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Upcoming events

May 27, 2024 (online), 5-7pm in EDT (Eastern Daylight Time)/ 10pm-12midnight (UK time)

Pigeons, Tigers, and Vampire Bats: On Ethnonationalism, Hospitality, and Kinship in South Asia

This panel explores South Asian fables about human relationships with more-than-human entities. Drawing on songs, films, and stories about bats, pigeons, tigers, and elephants, the panel explores how “folktales”, old and new, animate questions of ethnonationalism, militarization, hospitality, and kinship.

Chair: Radhika Govindrajan

Speakers:

Muhammad Kavesh (Australian National University), Ethics of Welcoming Pigeons in Pakistan

Dolly Kikon (University of California, Santa Cruz), Tiger, Spirit, Man: Creation Journey and Relationship in the Naga World

Mythri Jegathesan (Santa Clara University), Vampire bats, white blood, and thirsty elephants: fabulating ethnonationalism on Sri Lanka’s plantations

To register, please click here

Enquiries: Kaori Nagai [E-mail: K.Nagai@kent.ac.uk ]

Speakers/ Chair Bio

Muhammad Kavesh is the Director of the South Asia Research Institute (SARI) and an ARC DECRA fellow in anthropology at the Australian National University. His research interests include ethics, multispecies anthropology, decolonization, anthropology of Islam, multisensory analysis, and the geopolitics of present-day South Asia. Kavesh is the author of Animal Enthusiasms: Life Beyond Cage and Leash in Rural Pakistan (2021) and the lead editor of Nurturing Alternative Futures: Living with Diversity in a More-than-Human World (2024). He has also co-edited two special journal issues: Anthropology of Mutualism (2023, Anthropology Today) and Sense Making in a More-than-Human World (2021, The Australian Journal of Anthropology). His research has been featured in American Anthropologist, American Ethnologist, Journal of Asian Studies, and South Asia, among others. Currently, he is finalizing a manuscript on the ethics of hospitality to pigeons in South Asia.

Dolly Kikon is a Professor in the Department of Anthropology University of California, Santa Cruz. Her publications include Life and Dignity: Women’s Testimonies of Sexual Violence in Dimapur (Nagaland) (2015), Living with Oil and Coal: Resource Politics and Militarization in Northeast India (2019), Leaving the Land: Indigenous Migration and Affective Labour in India (2019, with Bengt. G. Karlsson), Ceasefire City: Militarism, Capitalism, Urbanism in Dimapur (2021, with Duncan McDuie-Ra), Seeds and Sovereignty: Eastern Himalayan Experiences (2023, with D. Deka, J. Rodrigues, B.G. Karlsson, S. Barbora and M. Tula), and most recently Food Journeys: Stories from the Heart (2023, with Joel Rodrigues). She is a member of Recover, Restore and Decolonise (RRaD), a community research initiative founded by the Forum for Naga Reconciliation (FNR). https://rradnagaland.org/ She is a senior researcher with the North Eastern Institute of Language and Culture, (NEILAC) in Guwahati, and serves as a member of the Council of Advisors for The India Forum (TIF).

Mythri Jegathesan is associate professor in the Department of Anthropology at Santa Clara University. She earned her PhD from Columbia University in 2013 and uses ethnographic, feminist, and humanistic methods to examine plantation life and the politics of labor, capital and development in Sri Lanka. Her book Tea and Solidarity: Tamil Women and Work in Postwar Sri Lanka (2019) is an ethnography of plantation life and work in the context of ethnonationalist violence and civil war in Sri Lanka. She is currently researching land resettlement, labor and livelihood in Sri Lanka’s Northern Province and is President of the American Institute for Sri Lankan Studies (AISLS) and co-editor of Anthropology of Work Review.

Radhika Govindrajan is an Associate Professor of Anthropology and International Studies at the University of Washington, Seattle. She is the Director of the South Asia Center. Her book, Animal Intimacies: Interspecies Relatedness in India’s Central Himalayas, was published by the University of Chicago Press in 2018 and Penguin India in 2019. She has published in American Ethnologist, Cultural Anthropology, American Anthropologist, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, and HAU: The Journal of Ethnographic Theory. She is currently working on a book that explores how debates about what makes a village a village take shape in relation to the political economic of sex.