Introduction

Abstract

This essay introduces six articles in the special section on animals and enchantment. The ethnographic bent of many of the essays in this special section demonstrates how the copresence of animal and human beings continues to make everyday life in South Asia a site of embodied philosophical engagement with questions regarding the bounds of self and community and our ethics toward others. We turn to these rich traditions, both textual and embodied, to confound and erase the sharp boundaries between the human, the animal, and the environment that have been, and continue to be, sites of incredible violence. The question of who gets the privilege to be considered a human is not an idle question. Animality is a constitutive part of the discursive terrain that marks out which life matters and which life can be erased.

Theme issue introduction: The species turn in Indian identity politics

“…In the main, however, the overarching tendency has been to delegitimise any wider/public concern for non-human animals, including wildlife, as ‘western, elitist, casteist, non-secular, emotional, moralistic’ (Srinivasan 2010, 33). Ambivalence around human violence to animals through sacrifice, slaughter and entertainment – and reluctance to characterise and challenge such acts as cruel or violent – predominates much South Asian animal studies work on politics, culture and socialities (cf Asif and Taneja 2015). Animals themselves thus, have rarely featured as subjects, or actors, or an identity group in themselves, in Indian political discourses.…”