you know you have a different takes on it, and that's what's so fascinating and exciting about this field at the moment.
Would you like to go next for Dolly? Hi, yes.
So. I came to study animals.
My passion was basically to learn about the connexion between humans and pigeons while growing up in a rural self-identification.
I would wake up every day listening to all those whistles and sounds.
People would make sure guided pigeons flying above on the rooftops.
So this would fascinate me how they were able to form that connexion with pigeons without any move or stream or any threat.
You know, like we have in kite flying.
So I fly and you have some kind of, you know, an ability to connect with the kite through that to that strength.
But in Britain, flying, it was fascinating to see how those pigeons were ascending and descending on their kind of orders.
So this was something fascinating for me.
And when I got this opportunity in my masters to study do ethnographic research, and I said, I'm going to do a pigeon flying,
and that was the kind of new thing for anthropology in Pakistan at the time while I was doing my email strategy in Islamabad that got Azam University.
So I told my surprise I've understood the animals, and he agreed.
Then I came across different literature, fascinating individuals.
One was a novel from pre partition novel.
Ahmed Ali from Edmonton leads a call to a lake in Delhi, and it details the fascinating the fascination of being flying back in India,
even though, you know, it's like before partition and at the end of the time, but it was still so much fascinating for many people.
So this brought me back to the question of disconnection.
I would say methodologically studying animals rather have given kind of a broader overview.
But in the context of Pakistan, what I have felt, there are two dominant issues that basically structure your approach to animals,
and one is treason, and the other one is lot of religion in the context that, for example, I was studying dogs and then I went to stray dogs.
That was Haram Animal, Fugit Animal. So I would have to go there instead.
And in spite of facing criticism from the same village people there, I was working.
So they would ask me, Why are you going to go just starting this brutal, horrible people find chickens are fine, but dogs are not.
That's the same with the donkeys were never going into research and legal issues in Pakistan because unlike India,
where in 1960s they developed the Animal Protection Act, revise the Animal Protection Act in Pakistan,
the 1890 version is still there and this causes so many problems.
If you are studying animals, it would mean that it's very ambiguous.
So many situations can arise, and it can cause so many problems.
So I would stop here because I think we are having some other questions. Thanksgiving's fascinating.
I love these sort of different entries to animal studies that all of you have, it's it's fascinating.
I can see some questions already popping up in the Turin inbox. Others please feel free to, you know, right to questions down.
But perhaps we can have Dolly go next on this.
And then I say, I think I just shared about how I was looking at human beings for the longest time.
You know it from a human rights work. And then I began to realise that my entry into food was also true.
The concept that I was right. And I mean, you know, there's so much looking at something looking at a regulation like that offers a
specialist spark inside of life as to human rights activist really impacts you.
And so, you know, in a sense,
I wouldn't apologise for a larger part of my life being really human centric because there's so much suffering around that.
And yet I realise that as I went into the archives, you know, a lot of the brain areas, a lot of cattle being burned down.
And then I saw that how food is so central to counterinsurgency, how starvation and starving communities were so central to state violence.
When I was working in the farm after I finished law school in the early part of the 2000s,
a lot of ethnic cleansing took place in the summer around the time,
and some of the reports that came were really about, you know, burning entire livestock.
So I still remember images of burnt pigs, goats, dogs, cows, and somehow they never entered the conversation.
And so over over the years, I think what really kind of started to make me think was this story that I can't forget,
which made me co-author a paper that came out called The Zone of Rehabilitation.
And this is an article that came out, I think, around two years ago, and it was because of our students here at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences,
first-generation rural students who were going back trained, as you know, in ecology and the social sciences back into conservation.
They were pretty much like as first generations would get when they were going back to study what ecology was.
And if you look at the North is a sense that there are so many conservation parks around.
And so when they invited us to my nurse and my partner and there,
when my husband and I went and it was amazing that they were in the middle of Manaus and,
you know, they would climb those watchtowers and they were there. And you know that the Manas National Park is in between Assam and Bhutan, right?
The elephants animals are constantly crossing boundaries.
And yet for students, fresh graduates who are working, especially the women there,
were so gendered the rule because any time the the funders would come, you know,
from other parts of India,
they would demand that where you donate and do you know how difficult it is to wear a borrowed coconut and walk in a wildlife park?
So, you know, says I really began to see and for a larger part of my life, it was really anger that that made me right.
And you need also burns me. It's really exhausting. And I think I'll just become very mellow at some point of time in my life.
But man, I look, and they were like, Man, we come to Dakonam, you know, forget, forget.
Don't forget the token. You have to wrap around the body in such an elegant clothing,
but you can't walk in the middle of a conservation Florida's state showing funders like from Delhi Bombay,
you know, you know, whoa, whoa, how the leopard and the tigers are being saved.
And it really made me think about communities. I mean, moral.
And if you look at the level of violence and the conflict, it has really scarred communities.
And with that, also the wildlife parks, right?
And I saw the human side of how communities who were most impacted by the armed conflict were actually finding a voice to include animals,
not because they were getting money from the funders, but because they saw that it was necessary that in their healing, the animals also had to heal.
And I was amazed at the sign.
And so I ended up writing this piece called The Zone of Rehabilitation Rehabilitation for both humans and animals together.
And I think that writing that piece really shook me up, right in terms of what I was able to see.
And and that made me, I think, really look at the world around me in a very different way.
And I'm not ashamed to say that I'm still learning and it's such a humbling process.
And also, I think my my journey to Australia, where indigenous people's experiences with the bird,
I think the bird of origin that that had such a powerful bird in a sense gave me a sense of work to come back to India and to say,
you know, as indigenous, as tribal, we have a story to tell.
And it's and and and, you know, sometimes as a writer, I feel that every time I don't have.
I have to take the script that are broadcast that dominant narrative gives me, and that's a danger.
I'll come back to the method of the analytical challenge that we have studying animals because we are.
So I think we are so fast in giving scripts to animals and humans are on our lives that we don't dwell on movement and we don't dwell on connexion.
And I think that's the magical thing that I think dwelling on that would actually make us see,
you know, the inhuman is of, I think, what we have done to our world honours.
And I and I go back to my tribal essence of being a Naga.
That the dogma debate brought up so many conversations about cruelty in India, but especially in Nagaland, amongst the Naga people themselves.
Right? Is it what are we doing? How do we think of it together?
How do we prefer animals, young people refusing to eat anything that that's game meat in Nagaland?
My niece, she spends all her salary teaching her cats in Nagaland.
And then what do you do? And of course,
I send her pocket money and we don't look at the stories that are happening because our tribal people are still the forest is disappearing.
And in my book that I wrote, I think that came out last year, 2021.
I wrote about that one chapter is on hunters in democracy and tribal people as we lose the forest, as we lose livelihood.
You know, there are more nano migrants than other hunters today.
And how do we understand is, how do we understand here, you know, in the backdrop of militarisation.
So even as violence has become such a big framework for me to understand rights and justice,
it's it's people on the ground, communities who are helping me to see a new light.
And I would be forever thankful to the to the people in Berlin and to the people in Manas for teaching me that the fantastic thank you so much.
And it to Europe for a second and just ask of you. I mean, you write about animals as well, and I know you haven't had a chance to speak so far,
but I'd love to hear from you about how you came to animals and how you would think about the methodological challenges before you.
Yeah, I think, you know, it's it's part of the reason I'm so sort of so fascinated with this question of how you
come to it is because I actually came to animals quite from a book and bureaucracy,
you know, from sitting inside government offices and looking at papers and documents and the space of sort of district magistrates offices, et cetera.
And also so partly, that's sort of the entry point for me, but also partly like really serendipitously,
like it wasn't something I ever was thinking about working on.
And then, as you know, in the field, you know, all sorts of things come to you and then these big cats sort of,
well, thankfully that didn't come for me, but they came out several times, and that's how it sort of I got into it.
But I think for me, the really interesting question personally and you know that I'm working on and I'm going to be wrestling with them.
I think in the near future is also thinking about non-humans and the climate crisis.
And how do we how do we read something like the famine crisis through animal studies
and through human relations with animals is something that I'm interested in.
And again, all of them have just come.
The slaughter thing is very much gone from some of the more recent interest in thinking about methods of thinking
about how anthropology can speak to history or to the natural sciences and to politics and political theory,
etc. But yeah, but it can go ahead and answer, but it's just sort of it's done from a range of things.
It's been I can't think of one particular interest or one particular moment in my field say that got me just an animal studies.
Yeah, it's been a I consider lots of questions sort of popping up already into the books.
I had several more questions to sort of pursue,
but perhaps what we can do is we can take a round of questions and then we can come back to some of the questions like the one you raised.
I think about animal rights activism, which I think is a really important one, but also I think something that all of you sort of refer to,
which is the political stakes of the work that you're doing right of your individual project, especially in this moment in time.
And I'd love to be able to think a bit more about that collectively, but perhaps we can just take some of these questions first.
How would you like to ask your question? I'm going to just give you the right to speak and then perhaps you could ask a question.
So this is a very interesting band,
and I really enjoyed listening to all the products that all of you are doing and how it all is really nice to hear you talk.
And I've been reading many articles that you have written and really fascinated.
I actually you've mostly answered my question, but I just kind of I just read it out what I've written.
OK? Because we've talked about ourselves and project.
And of course, you know that it was.
The Falcons began roosting because of the boundaries of wire and bone overall, who I remember did a story on it.
And kind of the process snowballed the conservation process after that,
which was taken up forward by others along the dialogue and discussion with the villagers.
And one of the things was that all about Falcon, as you rightly said, that the hunters,
because of the shrinking forest and also over hunting and overconsumption they were Falcon actually gave,
brought them enough money to tide them over the year.
And I remember reading that, you know, the number of falcons that they were able to to hunt for and sell.
So they had to also talk about, you know, how to replace that.
You know, how how can they earn money? And they were trying to give them chickens and other animals to raise something like that.
And also, there was a conservation project in Coloma long before this Abu Falcon game.
And I remember now there are kind of bird watching societies and tours and kind of my village that's
begun to take quite a bit of pride about the way the conservation has looked around that area.
And also because my work has been on religion, church and religious conversion also.
And I remember talking to the best looking mine. He was telling me that he was showing me that how they've started discouraging offering
of wild animals during the certain time in the church when harvest offerings are made.
So I was just wondering if you could shed some light on these issues, which are some from within the community as such,
rather than people from Bombay and others that are talking about dog meat and,
you know, animal activism, which is like imposing from outside and things.
But the way conservation, especially ecology and I think it was, let's do some kind of a climate change idea.
Also, what are the times when maybe the hunters used to not hunt in the forest or something like that?
I mean, I don't know what's going on. There's a lot of work that is happening and that would if you could shed some more light,
but you have actually already answered my question in what you were talking about the Bodo and the anX.
Thanks, Bieber. Wonderful to hear from you. You're right.
You know, Bono is an elder sister and we have been in touch,
and I think her her recent concerns have been something that touched ED on climate change and change of migration seasons.
So, so increasingly, there are less, I think falcons that come the timings are not kind of routine as they used to be.
And so that's one thing that's happening is also perhaps in disrupting the kind of the tourism element that's been tied to conservation.
And so what do you do with that? The second element within community conflict that's that's come up is that like with every conservation,
because it's tied to livelihood and money making, that communities should stop everything they're doing and entertain tourists and
take them to the roosting sites internal conflict that this should this year,
should that a more welcome kind of sightseeing spaces be constructed, right?
Which politician and which constituency would get the money?
In a sense, I think some of the internal conflicts that that come up within community has been quite fascinating.
The third point that's come up, I think, is is around. Then perhaps, you know, how do we understand and what are the limits of conservation tourism?
Do do you do a life concert there in Punta Gorda tokens that come in?
So there's not a young generation, they can also have a great party and like concerts.
And in the morning when kind of like, you know, look at look at the Falcons,
and I think there's really a script that's going wrong once like once again with conservation.
And I think that's been also one of the debates across Adivasi areas with conservation that is to do with Tiger or other big cats have come right.
You can't have the tourism element tied to conservation so much.
I think at some point for any kind of roosting, the birds need to be left alone.
Any, any anything just to tell you that. So I think that's something that the Naga people have really been struggling with because
anything that comes up in the note is to do with conservation is that there's money,
right? Sure. I know there's money riding elephant is money now.
Go see and we're talking, you know, and this money. So you're right.
So, you know, I'm really fascinated by the internal conversations that are that are coming up.
And how do we then eventually then define what is why are they really why the why we bother and disturb them so much with the money angle?
Or, you know, are they then part of us as in the urban, you know, zones, you know where they are eventually there to just entertain us?
Emotionally, I was wondering, I mean, we all know about the, you know, the way.
The Indian Army action on the villages to do so to suppress insurgency and nationalist movement,
how it has also disturbed the life and you know, the knowledge that comes down from one generation to the next.
That has also been disturbed, isn't it?
So when you think of the even timber logging, the over logging of the forest or over hunting and also the knowledge of the seeds and you know,
there's there is something else also going on. There's a kind of a disturbance that has happened in the.
In sort of generational knowledge giving, and there's a whole generation of the 1950s,
I mean, we all know about the 1956 and how so many villages were burnt.
And you know, that's the how it has disturbed that knowledge base as well.
Would you would you think that you're right?
I think you're right, I think absolutely, you know, working on militarisation, all your points are spot on.
And I think when you talk about non-human, I wrote this paper called Terrifying Politics and it's about the disappearance of the cosmos
flower from the hills of Manipur and how that was part of counterinsurgency to actually kind of,
you know, clear the forests around the highways. So yeah, you're spot on.
You're right. Thank you. Sorry.
Thanks for that. Thanks, Tony. We go to quite a few other questions coming in this one from an anonymous attendee.
I'm going to just read it out and they say, Hi, my question pertains to the relation between non-humans and religion,
as mentioned usage of animal metaphors, forms of living alone.
Should the social and religious conceptualisation of animals in South Asian context.
For my Ph.D., I'm working with the atheist visuals digital, where many animals are used in means of visual arts.
How do think about digital visuals involving animals and religion?
Who would like to get it means, you know, you don't have to lobby to try and take it.
But I have an answer for you that sounds like a fascinating project.
I'm a huge consumer of 80s memes involving animals, so I look forward to reading about this.
But I do think that there's been so much interesting work on the plate of popular
culture and the production of digital media around religion in particular.
You know, whether it's thinking about what kind of charisma transmit through images, for example,
what it means to take in the popular Hindu context, for example, darshan right through a digital meme or so on.
And certainly, I mean, there's a lot of digital media circulating on WhatsApp, for example, right?
These kinds of religious names in the Hindu right uses that a lot as well.
So I think for me, you know, the way to think about it would not be that different from thinking about the atheist means
I think it would be questions about what what forms of digital media are able to cultivate,
what kind of messaging accompanies them. And it would be interesting to think.
I think about how people receive that and how they imagine the work that the image is doing.
But yeah, I look forward to reading it. Thanks for the call.
Would anybody else like to jump in on the episode visuals?
OK, well, we can come back to the question of which reality in a bit, but thank you for that question.
I think, Meghna, you had a question if you'd like to ask it. Please go ahead. Hi, thank you.
This was all really fantastic. And actually, I have so many questions, but I'm going to stick to two of them if I may.
And one is, I think I should add the. And the other one is for now target.
But I think I was really, really glad that you sort of brought up animals in the supernatural.
And as Nicole mentioned, that it is an emerging field.
And I think, you know, Nizar Sakinah had been part of a workshop two years ago on questions of the non-human in South Asia,
and a lot of the literature that one thinks about is in relation to Ontology and
was citing it from the South America where we think of separate ontologies.
And I think something you said was really fascinating and I've been thinking about it,
which is that do you really what is, you know, does do South Asians have a separate ontology?
And I know this is a really large question, but I think in so many ways, you know,
not just in rural South Asia or forest dwelling South Asia, but what you said is that, you know, the Hindutva is an animistic tradition.
It's that they're using the Ganga and the Himalayas as vital forces in ways that I wondered if there was
an answer to this question of ontology vis a vis South Asia in this kind of feel that that there's,
you know, it's populated with so much of this literature from perspective ism and, you know, elsewhere in the Amazonia or the Andes.
But what do South Asia have to say about ontology?
And very quickly, if I may, and I said I had a question for for, you know, thinking about freedom and unfreedom alongside difference and indifference.
And so when you were talking about animals being left alone, you know, I in the Sunderbans,
at least some of the wildest animals, you know, the daigo or riverine turtles are so veiled.
So they have the radio collar and they have these tracking devices. And I think Dolly just mentioned this, you know, how wild are these wild animals?
And I think Emma Morris maybe talks about autonomy of words in the US,
and she sort of says that maybe a clue or a common sparrow is actually more wild or more free than than these wolves.
And I think in this in their bones, in these tigers, because they're trapped constantly.
And I just wondered alongside different scare in difference, if you thought about freedom,
autonomy, wilderness or wildness in in in this book that we all can't wait to read.
So thank you all for really fantastic thoughts. Thanks, Peter.
Rather, go direct to go first and then make a mess or whichever way.
Yep, that's fine. Sorry, if somebody is not going to unmute myself, I.
It's lovely to hear from you. Thank you for that question. I think that's exactly what we're trying to take on.
The dominance of ontological anthropology is the way to think about the non-human supernatural.
And I think that, you know, there have been very substantial critiques of the ontological tone that point to exactly this kind of the lack of history.
But I think what I find interesting is how, you know, academic work doesn't circulate in a vacuum in a sense, right?
And I was struck by this when I was at a Gotoxa rally and one of the speakers there said, we are like the people of Peru and Ecuador.
We're struggling with with colonialism, and we have to also shake it off like them.
And he interestingly said, you know, Ecuador has made Mother Earth the mother in their constitution.
And yet when we're talking about making the cow, the cow mother of the nation,
everyone's laughing at us and saying that this is, you know, this is a political movement.
So those are in that kind of the way in which ontological anthropology, if you will.
I don't know that they're reading Eduardo Rivera as the Castro, but certainly that kind of popular sense.
The fact that that's being drawn into these Right-Wing movements really made us think about returning the question of politics to you,
not just table ontologies, but questions of ontology in general.
So even someone like Mauricio de la Cadena, for example, and in the domain of anthropological writing on this,
she's much more, I think, circumspect about total ontologies, but still says something about how these are not.
These are not things that one can question because one is not off that world, right?
If it's so it's not just a belief, but it's a world.
And if you're not off that world, then you actually don't have a space from which to question this politics.
And this is exactly, in a sense, what the Hindu right is saying as well, right?
If you're not Hindu, you don't actually understand that the Ganga and the Himalaya are agent of Hindu forces.
So what do we what do we do of that with that? And I think for us, the question is really,
can South Asia return the question of politics to this discussion of quote unquote non-Western cosmology and ontologies?
And I think that's where we come down and really think about what are the political effects of such claims as well,
not just in terms of who is better placed to make them, but what kinds of politics are they imagining as an outcome of that?
So I think that's how I will try and think about what South Asia can bring to that.
But thank you for the question. Thank you, Magnus.
Nice to hear from you and to sort of see you again. Thank you for your question.
I guess I would just start here. I haven't thought too much about wildness. In particular, most of my research has been done in urban areas,
but I think we can think about sort of the freedoms of of street dogs as a kind of is a kind of wildness.
But I guess I would just respond to your question, first of all, by saying that I do think I mean, I have been thinking about freedom and autonomy.
And what's important to me is that. The recognition that freedom is fundamentally relational and that I think if we think about it,
most forms of unfreedom come from assertions of unreleased banality,
right, that are exemplified, for example, in what radical was talking about with anthrax denialism.
So the fear of recognising the self in the other that then leads to a denial of relation is the grounds for for freedoms,
the ground for justifications of interventions, putting surveillance callers,
having tourists come by to pay money, to see Belkin's for their own pleasure, right?
Those are. Those are premised fundamentally on an unrelated.
And I was really struck, I love this comment that Darlene made earlier about about the relationship between scripts and movements.
So these assertions of unrelated, which is to say that thing is so unlike me that I have the right to surveil it because
of my own human curiosity and my desire for knowledge about this other thing,
right, comes from the scripts that we create about what we are and what we are not about our right to knowledge,
about our right, to curiosity, about others.
But if we, I think, focus more on this question of movement, we find that animals in their freedom don't necessarily want nothing to do with us,
want nothing to do with other animals, want anything to do with humans.
But in fact, that movement tends to be a movement towards relation let you just not the relationally of intervention.
So, yeah, I think this is really like just lovely concepts, a desire to think about scripts and movements.
Tastic, thank you to all the kindness, and thank you for the question, we got quite a few more sort of pouring in,
so I'm going to ask you to ask a question of if you're happy to ask it otherwise, I can.
I can. Oh, I think Lauren's going to. Sorry, you might have had a glass.
OK, so Aaron, I had a question where he?
He asked. He said, My question is for Dr. Keegan, how how has your study of the dog meat debate affected your idea of racism?
Indian culture and citizenship is understanding the responsibility of certain animals,
of liberalising vast differences within societies, states, regions and India and of course, the world's.
Thank you so much. I think it's all very tight and I bring it out in my writing, and that's what really I think got me thinking about racism and food.
Recently, I wrote this article called Dirty Food and you know, it's part of a series on thinking about cost and thinking about racism in South Asia.
But I find that, you know, really, really in a way intertwined with racism,
because irrespective of what we eat and what we don't eat every kind of face in India that you see who is a tribal migrant,
they get asked this question, right? You eat snakes, you eat dogs, and it starts going, What is there?
Was this gusting food for? Then you do you eat rats?
And often this taunting that goes on not only stays within the boundaries of South Asia, but you know, in Australia as well, you have you have,
you know, kind of students from the North East who constantly say that even the work needs, you know, from other parts of India they are focussing on.
They're like, you know what, dirty food you eat? I just want to tell you this story in Melbourne because we're talking about dog food, racism and all.
But I would say, you know, in terms of racism and what we eat as tribals advances indigenous, it goes a step, it goes one step further.
And that's that's the link with cannibalism, right? I'd make other, you know, you'll eat human beings and and and here and here,
what we need to understand is the dog is more and more precious than than the human right.
That is much more disgusting. You know, the cannibals they eat human beings, kind of.
It's just that they get taken that once I had taken a I taken a cab in Melbourne, it was raining.
It was dark. You know, the street was deserted and it was it was Melbourne Winter.
So it was like the deep June July and I got it from the cab.
And, you know, usually people ask me a lot of cab drivers, you know, if they see me, this is where you're from.
I've like for a larger part of my life because the moment I say I'm from India, I exactly know where they're going to place me, right?
They said, Well, I think by water, or let's put that out there, they said. And that happens in Melbourne.
Mind you, it's not in Delhi. The attitude is so same when it comes to racism in South Asia and Africa.
It's unbelievable that it kind of says, I think that's a word that I'm going to use them.
They get Hansen's right this eating non-human and and making us non-humans.
So I said, not alone. And so the cab comes to a stop.
I get off, it's drizzling. And he looks at me in Hindi, immediately switches to Hindi, and he said, You know,
I'm going to ask you on things like Nagaland Mela, you know, you're human beings.
Look at me, cut in awe and I'm standing there and I have no reply for for that kind of a question.
And I just look at him and I'm like, That's where I want to play a game with him, right?
And I look at him and I say, I smile and with my tribals, I look at him and I go closer and I say to become the.
And he just sleeps, and it just kind of they start the car and flees from there.
Right? It's kind of a horror story, but it can also be a joke. For him, it's a horror story.
You find is you find this Adivasi that is done Dundee, who eats human beings and is lurking around Melbourne.
So imagine the story you create. But for me, it was such a joke standing there in that rainy night at Melbourne, which happened recently.
So I think to answer the question, it is, it comes, I think, back to the question of not only citizenship,
but the idea of cost and racism that is so tied and beyond South Asia.
And then when I think if I can add those examples from Gujarat where I am based on it, so I think it's it's you know, oh, you know,
I can sort of I have some of the examples in Gujarat on some things that people say that, you know,
if you are looking for a house or flat, the first thing is ask him, Do you eat meat or non-vegetarian?
And I think that question is not about knowing this in this part of being tribal and non-tribal, but [INAUDIBLE] Muslim or not.
And then then it comes whether you're, you know, the loser or not.
So and I spend side by socialists the problem because they're immediately asked,
you are not asking caste or religion directly, but food becomes a marker of your social identity.
And so so I think immediately the answer would be like, No, no, we don't give full.
It's immediately, they'll say. So people are from outside Gujarat are not within the Gujarat, also largely Muslims and Dalits,
but people from outside who are actually looking for a place here.
It's very difficult to find a kind of led because it's a very, you know, it's a question that comes up out of nowhere,
you know, you're not prepared for it when you're looking for those that are not. So I think I can understand that, of course, Meat-Eating is in India.
I think racism is still a very mild word for it.
Discussed as it is, the cost destroyed many places because in northeast people, when we've been like when we go to study that study,
you do field work that I think people from Indians were caste Hindus,
largely for them going to Northeast and India looking at northeast us now up, which behaves very many.
But I have written that in my book about how students from Noctis when they come on,
this is that and people from non-autistic places when they go to northeast, one of the things are down because of witchcraft there.
And that also is tied to wildlife conservation. When we are looking at the world of hunting hunting as a threat to ecological species.
One of the approaches that wildlife conservation organisations use to wean people away from hunting that is seen as
a project goals asking people to give up hunting and instead of looking at dust as a way to promote conservation.
It is ultimately,
but I'm going to convey to way of approaching the approach using that as a policy to ask people to give up certain livelihood practises to say well,
species, and especially when hunting is largely tied to consumption and markets and and on the social identity.
I just want to bring that. Thanks. Thanks.
Because really important, I'm going to ask a borer to just ask this question because I think it links up to what I just said about food and animals.
Honestly, how would you like to just read out a question or ask it? Because I think it's very much linked to the conversation we're just having.
Hey, hey. Hello. So amazing discussion.
First of all that I'm down with COVID, and this is like the best thing that has happened.
I just wanted to ask the question around like, so I work in central India and mostly I work with the Adivasi community and so on.
Growing narrative is that there's a moral judgement around the consumption and killing of animals for food like that is custom where it's called mine,
where people wish for something. And if that comes like, I mean, if it happens for them that way, they could enjoy food with the community, et cetera.
So often, like the commentary around this, especially by the goalie image, is that, you know, it's violence.
It's something that people should not do, especially the iDevices. And of course, it falls under the larger ambit of kind of enjoys the iDevices.
So as an outsider, I'm chromosome. I work here. And so the way they look at me is as an outsider who probably adheres to these ideas as well.
And so it is really hard to make sense of what they're thinking because conversations with me are also
often followed by the same narrative that people are trying to sort of impose on them in a certain way.
So I just wanted to understand how those and quote-unquote outsider make sense of this whole process.
Yeah. And because a or anybody would like to sort of jump in on this point.
For me, actually looking at animal slaughter, because in my own family, you know, in my in the fathers villages,
we slaughter chicken goats and all of us as we know it as part of family rituals.
So so I think a lot of what we do in our studies say what what we observe in our study site is.
I think the reading is, of course, from academia and and what we read, but it's also about your own background.
So for for I think the position of the researcher is it's very important to understand
here about the class class gender questioned Agusto identity because management an for me.
I don't have any these wrongful numbers in the family. People don't report.
But then I started paperwork when I went to an autism outside and lived abroad.
And so when it comes to food, I'm not. But there are. I can actually bet you may experience about how sometimes you know,
if you're coming from a certain, you know, background, this may look very, very immediately.
The and the labelling is that know their ecological communities.
So some of my religious friends have said that that a lot of people didn't know and I don't know, children hunting and eating.
How can you work with them there?
So some kinds of labels that we use SS, we are pretty careful when that's usually as outsiders and don't know if you go and study other communities,
you know, in a setting that is not familiar to us as to be a little bit of mind.
Be very mindful and A. So that's what ethics of research comes in.
And sometimes that I think is going to be very stigmatising the practises rather than trying to understand.
So if I say in my case when no, so I can give an example.
After I finished my Ph.D., I went to the village where I studied and we we actually started a big and I have a village feast and all of that.
So, so so for me, understanding Oh.
Understand why people think that is more important than what they do and think how much they're hunting, whether it is.
Of course, all these angles are very important to many.
All the activities that we are doing, as in animal studies or the research that you're doing is really multidisciplinary.
So rather rather than looking at an activity from one specific point of view, for example,
dog leadership only from a legal perspective or from a moralistic perspective is very problematic.
So I think all of us have also big responsibility to.
Be very aware of. You know, you know, doing justice in many ways, because I think religious groups that it's tribalism already faced.
And you know, and and yet we are at a stage where because of animal rights issues, where I live,
my life issues and medical issues, many of these communities will get for this marginalised and stigmatised.
And also many of them will easily fall under the the other side of the law.
So I think when we call ourselves as animal studies, scholars or anthropology,
often we're not underfunded just so I think we have to be a little bit careful about that, even if you I'd say that.
So it's better to just stay there rather than looking at livelihood activities from one specific angle that can be very, very problematic.
If I if I can just add to what I'm saying and you know, A.J., it's it's.
I think for you then to understand is not not by labelling yourself as an outsider,
but labelling yourself as somebody who's trying to understand what's happening,
and I think there's a larger politics there in terms of making certain practises taboo in the area where you are.
Even in the case of of let a lot of tribals.
They are really pressure to prove they're they a warrior like identity, right?
So what what militarisation did was in a way to ban every kind of storytelling because, you know, they they imposed any kind.
They say that any kind of gathering is illegal. So through the 50s and the 60s, as Naga people, we lost our art of storytelling.
We we lost any kind of social gatherings that we would have.
Their stories were passed down. And what we have is Naga culture. Today, we have to understand, right?
The warrior, the feathered and Modi bears that a lot of you see at the Hornbill Festival are really very select ideas of what culture ought to be.
We don't have today because of militarisation and what we have lost a larger part, let's say, of seasons,
a larger part of our ancestors who then hunt and would really kind of make sure that the forest grew on its own because the
storytelling has been so selective and has been imposed by the state to make Nagas and tribals and indigenous stuck in a time.
There is a pressure for so many young people who are unemployed to prove their Naga masculinity,
so the only thing they do is go to the jungle and hunt because hunting is part of what now domestic nutrition?
Right? I think that losing the entire picture there, and that is fear.
Perhaps that anthropologist I come in to study that this idea of masculinity and tied to hunting that car,
then going and killing in the forest is also really part of a history of violence and militarisation.
And how do we understand it? So I think thank you for your question, and I think this is something we need to think together.
Really important question, thank you and began to reflect on what position nodded in answering this.
Does anybody else want to respond to this?
Because you know, what I'm seeing is that there are a couple of sort of linked questions and method that we're getting in the Q&A books,
which I might sort of combine and and ask together. But before that, and if I'm saying your name correctly,
perhaps you wanted to ask a bigger question on popular media, so perhaps you could please go ahead and ask that?
No, thank you, and I did, and I think I would also echo with Dr. Dog about how, you know, because I'm also from the East and the London region.
So whenever we go out, even if it's to a conference or something, especially in places where all kinds of to eat and they'll all get this up,
which which means like, you know, you eat everything so you don't have any other option but to eat everything in front of everybody.
So that does come back again and again to how they are defining you by what you eat, and it is a little complicated in many ways.
As for Dr. Ambika, I was when you presented your work, when you said you be working on,
you know, Dalits and animals and their associations via via literature.
But also what came to my mind immediately was movies such as Vanjie, which which, you know,
which talks about the foundry itself is is big right and how the whole movie is built around the caste hierarchy and how classism plays out.
But using the imagery of an animal such as, you know, pigs.
But also, I think this it has also come up in other movies, which I don't know many of you will agree with me or not,
but movies such as Article 15 in the Hindi movie where they talk about, well, you know,
there are certain scenes which are very, you know, very stark, which which are not very, you know, in your faith,
but they are kind of indicative of, you know, talking about slaughtered animals but not showing the slaughtered animals.
But, you know, just it's just that you have to make up that they're talking about slaughtered animals and the relation ship to the hierarchy.
So would you also be exploiting other kinds of media apart from literature or you know,
or are you just focussing on the existing literature at the moment?
Thanks. Spencer, thanks added on. No.
Thank you for your comments. Actually, this project, I think we're actually writing a book proposal.
It's an edited volume.
So although there are two beautiful papers in the water, both are on movies and animals and cast and canon and period them put them on.
These are very powerful movies. I think if you watched that and no, you will go back with, of course, are memories of atrocities.
But animal images, images of animals will remain with you.
And certain kinds of animals.
I think that's what is very interesting, whether it is the the the dog in body, Albemarle and the multiple animals in an apartment or family.
So I think there are two book chapters. But I think I'm using this as a teaching tool.
Some actually, I'm teaching a course called the politics of the Environment, and those weeks are dedicated podcast to nature.
Somebody not borrowing a lot from my work, but using movies and movie analysis, you know, movie reviews and also a lot of music videos.
If you look at enjoy and I mean, you know, these are all image images about fighting for social justice, ecological justice, I think.
I think as scholars and teachers, we have to go beyond the textbook and law journal articles and borrow from from music videos.
So this week, actually, we look at the top of my class was environmental movements.
And so one of my favourite video is gone sort of me.
It's a very old album and it's very powerful.
You know, you play that and using those videos, you discuss what how people are protesting, you know, through folk art to music.
So I think popular culture, music videos, folk songs are very, very powerful.
So I will be I'm analysing that I'm not going to publish anything about visual media because I'm not from that field,
but I have the contributors to the world who have analysed these these films and they've written they'll be writing book chapters on that.
So I'm very happy to collaborate with people who have who the visual media, arts and culture is.
I don't know that other. I don't know. I think they've become big, too.
We all have to come together and then tell these stories because all of us cannot do that.
It's not. I don't know what I can discuss, but then I think that.
But I think that's what I think that, you know, if we can make our records is something I'm really interested in.
How do we leave this to the younger generation and then give, you know, in all forms of different?
And that's why stories about the little that it is very powerful.
And also in the environmental movement, in the next class,
I'm going to talk about models of Deborah and the question I'm asking you why does not that both as an environmental movement in India,
but we talk about the movement and that model, which I London, but not to my head to take your hand and.
Is that a Bakelite approach to its environmental environmental isms?
These are some things that I'm interested in. But thank you for the question.
I think I'm going, I'm going beyond what you asked for, but thanks for your question tonight.
Thank you. I really want to attend your classes. That's on some days.
I take this course of yours. So if you could that I've got, please go ahead.
Yeah, I was just actually going to ask if we could respond to that question about historical methods.
And because I think there's this discussion actually has been pointing in so many ways to why the question is from an anonymous attendee and is,
I'm wondering how historical methods are relevant or not do ethnographic or anthropological studies?
And I was just thinking from listening to my amazing Chobani's that I think everyone's pointing
to the importance of thinking with process and sitting with the complexities it throws up.
And I was thinking of what Dolly was saying about militarisation and its effects, like the desire to, for example,
the kind of validation of hunting right and the need to perform masculinity in the face of this large, colonial, militarised violence.
To me, that's the importance of attending to history rather than saying, you know, this is how, for example,
narco culture has always been also paying attention to how those clean some claims that are
attenuated because of certain kinds of historical events or thinking about capacious work,
for example, and just when debates around cockfighting amongst people.
So I think it's important to be attentive to how people are thinking with movement right to come back.
And yet like this, I actually really love that idea of the script in the movement.
And I think that also points of the importance of of thinking about history and thinking through the role that people,
the people themselves are caught up in these debates as political and social forms
are shifting and being attentive to that in ways that don't necessarily replicate
either the kind of cleansing violence that demands in himself or the violence that
demands a difference to quote unquote culture as something that hasn't moved.
Thanks for business.
Yeah, yeah, I'll just add on to that as a way to to come back to that earlier question about about marginalisation and food cultures, right?
Is that also if we pay attention to history as opposed to just what people say?
One of the things that we recognise is that the BJP, the Hindu right, is where it is right now.
So much because of the breeding captivity, sexual abuse and killing of animals.
Right. That and so to take as earnest or sincere any of their [INAUDIBLE] about protection of animals or care for animals or love for
animals takes us away from the point that that Hindu fascism is premised precisely on the the structural abuse of animals.
And when that is happening to the tune of billions of dollars, right to even sort of to to focus at all on on stigmatising like the food practises
of of oppressed peoples makes absolutely no sense to me when we have right here,
like such an example of a reliance on the breed in captivity and killing of animals.
So I think a historical perspective also takes us away from the rhetoric of Hindu fascism to the materiality
of Hindu fascism and how premised it is on the weaponization and the structural culpability of animals.
Thank you. I was wondering with we're basically we're actually out of time, but I was wondering we could do one quick round with everyone,
and what I'm going to try to do is pick up the remaining questions and put it into, well, maybe two.
There are a couple of questions on animal rights activism which are there, you know?
So for instance, there's another one on competing dietary regimes, cost and food practises and what happens when you encounter them?
Animal rights activists. And there is there are quite a few questions.
Everyone on again on discipline. So you know what? We just discussed history and we've discussed popular media.
But there's another one which is sort of from an anonymous attendee who's asking, Hi, I'm trying to wonder what are the ways in which we,
as researchers disseminate what we gain from these more than human projects going beyond, say, articles, books, publications?
Now, in some senses, I'll be in a position to engage with multiple stakeholders.
And I'm wondering if any of you have gone through this in your work so far and how could this be thought of a methodologically as well?
Swirsky Dungeon has a question, a really important question actually on law.
And she asked. I was wondering what the panellists view is on institutionalising the relationship between humans and animals,
quite often through law, especially given that the dominant perspective of law is to set this relationship in very definite domes.
So how do we understand the law that govern such relationships and be moved beyond the current depravity that is defined by climate change?
It was whether we can do one quick last round because I know Viraj actually time and some, you know,
many of you have to go in which you can either answer the question or both think about which disciplines or methods you're engaging with.
And also, if you wanted to add anything to the question of animal rights activism,
just because I know several of you sort of worked on that, would that be OK?
And then I think we would have answered most of these really great questions that we've got.
And also some of the threads of this discussion so far. So I'm gonna ask you to quickly begin if that's okay.
No, no wonderful questions, actually, because when I was writing my book,
I was I have written in my book that my book will be largely read by people in the Dibango and United in my field book.
And I really wanted I did not read written by, of course.
But it's not just, but I know because during my fieldwork, people are very curious about what I'm writing.
So I think all of us, when we are writing, of course we want to,
but I publish and I go and get a read articles which will be read by academics like us.
But the human animal relations work.
I don't know this kind of the kind of work we are doing that the information is coming from people,
you know, especially from people who are in a whose work has not been published in.
Many communities are not, you know, there is no script for writing.
So I think in many ways when I was doing my work, I also felt a little bit of no guilt about what is that I'm doing.
It's all about extracting information, and I'm putting and I'm packaging their stories and presenting.
And so even the title I goes on our brothers and all the credit goes to the individual people.
This is not my. The people are asking, can you be asked to give the title?
I said, no, it was from reading my interviews, people telling stories about tigers and tigers.
I don't believe this. So I feel that, you know, when we are seeing, how do we disseminate our work?
I think what we can keep respondents, collaborators, people with who we are giving this information.
I think one responsibility is to give this information back to them and a new one.
Then I also I can't write so much.
So I write in a very simple English side as I took the books to the bank, really, and I had posted them three four months back that received my book.
So what was very rewarding for me is that actually many of them have read my books and then they asked me questions about it.
There are agreements over disagreements, and the disagreement was also about A. Oh,
so I know that one of the interesting so there is a politics of knowledge.
Innovation is there.
And so my my particular project is I am reading the Gawker piece with my friend in the bumblebee about a River Valley book is coming out.
So I think my next projects, I feel like it should be a collaborative work.
You know, in many ways, it's also very, you know, it's very cliché saying that in all,
I I'm getting information from that I'm theorising and publishing. And then that is cool because that is also very problematic.
But what I'm trying to say is when I shared my work with them, I think many of them have read the interesting things about know,
because in some places that I read said that no tigers may not be their brothers in the future because of the markets coming in,
and that that was me and I was a book Protecting tigers make back.
So interesting discussions of that, I think in that way. What was all the transition?
Oh, I will always feel that we should pray more for the general audience who will,
who should, for example, policymakers in addition to the academic work that we doing.
And and then and then if if not able to communicate our work with the means, I don't call them stakeholders will the will.
So basically just giving back to them. So it's it's also, I don't know, I feel that I did that and I feel okay about that.
So now people are asking, we're not going to write a book at 11:30 coming back.
So all this is nice, but I know the responsibility of publishing for whom is a really important question to think about.
And when I answer to the law question, I'm going to use wildlife conservation laws in India and somewhere where Protection Act was set up
in 1972 and from 1972 onwards still doesn't prove you see the lives of national parks in India,
where I live centuries in India has increased, has increased tremendously.
And so because of this wildlife loss. People who live in that protected area that are at a huge loss so that not many studies,
except a few studies about Aspectos comparative work on displacement because of conservation.
It is a huge there's a very interesting environmental justice map.
I don't know that you know that, and it doesn't actually capture all the conflicts that related to natural resources.
And if we look at they have also captured the conflicts in national parks and wildlife sanctuaries,
which I think we are in to see the kind of in-depth study of serious studies on displacement social justice issue due to a life conservation,
because asking people to make make way for animals like elephants and tigers is something we have to have to.
Not many studies have been done on that, and I feel that this loss has to be relooked and in the meat, more meat,
little bit people centric, rather than just looking at wildlife conservation as as a priority and displacing people.
And most of the people are not getting the, let's say, tribal communities,
women and children and so on, and violence in the name of conservation has to be studied in detail.
A lot of this violence, actually because of the legal regimes, because if you have a law,
you are always just just like you're legitimising violence in the name of wildlife conservation.
And that is not correct. And when I say no, I didn't have to discuss these issues in detail.
Yeah. Thanks for the question.
This would you like to have a final stab at all of the questions and all the quick stab at maybe the animal activism question,
since that's one sort of closest to to what I'm doing.
So, yeah, so as I said in the beginning, my book started out as a project about animal animal activism.
I would call it that instead of animal rights or animal welfare groups, because it's easier.
And I will I will say that for anyone who knows me, I am sympathetic to animal justice.
I am definitively unsympathetic to any kind of politics that needs unfreedom with unfreedom,
and that is so much of what happens in animal activism, not just in India, but elsewhere.
Right. So in my text, in my work,
one of the things that I'm really trying to and not just intellectually but practically and materially figure out is what does it mean
in real terms to be on the side of the lives and freedoms of animals and on the side of the lives and freedoms of human persons?
What does that mean materially? Not rhetorically, right?
But what kind of work do we produce? What kind of arguments do we make?
What kind of questions do we open up? And so, yeah, so part of that for me is, you know,
I use this concept of critical solidarity in my first text that comes from Secretary Henry Donner and that what it means to be with
others and on the side of others and sympathetic to the politics of politics and meet those of others is often is often critique.
Right. And so one of the things that I'm really thinking about in my book are what are the ways in which animal justice movements
trip up over themselves and end up replicating the very sort of structures and modalities that generate the kill ability,
caster ability of animals in the first place, for example,
there is I spent a lot of time in the book talking about the way that animal welfare activists insist on the innocence of animals and the way
that that that replicates Hinduism through a patriarchal ideas of the innocence or speech listeners or lack of agency of not just animals,
but women, right in their guise of protection, more generally, that sort of paternalistic modality.
So, yeah, so for me, the the being in sympathy with something broad like like animal justice means.
Thinking, very frankly and honestly about all of the ways in which that politics fails,
commits violence, for which it remains responsible and complicit.
And to think really seriously and frankly about about those issues.
Anxious not to go. Would you like to keep it or answer all the questions as you wish?
I mean, the questions are great and aren't you? What has been said so far is really fantastic and I can try and maybe just piggyback off of that.
I think the NIS would needs to set right now on how to put that is really powerful,
which is what does it mean to think about multiple freedoms together without necessarily setting them against one another?
And I think that's really one of the challenges of doing this work, particularly in a South Asian context, right?
Where you where you're constantly up against the fact that one project entails violence,
one project of liberation entails violence against some other. But I've been thinking about this recently in another vein,
which is to this piece by talking Yang, which circulates a lot in anthropology and indigenous.
That decolonisation is not a metaphor. And they're arguing that, you know, there's this very loose use of decolonisation,
but there's a section at the end where they talk about income instability.
And what would it mean to recognise that sometimes different political movements,
no matter how kind of well-intentioned or how important in their own right that they might just be implementable?
And they're talking about, for example, immigrant justice and decolonisation in terms of giving land back to native communities and just saying,
OK, what did these projects actually can't be squared?
That doesn't make them any less important, but you might not be able to have the projects work together.
And I'm wondering, what would it mean at least to think about that in the current political moment?
And I don't want to say the projects remaining common struggle forever or that they are necessarily incremental.
But how do we think about the question of politics, right and where we are politically?
And how does that political moment and how things get said and taken, how we might have a life outside of us?
I was thinking about what America was saying about law earlier, actually, and just who is who bears the brunt of the law.
And we know that politically, there are certain people who do bear that.
So how do we think maybe about the income instability of certain kinds of liberation projects?
Not necessarily forever, but in this moment?
And I don't I don't know if that's an answer, but it's something I'm struggling with, and I thought I'd put that out there.
Thank you. Thanks for putting it so well, because I mean,
I know this because I think this question of how we struggle with these different forms
of freedoms on freedoms is something that's really at the heart of my studies right now,
especially in this moment in South Asia. And you know, it's fantastic the way all of you are looking at it from sort of different angles.
Yeah. Cubbage, do you want to go next? Hey, yes, it's been a great learning experience overall this session.
So I would like to speak something about the dissemination point beyond articles and books as part of my next project.
Don't get to each other. Like some economic corridor, I plan to organise workshops with animal activists and CEOs and policymakers
to highlight how the decrease in the number of donkeys within Pakistan could
increase their prices and may result in the kind of difficulty for many poor
people whose life relies on donkeys and how it could cause problems for them.
And also as a broader point, I want to understand the aspect of sustainability as it has been described in literature since 1980s and 1990,
something that we are to achieve the needs of the present generation without
compromising the capability of future generation to accommodate their own needs.
Whether these deeds are environmental, economic and social.
And so I try to understand this concept and maybe realising this concept to be
to the concept of relational etude that exists between humans and other games,
including animals and plants, forest non-humans, spirits, others.
And this way to try to understand that well-being is not only to be understood at the moment of life,
but also to be understood at the moment of death that how the death of some creature or some of some animals,
plants, donkeys or being treated could result in understanding or understanding of sustainability
that how this relation is being affected and how it could lead us to for applied issues.
So dissemination, I think beyond academia is important and it can bring concrete applicable changes in this society.
Thanksgiving is a really important point, and, you know, actually,
it's so incredibly difficult to do it, I think, you know, because done it really well,
you know, in her in her book, but it's a very hard sort of balance to sort of,
yeah, but that's a really important point you're making, though dissemination. Thank you so much.
Do you want to have the last word? I hope we go to another question, but I'm afraid you will never take it because we're totally out of time.
So thank you so much. I think I I really like what I said.
What in common is terrible?
And, you know, I think there's a limit for to to kind of like, what is it that we can bear and how is it we can think about it together.
And the first pieces that I wrote on animals actually came out in non-academic pieces, one in school and one in in the front line.
And I think Radhika was very kind. She was one of the first researchers who reached out and said, You know,
it's making sense and I'm liking what I'm reading, and I never thought that, you know, academics would read.
I was just really mad at what was happening as I was writing for a very different audience rated
as really kind of like the people who were always telling iDevices and tried to indigenous that,
you know, you guys think, Oh, they're very different.
And so like, I really want to thank her for generosity and there in itself, I think it's this politics of solidarity.
And how do we kind of how do we kind of invite one another?
I think we live in different continents. I live in. I work in Australia.
I do work in northeast India. And you know, North America is something really far away since I finished grad school.
So I really want to thank colleagues and, you know, we recognise that work.
I remember when I wrote Life in Dignity, it's a small monograph on sexual violence and and testimonies of rape survivors.
It's it's very well read and it is less than hundred pages.
It's read by many young people, by high schoolers, by college students.
But one of the constant complaint is that it's I think it's 50 rupees.
So there are write about where stories are cheap and and so in a sense, I think that such amazing that, you know,
they believe that it's a book that can put it inside their bag when they're waiting for a bus, when they're going to the next district.
And kind of it really, really makes my heart warm. So thanks, you know, for, you know, in a in a sense, I think talking about this admonition,
I also agree with all our friends that I think really looking at action based research is so important.
And so I think one way that I can do I see myself as a teacher and pedagogy becomes very important.
And so one of the ways that they do is that a lot of young journalism podcasters write to me and say, Oh, man, can you do this?
Can you do that? I always say, you know, call others, call others, call others, because I think I come from this.
How can I say I am where I am because of generosity? Because because someone else also opened up that space?
And I think it's so important to remember that because it's so easy to forget that as well.
And the thing about law and regulation is, I think, tied to what I think I said about, you know,
what is in common cerebral and one is actually Article 370 on air, which talks about, you know, not other people's custodianship.
The fifth schedule, the sixth schedule, which are giving rights and autonomy to the areas in the northeast.
But how do we understand corporations coming in in Nagaland?
How do we understand the custodianship of the tribal people versus the state was more reserved for animals and for animals centuries,
which I think people would be cast out? And you know, the state will take over in protecting really not compatible.
And the second thing that I have to see as my ending sentence is that as a feminist, as a tribal feminist, I cannot see my word in meat, right?
So for all the right places and for all the traditions that we may value in meat,
maybe it had a resonance with my ancestors, but not today that if five pigs is going to be non-ICU God's words.
And I think as tribal families, it's really going to ruffle feathers. But we need to see it as it is.
Maybe if my word is, you know, 10 percent of grapes, can I have agency to say that?
And I think that's fair. And. It has to go.
What a brilliant point to end, and that's the best sentence to end the ban on.
Well, over time. I know it's sort of early late. All sorts of things everywhere you are.
But thank you all so much time. You began this Rathgar coverage, dolly.
This was an amazing panel. I learnt so much more of you, and I'm so thrilled that we were able to get you on the same zoom.
I really hope in the future we can all be in the in real life.
And, you know, in 3-D, we can be in a room together and talk more on some of these themes, pick up some of them and work with them a bit more.
Thank you to everyone else who attended for the really great questions.
I'm really sorry we couldn't take all of them, but thank you so much for the questions.
We're going to be thinking about them subsequently. Great.
So I hope to see all elements of this one. Thank you all.
Good morning, etc. Thank you.
Thank you. Thank you. Kind of go by my my, my room, by everyone by.