Living waste, living on waste

A bioeconomy of urban cows in Delhi

Datos Bibliográficos

ID8963176
AutoresJ Turnbull (0000-0002-2430-9884, Department of Geography University of Cambridge Cambridge UK, autor de correspondencia), Merry Barua (0000-0002-6539-8131, Department of Geography University of Cambridge Cambridge UK)
Año2022
Volumen48
Número3
Páginas474-490
Fecha de publicación2022-09-08
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessSí
TipoARTICLE
RevistaTransactions of the Institute of British Geographers (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 0020-2754 • E-ISSN: 1475-5661
EditorialWiley (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1111/tran.12573
OpenAlexW4296105793
IdiomaEN
Citas recibidas11
Referencias citadas69

The economic implications of biopolitics – or the administration, regulation, and control of life – have received significant attention in recent geographical and cognate scholarship. An emerging theme of inquiry, largely focused on the Global North, makes contributions to specifying ‘lively capital’, defined here as bodily value in motion – predicated on accumulation from other‐than‐human life. In this paper, we argue that the biopolitical process of bringing life into the ambit of capital works in cultural, political, and economic registers and not just through singular logics of the economic, as extant accounts have implied. The rendition of life into capital through modes of biopower is not a universal process. It has diverging trajectories that, in postcolonial contexts, involve hybrids between biopolitical and vernacular practices. This argument is made through an account of bovine biopolitics in urban Delhi with specific reference to the city's ‘cattle problem’ involving ‘surplus’ animals. It unfolds in four distinct parts. First, drawing on archival work, we trace colonial histories of cattle improvement to reveal how the category of ‘surplus’ was invented. Second, we deploy more‐than‐human ethnographies of free‐ranging animals in Delhi to foreground how ‘surplus’ cattle – which we conceptualise as ‘living waste’ – are driven to feed on waste as a result of gentrification and the enclosure of erstwhile grazing grounds. Third, we turn to gaushalas (cow shelters) in Delhi to show how ‘surplus’ cattle from the city's streets are rehomed and managed. Fourth, we examine the uneven practices of care afforded to different bovines based on logics associated with right‐wing Hindutva nationalism. Our account provincialises lively capital by opening up more nuanced and situated understandings of the relations between biopolitics and capitalism, attentive to divergences from models situated in Western modernity

Archaeology · Biopower · Capital (architecture · Capitalism · Environmental ethics · Geography · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Scholarship · Sociology · Surplus value · Biomedical Ethics and Regulation · Geographies of human-animal interactions · Law · Water Governance and Infrastructure