Ethnographies of Sentience

More‐than‐human supremacy: Himalayan lessons on cosmopolitics

“…We build on and extend this important scholarship by mapping how contemporary right-wing cosmopolitics in India naturalizes its violence through claims that both human and nonhuman Hindus are committed to the project of restoring the organic Hindu essence of the more-than-human civilizational entity that is India. Much like "xenophobic sentient mountains" in Romania that "hate and attack" those who threaten "the Romanian people and their land" (Cotofana, 2022), "Hindu" rivers, mountains, forests, cows, and other sentient divine-natural beings are recognized by Hindu supremacists (and many ordinary Hindus) as playing an active role in reasserting the natural Hinduness of what is imagined as India's territory and, thereby, its status as the indigenous homeland for human Hindus.…”