Centre for South Asian Studies

Description

CSAS Seminar Series hosts Priyanshu Thapliyal, University of Edinburgh, to talk on 'For more-than-human space: Notes from shared multispecies lives in the Indian Himalayas'. 

Human-residents of a small Himalayan hill station in Uttarakhand, India, share their everyday lives and spaces with several wayward dogs, free-roaming bovines, thieving monkeys, pesky boars, and watchful leopards. Encounters with these nonhuman animals in and around human settlements are mostly considered undesirable and risky for humans. Humans in general attempt to distance themselves from such nonhumans through techniques of disinterest and border-making. Despite this, several nonhuman individuals and groups persist, and often force relationships of dependencies with their human neighbours and co-residents. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in and around the hill station’s central marketplace, I examine repertoires of every day knowledges that humans and nonhuman animals utilise to configure multispecies cohabitations. I explore how everyday social practices of indifference, care, and risk are culturally understood, embodied, and negotiated between various humans and nonhuman animals. In doing so, I reflect on contemporary ethics and politics of sharing life and space on our more-than-human planet that is undergoing planetary urbanization. Learnings from my human and nonhuman interlocutors in Uttarakhand, India, are eventually used to make a case for place-based modes of multispecies cohabitations that attune to nonhuman interests and desires while remaining cognizant of human social difference.