June 11, 2021: 7 – 10:00 pm

Keynote:

Anindya Sinha, Ph.D., is primarily based at the National Institute of Advanced Studies in Bangalore, India. Although his early research concerned the molecular biochemistry of yeast, social biology of wasps, population genetics of elephants and the classical genetics of human disease, his principal interests, over the last three decades, have been in the behavioural ecology, cognitive ethology, population and behavioural genetics, evolutionary biology and conservation studies of primates and other mammalian species. He is also deeply interested in natural philosophies, performance studies and in the tangible and intangible cultural heritage of India, especially concerning human-nonhuman relations and the lived experiences of other-than-humans. His current obsession is to specifically understand what living in urbanising habitats might mean to nonhuman individuals and populations, and reflect on the opportunities that ethnographic, in conjunction with ethological, explorations offer for our understanding of more-than-human lifeworlds, today and in the future.

Abstract:

Being Macaque: Nonhuman Ethnographies of Urban India

We are confronting, in recent times, an urgent need to investigate multispecies ethnographies of non/humans and delineate the potential of such unexplored approaches to understand the sentient lives of animals within increasingly human-dominated, ecological contexts of the Anthropocene. This is especially true for a country like India, where the close physical and emotional proximity of human and nonhuman species over thousands of years have not only led to intense interspecies behavioural exchanges and the generation of immersive and affective, more-than-human environments but also, in turn, to the slow, but irreversible, synurbisation of wild nonhuman populations in recent times. Affective interactions have begun to emerge in specific locations – naturalcultural contact zones – where humans and nonhumans encounter and relate to one another through specific exchanges of signals and materials. The affectivity of the individual actors engaged in these relational practices then leads to the co-creation of new forms of subjectivity within these changing spaces of interaction and the subsequent reimagination of our societies as not being exclusively human spaces but unique nature-society hybrids. How do other sentient creatures negotiate and learn to inhabit such complex, dynamic environments, comprehending them according to their own knowledges, speeds and rhythms? What bearings do our lives, and our often-unfeeling actions, have on the lifeworlds of animals and how can deeper understandings of these shared lifeworlds contribute to a recasting of our own perspectives, prejudices and practices? Drawing on my ongoing studies on the synurbisation of macaques, a group of remarkably adaptable nonhuman primate species, across the country, I hope to highlight, in this talk, what living in drastically altered socioecological environments might mean to both macaques and humans, and, in the process, reflect on the urban ecologies of our future.


Panel:Animal Studies:

S. Vignesh is a Research Scholar at the National Institute of Advanced Studies, Bangalore, Karnataka, where he is pursuing his Ph.D. in human-animal relationships.

Abstract:

Animals in the court of law: Discourse of Jallikattu and its more-than-human futures

Amidst the continuing political contestations over the welfare of animals and the preservation of cultural traditions in India, this presentation intends to speculate the ways in which the legal and the social subject-hood of bulls are getting enacted, in the context of the sport of Jallikattu. I explore two specific nodes – gaze and pain – in which the Supreme Court of India and sporting communities of Jallikattu encounter the bull. My major argument is, social and legal ways of understanding the bull is a gesture of more-than-human performatives, rather than an inherent meaning of bull which per se guides the rationale of animal welfare laws or the virtuous conduct of the sporting tradition. By specific ways of looking the bull and negotiating the practice of pain we, as human, give birth to legal and social bulls, which encompasses the mundane desires of transcending the human. However some immanent questions keeps haunting: what is the ethics of transcending the human? Is it a redemption from anthropomorphism or a neoliberal fallacy? The vortex of animal gaze and pain can be a starting point in a dialogue between the human, the animal and the post-human.


Susan Haris is a doctoral candidate in literature and philosophy at IIT Delhi. Her writing

has appeared in The Economic and Political Weekly, Frontline and The Wire. She is also a

Fulbright-Nehru Doctoral Fellowship awardee for the year 2021-22.

Abstract:

The Posthumanist Cow: Decolonizing the ideological and the radical

Posthumanism in its anti-anthropocentrism examines the question of the animal by questioning the dominant modes of liberal humanism that limit the ethical concern towards animals to a discussion of rights. However, analysing the “postcolonial animal” shows how the posthumanist approach needs to account for the diversity of locations and ideologies to avoid reproducing colonial styles of universalist, singular knowledges. If we think alongside Juanita Sandberg in her attempt to decolonize posthumanism as a methodological tool that should be enacted and aspired to rather than claimed, then thinking about the postcolonial animal in India outside of the rights discourse and ideological analyses emerges as a radical possibility. To do so, I explore these problems through two instances of a singular animal, the cow. In the first instance, I analyse how theorising about the cow focuses on the ideological constructions mediated by humans to be situated as a symbolic figure in nationalist discourses. In the second instance, I look at the recent farmer protests in India where cows marched along with farmers where this more-than-human configuration appeared to lend its human participants a simple but animal authenticity. In contrasting these two examples, I ask how a posthumanist approach can engage in conversation with the particular animal without being circumscribed by the humanism that motivates the decolonizing enterprise.

 

Sriram Natarajan is a cultural and human geographer particularly interested in engaging with the dialectics of a post-colonial Posthumanism. I have, in my past work drawn upon the various disjunctions emerging from my simultaneous enactments – as a posthuman scholar in the West, and my own positionality as a postcolonial subject – male, brown, ‘immigrant’ – as a productive tension in developing new methodologies for an attuned engagement. I currently hope to explore posthumanisms that challenge Eurocentric formations, drawing from indigenous and local knowledges to establish ‘loci of enunciation’ (Mignolo) simultaneously within and without the Western hegemonic knowledge framework.

Abstract:

Sacred Cows: The Fleshy Materiality of Religious Symbolism

The humble cow is at the centre of an intensely contested ideological conflict playing out in India today. Unlike in the West, the cow in India has not yet been relegated to ranches and mechanized meat factories, but traverses multiple geographies, displaying considerable agential capacities to entangle with the diverse socio-political, mythic and material lifeworlds that constitute India.  I propose that in order to counter totalizing narratives of the cow, either as a political and religious symbol or as a biological entity – requires us to envision the cow at the centre of multiple overlapping assemblages. The cow as a sacred religious figure, captured and advanced as a unifying symbol of a form of Hindu nationalism is just one narrative. On the other hand, widespread cow protection legislation and the slaughter ban have led to the reality of thousands of aging cows being abandoned in the Indian countryside. Here the symbolic collides with the fleshy materiality of cow bodies accumulating in the landscape with its corresponding environmental impacts. This narrative exemplifies a radically unique context for the study of human/more-than-human assemblages through engagements with the complex  biological, historical, political and socio-religious dimensions of the cow.


“Posthumanism as a way of existing”

Francesca Ferrando, Ph.D., teaches Philosophy at NYU-Liberal Studies, New York University. A leading voice in the field of Posthuman Studies and founder of the Global Posthuman Network, she has been the recipient of numerous honors and recognitions, including the Sainati prize with the Acknowledgement of the President of Italy. She has published extensively on these topics; her latest book is Philosophical Posthumanism (Bloomsbury 2019). In the history of TED talks, she was the first speaker to give a talk on the topic of the posthuman. US magazine “Origins” named her among the 100 people making change in the world.

Debashish Banerji, Ph.D. is the Haridas Chaudhuri Professor of Indian Philosophies and Cultures and the Doshi Professor of Asian Art at the California Institute of Integral Studies (CIIS), San Francisco. He is also the Program Chair for the East-West Psychology department at CIIS. His academic interests lie in postcolonial, cross-cultural and posthuman approaches to Indian philosophy, psychology and culture. He has authored and edited around ten books and art catalogs on major figures of “the Bengal Renaissance” such as the Indian poet Rabindranath Tagore, the artist Abanindranath Tagore and the spiritual thinker Sri Aurobindo; on Critical Posthumanism, Yoga Psychology andon a variety of creative and art-related projects. He has curated several exhibitions of Indian and Japanese art and has written and produced a documentary film, Darshan: The Living Art of India (2018).