In what ways do potentially hostile neighboring groups find a place in each other's moral aspirations? I analyze the arrival of a “new” god, the oral‐epic deity Tejaji, in the villages of Shahbad (Rajasthan, India) and the modes of relatedness this divine migration expresses between neighboring castes and tribes. How do we conceptualize relations between neighbors? I set out the idea of “agonistic intimacy” as a way of engaging the copresence of conflict and cohabitation. Placing Tejaji in relation to longer‐term currents of Hinduism, I examine the conflicts, neighborly relations, and shared moral aspirations that animate this form of religious life. I locate spiritual–moral aspirations not necessarily in “otherworldliness” but as a political theology of the neighbor, conceiving of the neighbor as human and nonhuman (as deity, spirit, and animal), in ways that widen the definition of “the political” and of “theos.”

Building on recent anthropological discussions on sovereignty and life, I examine the political theologies of Thakur baba, a minor sovereign deity in central India. How might we understand spirits and deities as cohabitants with the living? Following Gilles Deleuze, I set out the idea of “varying thresholds of life.” How do we conceptualize relations of power between these thresholds? Engaging Thakur baba's capacity to harm and to bless, I show how this sacred ambivalence may be understood as an expression of deified sovereignty. In contrast to Agamben and Schmitt's more absolutist political theology, I set out a “bipolar” concept of sovereignty as varying relations of force and contract, a tension I find best named by the Vedic mythological pair of Mitra‐Varuna. Rather than a direct mirroring of social or historical sovereignty, I locate Thakur baba's vitality in a weave of kin and spirit relations, and in his status as a human sacrifice. In conclusion I analyze how these deified powers might wax and wane.

In this article we explore particular sacred and profane forms in which animals are killed in contemporary India. Taking up religious and secular, rural and urban, industrial and domestic instances from our fieldwork, we examine the affects, doubts, pleasures, cruelties and forms of indifference expressed by our ethnographic interlocutors while witnessing or executing the death of animals. Rather than indicting such acts and emotions, we emphasize a different question within the anthropology of ethics. Instead of asking (only) how one ought to live, we suggest that the question of how one ought to kill is an equally significant question of ethics that is simultaneously long-standing (particularly in South Asian thought) and very contemporary. In relation to discussions of human-animal relations, we show how the idea of “companionship,” variously proposed by Veena Das, Stanley Cavell, and Donna Haraway, is not necessarily a resolution to ethical quandaries, since being together might also involve various forms of mutual violence. Instead, we ask: in thinking of the quality of life, can we also speak of a quality of death? And further, what does it mean for animals (among humans) to be alive or not quite alive in contemporary India?

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Opioid abuse is an increasingly global phenomenon. Rather than assuming it to be a uniformly global or neoliberal pathology, how might we better understand comparative and locally specific dimensions of opioid addiction? Working with neighborhoods as a unit of analysis, this article analyzes the striking differences between patterns of addiction and violence in two proximate and seemingly similar urban poor neighborhoods in Delhi, India. Rather than global or national etiologies, I suggest that an attention to sharp ecological variation within epidemics challenges social scientists to offer more fine‐grained diagnostics. Using a combination of quantitative and ethnographic methods, I show how heroin addiction and collective violence might be understood as expressions of what Durkheim called “suicido–genetic currents.” I suggest the idea of varying currents as an alternative to the sociology of neighborhood “effects” in understanding significant differences in patterns of self‐harm and injury across demographically similar localities.