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Indifference

Indifference

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In Indifference, Naisargi N. Davé examines the complex worlds of animalists and animalism in India. Through ethnographic fieldwork with animal healers, animal activists, farmers, laborers, transporters, and animals themselves, and moving across animal shelters and dairy farms to city streets and abattoirs, Davé shows how human-animal relations often manifest through care and violence. More surprisingly, what Davé also finds animating interspecies relationality in India is an ethic of indifference—that is, an orientation of mutual regard rather than curiosity, love, desire, or animus. For Davé, indifference is a respect for others in their otherness that allows human and nonhuman animals to flourish in immanent encounters. Indifference, then, becomes the basis for an interspecies ethics and a method of care and practice in everyday life. With indifference, Davé describes both a mode of relationality in the world and a scholarly approach: seeking what is possible when we approach ethico-political concepts with indifference rather than commitment or antagonism. Moments of indifference, Davé contends, offer the promise of otherwise worlds. Naisargi N. Davé examines the complex worlds of animalists and animalism in India, arguing for an interspecies relationality premised on indifference: that is, an orientation of mutual regard rather than curiosity, love, desire, or animus. Naisargi N. Davé is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Toronto and author of Queer Activism in India: A Story in the Anthropology of Ethics, also published by Duke University Press. Introduction: What Is Indifference?  1
1. Witness: How Do We Come to Occupy a Different Skin?  13
2. Biography: Why Is Moral Attention to the Animal so Repulsive?  31
3. Contradiction: How Is the Otherwise Exhausted?  55
4. Sound: Can the Subaltern Be Silent?  73
5. Interlude: Take a Walk with Me  91
6. Touch: Can Indifference Be the Basis for an Ethical Engagement with the World?  108
7. Sex: What Does Cow Protection Protect (with Alok Gupta)  125
8. Appetite: Does That Which Is Inevitable Cease to Matter?  146
Acknowledgments  167
Bibliography  171
Index

“Naisargi N. Davé is one of the most sophisticated, imaginative, and interdisciplinarily literate scholars of animality, activism on behalf of animals, animal slaughter, queerness, and postcolonial South Asia that I know. There is practically no one else to whom she can be compared for the counterintuitive turns of her thought and the spellbinding character of her ethnography. Not surprisingly, then, Indifference is a work of considerable consequence.”
“Naisargi N. Davé offers a deeply moving exploration of the vital political work of ‘indifference’ as a mobilizing dehumanist force in this world. Davé brings us through animal activism and sacrifice with candor and extraordinary care. A riveting ethnography of immense beauty and force; I would follow her anywhere.”

Additional information

Weight 1 oz
Dimensions 1 × 6 × 9 in