The lactosocial at Data Saheb’s Shrine (Lahore-Pakistan): Piety, flows, commons, and the community

Abstract

In this visual intervention, we show how a traditional community ( Gujjars) associated with livestock and dairy business enables and sustains milk commons as an articulation of their devotion to Lahore's city saint Data Ganj Bakhsh. We argue that the flows of milk at the shrine (monthly/annually) operate not only as a special purpose vehicle of piety for centuries but also as a device for Gujjar identity formation. The commoning practices reveal that identity, spirituality, and rituals are key cultural drivers of the urban commons and associated metabolic circulations, therefore, establishing themselves as important markers and analytical categories within the broader urban-nature-society debates. We seek to foreground constituent elements of the local commoning and the socio-nature at the shrine—milk, community, identity, and rituals of piety. We call their interplay the “ lactosocial” and show that it goes beyond the shrine, and its monthly/annual assemblies, and manifests itself throughout the year in other places, representations, and portrayals vis-à-vis Gujjar community. Through this work, we suggest that the lactosocial may be taken as a broader theoretical trope. It essentially moves our focus towards more-than-humans and the forms of power and social differentiation that cut across, inter alia, animal lifeworlds, traditional ecological knowledge, and neoliberal food policy domain.