Radhika Govindrajan
Datos Biográficos
| ID | 130517 |
|---|---|
| NOMBRE | Radhika Govindrajan |
| NOMBRES | Radhika |
| APELLIDO | Govindrajan |
| FIRMA | GOVINDRAJAN R |
| AFILIACIONES | University of Washington |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-4972-8663 |
| VERIFICADO | Sí |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 19 |
| TOTAL DE CITAS | 259 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 19 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 0 |
| PRIMER AÑO DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2015 |
| AÑO MÁS RECIENTE DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2026 |
| ÍNDICE H | 6 |
It’s Not Love, It’s Deception”
This article explores how low-level bureaucrats in the Himalayan state of Uttarakhand both construct and feel for “endangered” Hindu subjects in ways that profoundly shape their legal practice. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork from rural Uttarakhand, I suggest that focusing on the sociohistorical production of embodied feeling among bureaucrats allows us to understand the incremental, almost unremarked, remaking of law along majoritarian lines. …
Desire for Sovereignty/Nonsovereign Desires
Weaponizing Nature, Naturalizing Violence
After decades of denial and obstruction, the global Right is increasingly willing to acknowledge that climate change is a threat to lives and lifeways everywhere. Moreover, some seize on the specter of ecological collapse to advance fascistic politics. Mass shootings by White men who propose that eliminating racialized people will ease environmental pressures—including in Christchurch and El Paso—have been the most spectacular manifestations of t…
Ecofascism and the politics of de/territorialization
This article proposes that ecofascism captures popular imagination and politics by drawing from and extending localized conceptions and practices of enchanted ecologies. It examines how ecofascist politics draws on emplaced connections between humans, nonhumans, and gods to territorialize and naturalize beloved subjects while deterritorializing and denaturalizing hated others. I use territorialization to capture how the transcendent collective to…
All cases are false
This article focuses on Indian women's experiences of filing complaints of gendered violence in order to address two interconnected questions: how are complaints of gendered and sexual violence authenticated as genuine or rejected as dubious before they even reach a courtroom? And how do women who bring these complaints before the law navigate a social field in which what counts as the 'truth' might conflict with their own understandings and expe…
More-than-human supremacy
How might our analysis of fascism be enriched if we turn our attention to how contemporary supremacist movements self-fashion themselves as more-than-human formations? How is fascist politics naturalized through claims that it is fueled by the agency and vitality of not just humans but also other-than-humans? How do right-wing supremacists' assertions that theirs is an indigenous more-than-human politics that suffered but endured the violence of …
Crooked Cats
Labors of Love
This essay asks how conceptualizing love as work might provide a fresh perspective on love's politics. In offering an ethnographic account of how love for Gau-Mata, the Cow-Mother of the idealized Hindu nation, fuels a right-wing Hindu nationalist politics of cow-protection in India's central Himalayan state of Uttarakhand, I suggest that the specific arrangements of labor through which affective attachments are organized critically shape the eth…
Bovine Politics in South Asia
This introduction outlines how the essays in this special section contribute to scholarship on cow protection in India. It argues that they disrupt three powerful framing binaries—religion/economy, legality/illegality and cow-lover/cow-killer—that have tended to dominate the literature on cow protection. Making tangible the analytical limits of these categories, the essays find new critical leverage in the everyday situated relationships between …
The Cow Herself Has Changed
This chapter examines the effects of recent attempts by right-wing Hindu nationalists to forge, through legislative action as well as vigilante violence, a Hindu community and nation unified by the symbol of the mother cow. The chapter describes how villagers in the mountains viewed such attempts to impose kinship between them and cows at large as an act of coercion. However, such coercive framings of kinship did not go unchallenged; villagers re…
Pig Gone Wild
This chapter follows the story of an experimental pig who escaped from the IVRI, a livestock research institution established by the colonial state, in the 1960s and is said to have lived out the rest of her life in the adjoining forest. Many villagers believe that the runaway pig is an ancestor of the numerous wild boar who roam the forests in this region today. As such, they argue that contemporary conservation practices ignore the ways in whic…
Epilogue
This chapter uses the entanglements between dogs, leopards, and humans in the mountains as a point of entry into broader discussions on the nature of relatedness, love, ethics, and anthropocentrism.
Outsider Monkey, Insider Monkey
This chapter describes how, over the last decade, hundreds of monkeys captured in Delhi and small towns in Uttarakhand have been released into forests across this region to keep them out of contact with people. However, these monkeys are resolutely urban creatures accustomed to living with humans, and soon make their way to the nearest village in search of people and resources. The chapter recounts how the sharp rise in instances of monkey-human …
The Goat Who Died for Family
What is the nature of sacrificial connection between the one who sacrifices, the one who is sacrificed, and the one who accepts the sacrifice? Does sacrifice leave an imprint on everyday relationships that extends beyond the moment of killing? This chapter addresses these questions through an examination of increasingly controversial practices of ritual animal sacrifice, primarily of goats. The chapter argues that sacrificial relationships betwee…
The Bear Who Loved a Woman
This chapter examines a genre of narratives about black bears who are believed to abduct and have sex with women. The transgressive desires celebrated by women in their accounts of these interspecies sexual encounters call into question not just patriarchal but also anthropocentric hierarchies in which the boundary between humans and nonhumans is drawn on the terrain of desire. What makes this talk about bear-human sex so compelling is the fact t…
Animal Intimacies
Electoral ripples
Anthropologists who study elections tend to restrict their analysis to the run-up to and conduct of an election and only its immediate aftermath. This article suggests that this approach misses the complicated afterlife of elections. Through an ethnographic analysis of a village election in India, the article proposes the concept of "electoral ripples" to capture the enduring transformations in ordinary sociality that are caused by a particular e…
Monkey Business
The translocation of captured monkeys from lowlands to rural hill areas in the Central Himalayan state of Uttarakhand has become an incendiary social and political issue over the last five years. This essay asks what the recent outpouring of intense emotions and arguments around the issue of monkey translocation reveals about notions of belonging in this region. It contends that the reason there is such anxious public discourse around what is cal…
The goat that died for family
Animal sacrifice can be productively theorized as a practice of kindred intimacy between human and nonhuman animal. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in India's Central Himalayas, I trace how the ritual sacrifice of goats in the region's mountain villages acquires power and meaning through its anchoring in a realm of interspecies kinship. This kinship between humans and animals is created and sustained through everyday practices of intercorporeal…
Animal Intimacies
The goat that died for family
Animal sacrifice can be productively theorized as a practice of kindred intimacy between human and nonhuman animal. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in India's Central Himalayas, I trace how the ritual sacrifice of goats in the region's mountain villages acquires power and meaning through its anchoring in a realm of interspecies kinship. This kinship between humans and animals is created and sustained through everyday practices of intercorporeal…
Labors of Love
This essay asks how conceptualizing love as work might provide a fresh perspective on love's politics. In offering an ethnographic account of how love for Gau-Mata, the Cow-Mother of the idealized Hindu nation, fuels a right-wing Hindu nationalist politics of cow-protection in India's central Himalayan state of Uttarakhand, I suggest that the specific arrangements of labor through which affective attachments are organized critically shape the eth…
More-than-human supremacy
How might our analysis of fascism be enriched if we turn our attention to how contemporary supremacist movements self-fashion themselves as more-than-human formations? How is fascist politics naturalized through claims that it is fueled by the agency and vitality of not just humans but also other-than-humans? How do right-wing supremacists' assertions that theirs is an indigenous more-than-human politics that suffered but endured the violence of …
Monkey Business
The translocation of captured monkeys from lowlands to rural hill areas in the Central Himalayan state of Uttarakhand has become an incendiary social and political issue over the last five years. This essay asks what the recent outpouring of intense emotions and arguments around the issue of monkey translocation reveals about notions of belonging in this region. It contends that the reason there is such anxious public discourse around what is cal…
Electoral ripples
Anthropologists who study elections tend to restrict their analysis to the run-up to and conduct of an election and only its immediate aftermath. This article suggests that this approach misses the complicated afterlife of elections. Through an ethnographic analysis of a village election in India, the article proposes the concept of "electoral ripples" to capture the enduring transformations in ordinary sociality that are caused by a particular e…
Bovine Politics in South Asia
This introduction outlines how the essays in this special section contribute to scholarship on cow protection in India. It argues that they disrupt three powerful framing binaries—religion/economy, legality/illegality and cow-lover/cow-killer—that have tended to dominate the literature on cow protection. Making tangible the analytical limits of these categories, the essays find new critical leverage in the everyday situated relationships between …
All cases are false
This article focuses on Indian women's experiences of filing complaints of gendered violence in order to address two interconnected questions: how are complaints of gendered and sexual violence authenticated as genuine or rejected as dubious before they even reach a courtroom? And how do women who bring these complaints before the law navigate a social field in which what counts as the 'truth' might conflict with their own understandings and expe…
Ecofascism and the politics of de/territorialization
This article proposes that ecofascism captures popular imagination and politics by drawing from and extending localized conceptions and practices of enchanted ecologies. It examines how ecofascist politics draws on emplaced connections between humans, nonhumans, and gods to territorialize and naturalize beloved subjects while deterritorializing and denaturalizing hated others. I use territorialization to capture how the transcendent collective to…
Monkey Business
The translocation of captured monkeys from lowlands to rural hill areas in the Central Himalayan state of Uttarakhand has become an incendiary social and political issue over the last five years. This essay asks what the recent outpouring of intense emotions and arguments around the issue of monkey translocation reveals about notions of belonging in this region. It contends that the reason there is such anxious public discourse around what is cal…
The goat that died for family
Animal sacrifice can be productively theorized as a practice of kindred intimacy between human and nonhuman animal. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in India's Central Himalayas, I trace how the ritual sacrifice of goats in the region's mountain villages acquires power and meaning through its anchoring in a realm of interspecies kinship. This kinship between humans and animals is created and sustained through everyday practices of intercorporeal…
The Cow Herself Has Changed
This chapter examines the effects of recent attempts by right-wing Hindu nationalists to forge, through legislative action as well as vigilante violence, a Hindu community and nation unified by the symbol of the mother cow. The chapter describes how villagers in the mountains viewed such attempts to impose kinship between them and cows at large as an act of coercion. However, such coercive framings of kinship did not go unchallenged; villagers re…
Pig Gone Wild
This chapter follows the story of an experimental pig who escaped from the IVRI, a livestock research institution established by the colonial state, in the 1960s and is said to have lived out the rest of her life in the adjoining forest. Many villagers believe that the runaway pig is an ancestor of the numerous wild boar who roam the forests in this region today. As such, they argue that contemporary conservation practices ignore the ways in whic…
Epilogue
This chapter uses the entanglements between dogs, leopards, and humans in the mountains as a point of entry into broader discussions on the nature of relatedness, love, ethics, and anthropocentrism.
Outsider Monkey, Insider Monkey
This chapter describes how, over the last decade, hundreds of monkeys captured in Delhi and small towns in Uttarakhand have been released into forests across this region to keep them out of contact with people. However, these monkeys are resolutely urban creatures accustomed to living with humans, and soon make their way to the nearest village in search of people and resources. The chapter recounts how the sharp rise in instances of monkey-human …
The Goat Who Died for Family
What is the nature of sacrificial connection between the one who sacrifices, the one who is sacrificed, and the one who accepts the sacrifice? Does sacrifice leave an imprint on everyday relationships that extends beyond the moment of killing? This chapter addresses these questions through an examination of increasingly controversial practices of ritual animal sacrifice, primarily of goats. The chapter argues that sacrificial relationships betwee…
The Bear Who Loved a Woman
This chapter examines a genre of narratives about black bears who are believed to abduct and have sex with women. The transgressive desires celebrated by women in their accounts of these interspecies sexual encounters call into question not just patriarchal but also anthropocentric hierarchies in which the boundary between humans and nonhumans is drawn on the terrain of desire. What makes this talk about bear-human sex so compelling is the fact t…
Animal Intimacies
Electoral ripples
Anthropologists who study elections tend to restrict their analysis to the run-up to and conduct of an election and only its immediate aftermath. This article suggests that this approach misses the complicated afterlife of elections. Through an ethnographic analysis of a village election in India, the article proposes the concept of "electoral ripples" to capture the enduring transformations in ordinary sociality that are caused by a particular e…
Bovine Politics in South Asia
This introduction outlines how the essays in this special section contribute to scholarship on cow protection in India. It argues that they disrupt three powerful framing binaries—religion/economy, legality/illegality and cow-lover/cow-killer—that have tended to dominate the literature on cow protection. Making tangible the analytical limits of these categories, the essays find new critical leverage in the everyday situated relationships between …
Labors of Love
This essay asks how conceptualizing love as work might provide a fresh perspective on love's politics. In offering an ethnographic account of how love for Gau-Mata, the Cow-Mother of the idealized Hindu nation, fuels a right-wing Hindu nationalist politics of cow-protection in India's central Himalayan state of Uttarakhand, I suggest that the specific arrangements of labor through which affective attachments are organized critically shape the eth…
Crooked Cats
More-than-human supremacy
How might our analysis of fascism be enriched if we turn our attention to how contemporary supremacist movements self-fashion themselves as more-than-human formations? How is fascist politics naturalized through claims that it is fueled by the agency and vitality of not just humans but also other-than-humans? How do right-wing supremacists' assertions that theirs is an indigenous more-than-human politics that suffered but endured the violence of …
Desire for Sovereignty/Nonsovereign Desires
Weaponizing Nature, Naturalizing Violence
After decades of denial and obstruction, the global Right is increasingly willing to acknowledge that climate change is a threat to lives and lifeways everywhere. Moreover, some seize on the specter of ecological collapse to advance fascistic politics. Mass shootings by White men who propose that eliminating racialized people will ease environmental pressures—including in Christchurch and El Paso—have been the most spectacular manifestations of t…
Ecofascism and the politics of de/territorialization
This article proposes that ecofascism captures popular imagination and politics by drawing from and extending localized conceptions and practices of enchanted ecologies. It examines how ecofascist politics draws on emplaced connections between humans, nonhumans, and gods to territorialize and naturalize beloved subjects while deterritorializing and denaturalizing hated others. I use territorialization to capture how the transcendent collective to…
All cases are false
This article focuses on Indian women's experiences of filing complaints of gendered violence in order to address two interconnected questions: how are complaints of gendered and sexual violence authenticated as genuine or rejected as dubious before they even reach a courtroom? And how do women who bring these complaints before the law navigate a social field in which what counts as the 'truth' might conflict with their own understandings and expe…
It’s Not Love, It’s Deception”
This article explores how low-level bureaucrats in the Himalayan state of Uttarakhand both construct and feel for “endangered” Hindu subjects in ways that profoundly shape their legal practice. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork from rural Uttarakhand, I suggest that focusing on the sociohistorical production of embodied feeling among bureaucrats allows us to understand the incremental, almost unremarked, remaking of law along majoritarian lines. …
Sociology (11 obras) · Politics (10 obras) · Geographies of human-animal interactions (9 obras) · Anthropological Studies and Insights (8 obras) · Law (8 obras) · Political science (8 obras) · Law (7 obras) · Philosophy (7 obras) · South Asian Studies and Conflicts (7 obras) · Epistemology (6 obras)