Department of Humanities and Social Sciences
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Item Indifference: On the praxis of interspecies being By Naisargi Davé. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2023. 208 pp.(Wiley, 2024-09) Haris, SusanAt 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).Item Can bulls be cyborgs? unmaking the logics of dispensability(Bloomsbury Publishing, 2024) Haris, SusanI had come to study wild boars in Wayanad in Kerala in 2023 because I had heard that wild boar-human conflict is increasing. Since Wayanad is a fertile terrain, agriculture is the mainstay of the people; however, increasing agricultural activity has caused habitat degradation, forcing animals to venture into human habitations in search of food. The same could not be said about the cows that belonged to the hostel I stayed in. There were nine cows in total—seven cows and two calves who demanded my equal attention every day. Both calves were, unfortunately, male, and it was disconcerting to know that their fate was predetermined, even though they were young, affectionate and curious about the world. Since they were going to be slaughtered, they did not even receive the dignity of names. The absence of names indicated their foreclosed fate. This essay explores the status of bulls in contemporary India, questioning whether they can be regarded as posthumanist creatures or cyborgs. It critically examines the potential of a posthumanist sensibility in framing them as taurine subjects. In doing so, it challenges the traditional binary narrative that confines their existence to either artificial insemination or slaughter.Item Wayanad’s Makara Dragon(Taylor & Francis, 2024-05) Haris, SusanI wrote this poem after visiting a Jain temple in Sultan Bathery during my fieldwork on human- wild boar conflict in Wayanad, Kerala. Sultan Bathery was the ammunition centre (Sultan: king; battery: ammunition store) for Tipu Sultan, of Kingdom of Mysore when he invaded Wayanad in the 18th century. Jain philosophy is renowned for its nonviolent approach to living with animals, and Wayanad, a forested district in Kerala, has seen human-wildlife conflict escalate over the last few years. My poem explores this juxtaposition. The Jain temple had several animal figures, the most important being the makara, who is the protagonist of the poem. The makara is a mythical dragon-like creature seen in Jain temples, believed to embody a good soldier because they possess the best attributes of several animals. As human-wildlife conflict continues to rise, social and print media report daily about the destruction of human property and provide detailed accounts of human loss and suffering. What do animals think of coexistence? This poem poeticises animal subjectivity, even as they are trapped in hierarchies of power and stone in historyItem The disasterification of human–wildlife conflict: policy implications and ethical considerations(Taylor & Francis, 2025-06) Haris, SusanHuman–wildlife conflict (HWC) is increasingly recognized as a critical socio-political issue in Kerala, South India. In response to the rise in HWC, the Kerala government classified it as a state-specific disaster, a move that significantly impacts wildlife conservation efforts and policy development. “Disasterification” or designating situations as disasters to mobilize emergency measures and administrative responses alter management and response strategies, often leading to negative outcomes for either wildlife or people. There are administrative and financial benefits of declaring human–wildlife conflict (HWC) as a disaster. However, there are also important ethical considerations, including anthropocentrism and the influence of disasterification on public perception and policy responses toward wildlife conservation and coexistence. Disasterification often portrays any human–wildlife interaction as dangerous, leading to extreme measures against wildlife deemed aberrant.Item How to perform a reality check: multispecies ethnography and becoming human(American Anthropological Association, 2022) Haris, SusanItem COVID-19, microbiopolitics and species precarity in the anthropocene(Taylor & Francis, 2022-10) Haris, SusanThe turn towards deep entanglement precipitated by the Anthropocene has seen a rise in probiotic approaches towards microorganisms that highlight human-microbe relationalities. However, COVID-19 complicates this relationality not least considering its staggering effects on human society which have reinforced notions of solidarity and common crisis, as evidenced in the various biopolitical measures or the ‘outbreak narrative’. In this regard, Heather Paxson’s formulation of microbiopolitics as the construction and evaluation of categories of microorganisms serves as a useful model to ask what kind of microbiopolitics the coronavirus pandemic makes possible and what these strategies imply for collaborative human-microbe relations or multispecies flourishing. The microbiopolitics that marks the pandemic as new mutations and strains of viruses are being identified and a future of zoonotic diseases is anticipated shows this microbial relationality as already present. However, to make sense of entanglement in the pandemic is to recognize microbiopolitics as socio-politically contingent and undercut by anthropocentric anxieties for our own well-being but also as a species precarity. This species precarity for humans shows that the pandemic is differentially experienced as a self while negotiating its relations with non-human others. It is what demands of us that we develop strategies for living along with the virus or other microbes for the foreseeable future.Item Subalterns in the house: sites for a postcolonial multispecies ethnography(University of Alcalá, 2022) Haris, SusanMultispecies ethnography attempts to bring to the forefront those animal lives previously overlooked by charting our shared social worlds and showing how humans and nonhumans are mutually affected by social, cultural and political processes. The resistance in postcolonial critique to focus on nonhuman animal subjects stems from making the colonised and the animal comparable and the fear that such an association may dehumanise the human subject. This paper suggests that multispecies ethnography influenced by Latour, Haraway, Tsing and others is a useful tool for analysing postcolonial contexts because of its emphasis on relation, mutuality and alliances. However, I suggest that this inheritance is rebuilt as a postcolonial multispecies ethnography because of its attention to five aspects that is common to both fields: subaltern, local, collective, representation and decolonisation. By a careful reading of these key concepts with examples from contemporary literature, I show how postcolonial multispecies ethnographies engage with hybrid identities that are culturally produced and historically situated and how they register the nonhuman animals as narrativisable subjects who are nevertheless “irretrievably heterogeneous” (284). In this ethnographic emergence, postcolonial multispecies ethnography re-dignifies the nonhuman animal subject which opens up the radical possibility of realizing their embodied perspectives.Item Compassion, hunger and animal suffering: scenes from Kerala, South India(Taylor & Francis, 2022-03) Haris, SusanAnimal narratives have not been a major part of the coronavirus pandemic other than to frame animals as “epidemic villains” whose relations with humans are either zoonotic or pathological. In this context, this article considers stories of compassion from Kerala, where activists and ordinary people started feeding stray dogs and other street animals during the state instituted lockdowns. State sanction and media coverage of feeding these hungry animals allowed them to be instated as part of a multispecies community in the pandemic, allowing them for the first time, legitimized access to food and water. Compassion was prescribed and validated on the basis of perceiving suffering synergistically or as mutually experienced during the pandemic. However, a linear history of compassion cannot be constructed as Kerala has an antagonistic relationship with street dogs framing them as violent free-ranging dogs that carry diseases and attack people. This article draws on insights gleaned from multispecies ethnography to explore the hidden everyday lives of the animals during the pandemic. It raises questions about how people come to occupy relations of care in societies where animal suffering is not acknowledged and explores the possibilities opened by the way compassion was constructed as a practical and moral value during the pandemic.Item Capital inflow and financial status of the Indian economy(Taylor & Francis, 2024) Hazarika, NatashaForeign capital tends to be erratic in nature as it flows more during favourable times, in contrast to the times of crises, when they tend to flow less. This situation can be explained well with the example of the inflow of Official Development Assistance (ODA) and Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) in recent years in India. As compared to the ODA and FDI, capital inflows in terms of remittances were relatively stable, for example, remittance inflows in developing countries hiked during 1998–2001 but during the same period, a decline in FDI was noticed during the East Asian crisis. Along with FDI and ODA, remittances also play a very important role in the development of finance but their mechanism is quite different from the other two. Against this background, this chapter tries to study the effects of remittances on the financial status of the Indian economy using appropriate time series econometric techniques involving the ARDL model. The study obtains a significant long-run relationship between remittance and financial development. The long-run estimation of the ARDL model suggests that the inflows of remittances have a positive and significant impact on the financial development of the countryItem What do epiphytic lichens of Guwahati city indicate?(Indian academy of sciences (IAS), 2011-10) Hazarika, NatashaLichens are composite organisms consisting of a symbiotic association of a fungus with a photosynthetic partner, either a green alga or a Cyanobacteria, grow in diverse climatic conditions and on equally diverse substrata and are widely distributed in almost all the phytogeographical regions of the world. An ‘annotated checklist’ published by the Botanical Survey of India (BSI) documents 2303 species belonging to 305 genera and 74 families in India1. Lichens are a major section of species that are sensitive to changes in atmospheric nutrient conditions2 and have been used as bioindicators of pollution over a long period of time, especially sulphur dioxide (SO2)3. Fruticose lichens are known to be the most sensitive to air pollution, followed by foliose and crustose forms. The vanishing of sensitive lichen species due to changes in microclimatic conditions and air pollution has been reported from Indian cities of Bangalore4 and Kolkata5. Due to the fast rate of disappearance of flora for a range of reasons like habitat loss, air pollution, changes in the microclimatic conditions and uncontrolled harvest, lichen biologists have initiated a discourse to creating ‘protected areas’ for conservation of lichens6. Systematic studies on lichens in India, however, are still sporadic. More so, there are instances of limited studies in the northeastern region of India, which is also a biological hotspot.