Indifference: On the Praxis of Interspecies Being

by Naisargi N. Davé

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781478027133
Publisher:	Duke University Press
Publication date:	06/30/2023
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	208
File size:	592 KB

About the Author

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.

Table of Contents

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  191

Editorial Reviews

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.”—Parama Roy, author of, Alimentary Tracts: Appetites, Aversions, and the Postcolonial

“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.”—Julietta Singh, author of, Unthinking Mastery: Dehumanism and Decolonial Entanglements

"Davé calls for an ethic premised on 'not acquiring, not desiring, not in thrall, not hankering, not assimilating, not repairing, not consuming, not anthropologizing, not staring,' an ethic premised on living 'side by side, rather than face to face.' ... [Her] book is a provocative intervention in the anthropology of ethics, moving beyond critiques of care, to what might be possible once we are able to live without a will for difference; to live side by side, rather than face to face." 

—Jack Jiang, Anthropology Book Forum

"Davé (Univ. of Toronto, Canada) offers an original, constructively critical, and well-referenced view on the intricacies of human-animal relationships, or lack thereof, in India. . . . Recommended. Advanced undergraduates through faculty."—J-B. Leca, Choice

"Reading Indifference feels like participating in a conversation that entertains, inspires, yet also provokes and challenges. In other words, it’s good company."—Eimear Mc Loughlin, Ethnos

"Indifference is widely researched and excitingly eclectic. . . . A work of incisive commentary, Indifference is both a theoretical bulwark against liberal and right-wing anthropocentrism in India and a community- crafting book of animalist commitment."—Dominic O’Key, Year's Work in Critical and Cultural Theory

". . . Indifference stands as a significant contribution to ordinary ethics and critical animal studies. In contemporary South Asian studies, in which animals are largely overlooked, Davé adeptly demonstrates how ethnography can provoke essential ethical inquiries. Indifference will be of interest to any anthropologist concerned with the study of animal ethics, anthropology of ethics, multispecies studies, activism, and animal politics in India. The book’s peripatetic nature, both conceptually and geographically, offers a compelling initiation into the layered complexities surrounding the theorization and practice of interspecies ethics in postcolonial India."—Susan Harris, American Ethnologist

From the Publisher

"Indifference is widely researched and excitingly eclectic. . . . A work of incisive commentary, Indifference is both a theoretical bulwark against liberal and right-wing anthropocentrism in India and a community- crafting book of animalist commitment."

Year's Work in Critical and Cultural Theory - Dominic O’Key

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.

Unthinking Mastery: Dehumanism and Decolonial Entanglements - Julietta Singh

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.

Alimentary Tracts: Appetites, Aversions, and the Postcolonial - Parama Roy

"Davé (Univ. of Toronto, Canada) offers an original, constructively critical, and well-referenced view on the intricacies of human-animal relationships, or lack thereof, in India. . . . Recommended. Advanced undergraduates through faculty."

Choice - J-B. Leca

". . . Indifference stands as a significant contribution to ordinary ethics and critical animal studies. In contemporary South Asian studies, in which animals are largely overlooked, Davé adeptly demonstrates how ethnography can provoke essential ethical inquiries. Indifference will be of interest to any anthropologist concerned with the study of animal ethics, anthropology of ethics, multispecies studies, activism, and animal politics in India. The book’s peripatetic nature, both conceptually and geographically, offers a compelling initiation into the layered complexities surrounding the theorization and practice of interspecies ethics in postcolonial India."

Susan Harrisn Ethnologist

"Reading Indifference feels like participating in a conversation that entertains, inspires, yet also provokes and challenges. In other words, it’s good company."

Ethnos - Eimear Mc Loughlin

"Davé calls for an ethic premised on 'not acquiring, not desiring, not in thrall, not hankering, not assimilating, not repairing, not consuming, not anthropologizing, not staring,' an ethic premised on living 'side by side, rather than face to face.' ... [Her] book is a provocative intervention in the anthropology of ethics, moving beyond critiques of care, to what might be possible once we are able to live without a will for difference; to live side by side, rather than face to face." 

Anthropology Book Forum - Jack Jiang