It is quite unlikely if anybody would value pigeon as a pet, since the ubiquitous bird has already attained the undisputed title of a despised pest. This widespread notion can easily change if one gets to hear about the experiments which are now engaging pigeons to collect and distribute information about air quality conditions to the general public - a despised pest being transformed into a veritable messenger. Gathering new data to imagine fresh engagement with the feathered critters may eventually help afresh strained relationship to address complexities of life. Such possibilities are worth exploring for building new sensitivities with fellow species as a means of fostering enhanced response-ability.
Based on extensive ethnographic research in the mountain villages, Radhika Govindrajan explores multiple aspects of interspecies co-existence for assigning new meanings to intimacies with domestic and wild animals. Animal Intimacies captures the recursive play between life and death of six species – goat, dog, cow, pig and bear – which has violence at the heart of inevitable relatedness with the mountain households. The stories of goat sacrifice, cow love, monkey hooliganism, and bear sex are grounded in the recognition that each needs the other to survive and even thrive. Even in the otherness of the species there is a moral and ethical underpinning that defines interspecies care and reciprocity, which extends the narrow domain of such interactions beyond the conventional man-animal conflict.
Relatedness is the key that holds stories in Animal Intimacies from the perspective of sustaining kinship. Drawing heavily from Donna Haraway’s Staying with the Trouble, Govindrajan frames interspecies relations as kin‐like, which provides distinctive ways of defining intensity of such relationships in the mountains. Even the queer narrative of bear engaging women in sex is not without a sense of kinship, where they relate to one another by their shared desire of pleasure. Bear becomes the metaphor to critique the denial of legitimacy to female sexuality, as also highlights their social subjectivity and marginality.
Animal Intimacies provides lively reportage on the everydayness of existence in the mountain villages, where interaction with domesticated cattle and encounters with wild animals constitute a better part of daily existence. Within the knotty nature of multispecies relatedness Govindrajan discovers the common experience of inequality and exploitation that has contributed to a distinct fellowship between humans and animals. Is the shared history of neglect and exclusion the cause for of goat sacrifice, cow love kinship in the mountains? Each story provides insights on how people perceive and relate to different animals, building a unique interspecies social equilibrium.
However, in recent years two notable externalities - the right-wing political project on cow protection and translocation of monkeys from the plains to the mountains – have disrupted interspecies equilibrium which the local population finds hard to negotiate. The consequent flux of stray cattle and the growing monkey hooliganism have made the potential of participation in the life of the other impermeable. As hordes of people abandon land and migrate in search of better pastures, the everyday form of relatedness has taken a serious beating. It is an incredible loss, both to humans as a body and animals as an agency.
Through stories of interspecies interconnections, based on empathy and love, Govindrajan constructs the fleeting possibility of another world. She doesn’t render animals as a symbolic foil but as subjects whose agency, intention, and capacity for emotion is critical in shaping the relationships that has the potential to dilute the impact of humans as a geological force. In this period of the Anthropocene, when places for people and other critters are being destroyed, the urgency of making kin with other species was never more compelling.
The stories in Animal Intimacies lend credence to the notion that despite both animals and humans representing the world differently; it is in creative imagination of their relatedness lies the possibility of creating refuges for the humans and the non humans. Written with style and scholarship, Animal Intricacies provides fresh insights on the variety of human‐non human interactions that has the potential to take the urgency of making kin, with other critters, to an imaginative high.
An assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Washington, Radhika Govindrajan has put together her research into an interesting and immensely readable book.
Animal Intimacies
by Radhika Govindrajan
Penguin, New Delhi
Extent: 327, Price: Rs 599.
First published in the Hindustan Times, dated July 20, 2019.
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