Indifference: On the praxis of interspecies being By Naisargi Davé. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2023. 208 pp.

Abstract

At the heart of Naisargi Davé’s latest book, Indifference: On the Praxis of Interspecies Being, lies a simple question—can an ethics of indifference offer a kind of relationality different from what is commonly invoked in multispecies anthropology today? Davé argues early in the introduction that curiosity and entanglement, as evidenced in the work of Donna Haraway, have always been dear to anthropology in understanding the other—the animal other, the cultural other, the human other—and that these attitudinal stances variously involve transparency, conquest, and ingestion. The book prescribes an immanent ethics that at crucial points turns to the idioms of Deleuze (“difference,” “plane of immanence”), though this notion is reminiscent of Derrida (1991) in “Eating Well,” where he famously resists championing animal activism or prescribing veganism by emphasizing the symbolic violence that accompanies even the most well-meaning position with regard to animals.

Indifference is suspicious of neat ethical propositions, but it is not marked by that Derridean kind of ambivalence. This is a moving meditation on animal ethics in contemporary India, where “indifference” is theorized as an interspecies relational ethic of mutual regard or as a form of mutually existing-in-difference rather than seeking to grasp and master the other. The text is loosely structured and intermittently adopts a memoiristic tone, extending a narrative initiated in her debut work Queer Activism in India: A Story in the Anthropology of Ethics. In Indifference, Davé continues to trace her family's lineage, from her position as the eldest daughter of Gujarati Brahmins in America to her queer becoming, exploring its intersections with an immanent ethics of action that can transcend context and framework. There is a rippling tension in Davé’s focus on animal activism in India. Even as the reader understands Davé’s theoretical point about surrendering to the call of the animal without invasive curiosity, readers are presented with the ethos of passionate immersion evinced by animal activists, or “animalists,” as she refers to them. Therefore, “indifference” emerges as a concept so capacious that it indicates a radical praxis of interspecies being, as evidenced in her invocation of Édouard Glissant's right to opacity. “Indifference,” however, cannot entirely preclude an anthropocentric ethics of care, as upheld by the true protagonists of Indifference—the animal activists (not animals).