Tiger atmospheres and co-belonging in mangrove worlds

Abstract

This article adopts a place-based approach to explore tiger atmospheres in the Sundarbans, a transboundary environmental commons and major climatic hotspot in the Ganges-Brahmaputra-Meghna delta of India and Bangladesh. We argue that affective intensities of greed ( lobh), fear ( bhaya), respect ( srodhya), trust ( biswas) and empathy ( karuna) sensed by the tiger subject contribute to novel theoretical as well as empirical insights into co-belonging and intersectional multispecies justice. We explore these animal atmospheres through multi-sited ethnographic research that include embodied observations, photographs, 31 in-depth interviews and focus groups with impoverished as well as racialised low-caste Hindus (Dalits/Scheduled Castes), Adivasis (Indigenous peoples) and Muslim forest-dwellers in India and Bangladesh. This attention to more-than-human geographies, animal atmospheres and subaltern stories situated in the Bengal delta unsettles macro-narratives of forest conservation and wildlife management that reduce animals to passive subjects or alternatively make them killable.

Theme issue introduction: The species turn in Indian identity politics

“…Lobo, Alam and Bandhopadhyay's work (2022) in the Sunderbans on how people and Royal Bengal tigers cohabit highlights a different aspect of how human and nonhuman identities intersect with justice implications. Their aim is to foreground the voices and positions of subaltern people and of subaltern academics.…”

Decolonizing ocean spaces: Saltwater co-belonging and responsibilities

“…Kin-centric ecologies include affective relationships as well as ethical and political obligations of “response-ability” with more-than-human worlds, including ocean homes, living species, fossil kin, and ancestral spirits of Sea Country (Lobo et al 2022; Fackler and Schultermandl 2022; Haraway 2016; Todd 2022, 17). These reciprocal relationships and obligations of responsibility are often strengthened through the diversity of Indigenous and Southern laws, intergenerational storytelling, subaltern animal stories, poetry, religious and cultural ceremonies, as well as practices such as swimming, diving, surfing, rowing, and even contemporary Indigenous whaling that provide food security (Lobo et al 2022; Ingersoll 2016; McGarry, Walne and Mthombeni 2021; Sakakibara 2020; Waiti and Wheaton 2022).…”

“…Second, the desire to produce waves of more diverse citational politics that privilege Indigenous, Black, Brown, and Southern-led ontologies of the ocean. Third, the desire to produce reverberating echoes of polyphonic oceanic knowledge that is in danger of disappearing, if ocean stewardship by racialized, marginalized, displaced, and dispossessed ethnic/ethnoreligious minorities and Indigenous peoples are denied (Lobo 2019; Lobo et al 2022; Locke, Trudgett and Page 2021; Rarai et al 2022).…”

“…Such talking has produced a language of crises, which exacerbates racial injustice, climate colonialism, capitalist extractivism, and multispecies extinction with material consequences (Sultana 2022; Whyte 2021b). These consequences unfold when Indigenous rights to govern and manage seas, seafloors, and fisheries are denied (Kearney 2018, Kearney et al 2022; Mehta, Parthsarathy and Bose 2022; Reid 2015; Richmond and Kotowicz 2015), or the state places hurdles, making it difficult for Indigenous Peoples and ethnic/ethnoreligious minorities to participate in processes of marine spatial planning (Lobo et al 2022; Parsons et al 2021; Diggon et al 2019). Or, when “sacred energies” (Marawili 1999, 54), laws, creation stories, songlines of ancestral beings, and interspecies kinship that weave responsibility through Sea, Land, and Sky, are broken by climate change, extractive capitalism (oil, gas, fish), and the pollution of oceans by nuclear waste, plastics, and toxins (Bordner, Ferguson and Ortolan 2020; Bradley 2010; Bundle, Rushton and Wade 2022; Fuller et al 2022; Liboiron et al 2021).…”

Entangled, unraveled, and reconfigured: Human–animal relations among ethnic minority farmers and water buffalo in the northern uplands of Vietnam

“…Beyond these engagements with local residents, a focus on entanglements in a more-than-human context requires us to pay attention to the agency of water buffalo as well. 4 Attempts to do this in previous multispecies studies have included: a) through ethology, focusing on animal behavior in natural or experimental contexts (e.g., Despret, 2004); b) via semiotics, exploring how humans and animals are communicating/understanding each other through semiotic practices (e.g., Kohn, 2007); and c) focusing on affective relationships (i.e., positive and negative affects) (e.g., Govindrajan et al, 2022; Lobo et al, 2022). To bring elements of these approaches together, we have found it useful to draw on a form of “diffractive methodology.” Giraud (2019: 13) explains this as “two stones being dropped into water.…”