Suchergebnisse

Intro -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- 1. Introduction -- 2. The Goat Who Died for Family: Sacrificial Ethics and Kinship -- 3. The Cow Herself Has Changed: Hindu Nationalism, Cow Protection, and Bovine Materiality -- 4. Outsider Monkey, Insider Monkey: On the Politics of Exclusion and Belonging -- 5. Pig Gone Wild: Colonialism, Conservation, and the Otherwild -- 6. The Bear Who Loved a Woman: The Intersection of Queer Desires -- Epilogue: Kukur aur bagh -- Notes -- References -- Index

AbstractThis article focuses on Indian women's experiences of filing complaints of gendered violence in order to address two interconnected questions: how are complaints of gendered and sexual violence authenticated as genuine or rejected as dubious before they even reach a courtroom? And how do women who bring these complaints before the law navigate a social field in which what counts as the 'truth' might conflict with their own understandings and experiences? Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in the Central Himalayan state of Uttarakhand in India, this article explores how family, community, and local state officials engaged in a kind of thick description that contextualized women's complaints within rural social relations and political economy. It shows how this politics of thickening often displaced women's individual experiences of violence and served to falsify their complaints. This everyday thickening bears a troubling similarity to the theory and methods of feminist activists and anthropologists, necessitating reflection on how to write ethically about gendered violence without replicating violence. Finally, this article turns attention to how some women decided to take on this politics of thickening through canny adoption of its methods and premises, eventually stretching the limits of the law and unintentionally expanding its scope.

Gunnel Cederlöf and Mahesh Rangarajan, eds, At Nature's Edge: The Global Present and Long-Term History, Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2018, 331 pp.

The translocation of captured monkeys from lowlands to rural hill areas in the Central Himalayan state of Uttarakhand has become an incendiary social and political issue over the last five years. This essay asks what the recent outpouring of intense emotions and arguments around the issue of monkey translocation reveals about notions of belonging in this region. It contends that the reason there is such anxious public discourse around what is called the "monkey menace" is that it has dovetailed with a regional politics of identity and cultural meaning. What is at stake is the question of who belongs and what it means to belong in terms of moral and material access to resources. This essay further suggests that monkeys — the nonhuman actors in this story — play an important part in shaping the nature of these conversations about cultural meaning and belonging. Recognizing their vibrant semiotic-material presence in this landscape, this essay argues that the outsider monkey discourse has such resonance in this region precisely because the situated bodies of monkeys themselves play an important part in determining the nature of ongoing struggles over belonging and identity.

AbstractHow might our analysis of fascism be enriched if we turn our attention to how contemporary supremacist movements self‐fashion themselves as more‐than‐human formations? How is fascist politics naturalized through claims that it is fueled by the agency and vitality of not just humans but also other‐than‐humans? How do right‐wing supremacists' assertions that theirs is an indigenous more‐than‐human politics that suffered but endured the violence of colonialism support the framing of fascism as a decolonizing project? In this article, we ground these questions in an ethnographic analysis of what we call the more‐than‐human turn in contemporary Hindu‐supremacist politics in the northwestern Himalayan region, focusing specifically on two political projects: the Hindu right‐wing's rediscovery of "ancient" Hindu rivers and communities in Ladakh and cow protection in Uttarakhand. In contrast to ontological anthropologists who suggest that cosmopolitics is plural and liberatory, we demonstrate how the inclusion of nonhuman entities in political life can serve to naturalize a fascist politics that seeks the extermination of those who are not part of the natural order of life. We urge anthropologists to make room for skepticism and critique in their analysis of cosmopolitical formations instead of prematurely celebrating "ecopolitics" as anti‐Western and anticolonial.

Klappentext: What are the possibilities for multispecies justice? How do social justice struggles intersect with the lives of animals, plants, and other creatures? Leading thinkers in anthropology, geography, philosophy, speculative fiction, poetry, and contemporary art answer these questions from diverse grounded locations. In America, Indigenous peoples and prisoners are decolonizing multispecies relations in unceded territory and carceral landscapes. Small justices are emerging in Tanzanian markets, near banana plantations in the Philippines, and in abandoned buildings of Azerbaijan as people navigate relations with feral dogs, weeds, rats, and pesticides. Conflicts over rights of nature are intensifying in Colombia's Amazon. Specters of justice are emerging in India, while children in Micronesia memorialize extinct bird species. Engaging with ideas about environmental justice, restorative justice, and other species of justice, The Promise of Multispecies Justice holds open the possibility of flourishing in multispecies worlds, present and to come.