Animal sacrifice can be productively theorized as a practice of kindred intimacy between human and nonhuman animal. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in India's Central Himalayas, I trace how the ritual sacrifice of goats in the region's mountain villages acquires power and meaning through its anchoring in a realm of interspecies kinship. This kinship between humans and animals is created and sustained through everyday practices of intercorporeal engagement and care. I contend, in fact, that animal sacrifice is itself constitutive of interspecies kin relations. The spectacular act of violence at the heart of sacrifice—the beheading of the sacrificial animal—is crucial to the constitution of kin solidarity between human sacrificer and animal victim. From this perspective, animal sacrifice creates a world rich with the possibility of mutual response and recognition between different beings entangled in intimate and complex ways. [sacrifice, human–animal, interspecies kinship, South Asia, relations of care, religion, Himalayas]

No abstract

No abstract

This essay asks how conceptualizing love as work might provide a fresh perspective on love’s politics. In offering an ethnographic account of how love for Gau-Mata, the Cow-Mother of the idealized Hindu nation, fuels a right-wing Hindu nationalist politics of cow-protection in India’s central Himalayan state of Uttarakhand, I suggest that the specific arrangements of labor through which affective attachments are organized critically shape the ethics and politics of love. More specifically, I depict how different kinds of situated labor produced varied kinds of love in the conjoined social worlds of right-wing gau-rakshaks (cow-protectionists) and rural women dairy farmers in Uttarakhand. For these social actors, genuine love for the cow manifested in a willingness to labor for her. Yet their understandings of what this loving labor entailed differed starkly. This article examines three distinct kinds of work—protection, service, and care-labor—that these actors variously undertook out of love for the cow. It traces how these different labors produced a varied set of relationships, affiliations, and obligations that crucially shaped the ethics and politics of love. Ultimately, I show, attending to the varied labors of love in situated social worlds reveals how love can condition a variety of often conflicting political and ethical possibilities, working simultaneously as a force of transcendence, fascist violence, and repair.

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.