Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2018. xiii, 220 pp. (B&W photos.) US$27.50, paper. ISBN 978-0-226-55998-8.
Animal Intimacies is an evocative monograph on the entanglements between animals and rural residents of the Central Himalayas. Govindrajan’s scholarship brings attention to the more-than-human relationships that exist in everyday life in Kumaon, and contributes to feminist scholarship on kinship and relatedness. Consistent with the orientation of multispecies ethnography, this work treats animals as subjects with agency and emotion, while adding a critical dimension to its engagement with particular, individual animals, instead of only engaging with them as part of a collective or abstract category of animal. In doing so, Govindrajan engages with animal subjects just as she does with human subjects, while always keeping a careful eye on the ontological differences and power differentials between the two kinds of subjects.
On the sacrificial goat in chapter 2, for instance, Govindrajan highlights how paharis wrestle with the liberal, “modern,” and often distant view on animal sacrifice as barbaric in its religiosity, in which goats are offered to the devi in lieu of first-born sons. Their relationship with goats, however, entails everyday intercorporeal practices of care in their raising, which leads to genuine feelings of loss and grief upon their sacrifice, emphasizing labour, love, and death as components of kinship.
In chapter 3, Govindrajan continues to draw on the fractures between distant policy, this time, from the Hindu nationalists’ violent, casteist insistence on cow protection, and the actual embodied and emotional relationship between people and the animals they care for in a multispecies rural economy that hinges on “collaborative survival” (drawing from Anna Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015). The difference in the relatedness people share with a Jersey cow as opposed to a pahari cow, is further seen in the distinction between insider and city monkeys, made in chapter 4. The arrival of bahar ke bandar (outsider monkeys) create a space for paharis to articulate anxieties around state neglect, land commodification in the mountains, the decline of agriculture, and uneven geographies of development. But for paharis, these animals are not just metaphors (89), but actors who condition the material lives of humans in specific ways. City monkeys are aggressive and dangerous enough to destroy native flora and fauna, cause significant losses of potential harvests to farmers, and discourage cultivation. That courts and activists consider the translocation of monkeys to other sites a humane solution of controlling their population reveals inattention not only to the material effects on paharis, but also the tendency of rhesus monkeys to settle near humans, and the breakage of the monkeys’ own social bonds in this method of conservation.
In addition to emphasizing this role of institutions in mediating conservation, the narrative about and around the runaway pig in chapter 5 illuminates the colonial logic inherent in upholding distinctions between the wild and the domestic, the natural and the human, and the animal and the human, as if there is a nature out there that is ever unmediated by human activity. The most fascinating demonstration of the co-constitution of human and animal subjectivities comes from the pahari women’s tellings of and speculation around sexual relationships with bears in chapter 6. In these narratives, women are able to articulate sexual desire, resistance to patriarchy in their everyday lives, and the gendered dimensions of relating to animals through labour.
One of Govindrajan’s key ethnographic interventions is in immersing herself in the lives of animals, spending time, observing, and tracing their individual lives much as an ethnographer would with human subjects. Indeed, the most poignant moment in the book involves Govindrajan seeing “something” in the gaze of a female juvenile loner monkey, and recognizing in it, a reciprocal connection the monkey shared with a human—one that she is bold enough to call “love” (118). The boldness, however, never once feels heavy-handed, and instead remains suggestive, even vulnerable in its emotive capacity. Govindrajan is fuelled by “the latent possibility” of other worlds (123) and imagination in her open-ended theorizing that succeeds in drawing in the reader while never attempting to tie happy or neat bows. That may be the book’s biggest accomplishment.
Govindrajan’s success with evoking place emerges partly from her willingness to make herself visible in the narrative. In her note on method, she acknowledges her own relatedness to her (human) informants, who let her into their world, “as a friend, as a daughter, as a sister, and as a sister-in-law” (28). One wishes that she had taken the chance to dwell on the uneasiness of interrelatedness, insider-outsider dynamics, and the differences and hierarchies inherent in connection, in the relationship between the ethnographer and the research subject, much as she does between humans and animals. If relatedness is always a “partial connection between beings who come to their relationship as unpredictable, unknowable, and unequal entities” (25), more-than-human ethnographies like Govindrajan’s only draw emphatic attention to the always-partial, incomplete translation of how subjects think, feel, and act. Therefore, aren’t all interlocutors, human and nonhuman alike, “intimate strangers,” despite the ontological differences between the two? Are there new radical possibilities that come to light through the study of nonhumans, in acknowledging the unknowability of all research subjects, in how we do ethnography itself? How might we reconcile intimacy with unknowability and power relations in knowledge production? Animal Intimacies raises these questions among many more.
Priti Narayan
The University of British Columbia, Vancouver