Naisargi N Dave
Biographic Data
| ID | 588941 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Naisargi N Dave |
| GIVEN NAMES | Naisargi N |
| FAMILY NAME | Dave |
| SIGNATURE | DAVE N N |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Toronto |
| ORCID | 0009-0005-7915-0347 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 18 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 262 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 18 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2008 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 6 |
Semiotics of Rape: Sexual Subjectivity and Violation in Rural India
Clay tips of thought
A decolonial anthropology: You can dismantle the master's house with the master's tools
The 2022 meeting of the Group for Debates in Anthropological Theory (GDAT) Social Anthropology, University of Manchester. The motion is, of course, a riff on Audre Lorde's well-known 1984 claim that 'the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house. They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change.' Lorde is asking about the tools of a racist and constitutionally excl…
The permissible and the perverse: Indian geographies of interspecies sex
We argue in this paper that what separates permissible from perverse acts of killing, or sex with, an animal is a matter of material and symbolic space. We focus on interspecies sex -which is often, but not always, bound up with killing -to argue that what separates permissible from perverse acts of interspecies sex in India, or husbandry from bestiality, is where it occurs geographically in proximity to an upper-caste, anthropatriarchal imaginar…
A writing life
A Writing Life" (Dillard 1989) is part of a special section of "hundreds" in honor of Kathleen Stewart. This "hundred" concerns the work of cultivating inspiration, openness, and observation
Part Seven. Ethical Life: Encounters with History, Religion, and the Political
Love and Other Injustices
In this article, Naisargi N. Dave examines the relationship between animals and love in India, animals and love in multispecies anthropology, and between ethics and love more generally. She argues that ahimsa (nonviolence) and love share the characteristic of abnegating moral responsibility beyond the self and its attachments. Thus, Dave argues, against some strains of contemporary political thought, love is not the antithesis to ethical indiffer…
Afterword: For a Synaesthetics of Seeing
This Afterword explores the volume's ambivalent relationship to witnessing, and argues for a synaesthetics of seeing. Drawing on literature fictive and otherwise, with an emphasis on animality (fictive and otherwise), it reflects on how sound and touch enable us to see
Witness: Humans, Animals, and the Politics of Becoming
Something, Everything, Nothing; Or, Cows, Dogs, and Maggots
This article tries to locate the missing something that enables radical social projects to persevere, in this case, the social project of animal activism in India. The author argues that we will find the missing something buried in and by the tyranny of consistency (or contradiction thinking), which demands that any ethics in an oppositional or oblique relationship to the way things are account for its apparent inconsistencies or contradictions. …
On the Killing and Killability of Animals
In this article we explore particular sacred and profane forms in which animals are killed in contemporary India. Taking up religious and secular, rural and urban, industrial and domestic instances from our fieldwork, we examine the affects, doubts, pleasures, cruelties and forms of indifference expressed by our ethnographic interlocutors while witnessing or executing the death of animals. Rather than indicting such acts and emotions, we emphasiz…
Witness: Humans, Animals, and the Politics of Becoming
A prominent animal rights activist in New Delhi, explaining her relentlessness on behalf of animals, said to me the following: "I only wish there were a slaughterhouse next door. To witness that violence, to hear those screams . . . I would never be able to rest." She was not alone among animal welfare activists in India in linking the witnessing of violence against an animal to the creation of a profound bond that demanded from her a life of res…
Queer Activism in India: A Story in the Anthropology of Ethics
introduction''Where do we go now?''Gautam wondered aloud.His expression was of optimism and loss, touching on both but settling on neither.We were all sitting, the dozens of us, on the floor of a gallery and performance space on the second floor of a building in New Delhi's Connaught Place.It was a familiar and comfortable scene, even if some of the faces were new.A group of college-aged gay boys, in their neatly pressed kurtas and colorful scarv…
Abundance and Loss: Queer Intimacies in South Asia
Abundance and Loss: Queer Intimacies in South Asia Naisargi N. Dave Queerness, definitively, is no longer "a question of silence" in Indian arts and letters. When Mary John and Janaki Nair published their important edited volume A Question of Silence? The Sexual Economies of India in 1998, with "lesbian" and "gay" largely relegated to a brief section on "alter nate sexualities," so much was just on the horizon. Deepa Mehta's Fire, a film about th…
Activism as Ethical Practice: Queer Politics in Contemporary India
Why are activists, activists? In this article I address that question, as well as what it means for an ethnographer to ask it. Based on fieldwork with lesbian and gay activists in New Delhi, I argue that activism emerges as ethical practice, and that 'ethical practice' consists of three affective exercises: problematizing established social norms, inventing alternatives to those norms, and creatively practicing those newly invented relational pos…
Indian and lesbian and what came next: Affect, commensuration, and queer emergences
In this article, I demonstrate how a new social world of lesbian activists emerged in India around the text of a sign reading "Indian and Lesbian," which was held aloft at a demonstration and then pictured in newspapers the following morning. I argue that the efficacy of this sign lay not in its commensuration of "Indian" and "lesbian" but, rather, in its introduction of an incommensurability that now had to be resolved. I understand incommensura…
To Render Real the Imagined: An Ethnographic History of Lesbian Community in India
Among the preoccupations of the anthropology of sexuality has been demonstrating the cultural uniqueness of queer sexual forms around the world, a task most effectively begun by excavating a range of vernacular, culturally specific, sexual identity terms. Often missed in this attention to difference is an engagement with the processes by which the term “lesbian” has offered itself as a site for passionate personal attachment and as a node for ima…
Impossible Desires: Queer Diasporas and South Asian Public Cultures by Gayatri Gopinath
Queer Activism in India: A Story in the Anthropology of Ethics
introduction''Where do we go now?''Gautam wondered aloud.His expression was of optimism and loss, touching on both but settling on neither.We were all sitting, the dozens of us, on the floor of a gallery and performance space on the second floor of a building in New Delhi's Connaught Place.It was a familiar and comfortable scene, even if some of the faces were new.A group of college-aged gay boys, in their neatly pressed kurtas and colorful scarv…
Witness: Humans, Animals, and the Politics of Becoming
A prominent animal rights activist in New Delhi, explaining her relentlessness on behalf of animals, said to me the following: "I only wish there were a slaughterhouse next door. To witness that violence, to hear those screams . . . I would never be able to rest." She was not alone among animal welfare activists in India in linking the witnessing of violence against an animal to the creation of a profound bond that demanded from her a life of res…
Indian and lesbian and what came next: Affect, commensuration, and queer emergences
In this article, I demonstrate how a new social world of lesbian activists emerged in India around the text of a sign reading "Indian and Lesbian," which was held aloft at a demonstration and then pictured in newspapers the following morning. I argue that the efficacy of this sign lay not in its commensuration of "Indian" and "lesbian" but, rather, in its introduction of an incommensurability that now had to be resolved. I understand incommensura…
On the Killing and Killability of Animals
In this article we explore particular sacred and profane forms in which animals are killed in contemporary India. Taking up religious and secular, rural and urban, industrial and domestic instances from our fieldwork, we examine the affects, doubts, pleasures, cruelties and forms of indifference expressed by our ethnographic interlocutors while witnessing or executing the death of animals. Rather than indicting such acts and emotions, we emphasiz…
Something, Everything, Nothing; Or, Cows, Dogs, and Maggots
This article tries to locate the missing something that enables radical social projects to persevere, in this case, the social project of animal activism in India. The author argues that we will find the missing something buried in and by the tyranny of consistency (or contradiction thinking), which demands that any ethics in an oppositional or oblique relationship to the way things are account for its apparent inconsistencies or contradictions. …
Activism as Ethical Practice: Queer Politics in Contemporary India
Why are activists, activists? In this article I address that question, as well as what it means for an ethnographer to ask it. Based on fieldwork with lesbian and gay activists in New Delhi, I argue that activism emerges as ethical practice, and that 'ethical practice' consists of three affective exercises: problematizing established social norms, inventing alternatives to those norms, and creatively practicing those newly invented relational pos…
Afterword: For a Synaesthetics of Seeing
This Afterword explores the volume's ambivalent relationship to witnessing, and argues for a synaesthetics of seeing. Drawing on literature fictive and otherwise, with an emphasis on animality (fictive and otherwise), it reflects on how sound and touch enable us to see
A decolonial anthropology: You can dismantle the master's house with the master's tools
The 2022 meeting of the Group for Debates in Anthropological Theory (GDAT) Social Anthropology, University of Manchester. The motion is, of course, a riff on Audre Lorde's well-known 1984 claim that 'the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house. They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change.' Lorde is asking about the tools of a racist and constitutionally excl…
Love and Other Injustices
In this article, Naisargi N. Dave examines the relationship between animals and love in India, animals and love in multispecies anthropology, and between ethics and love more generally. She argues that ahimsa (nonviolence) and love share the characteristic of abnegating moral responsibility beyond the self and its attachments. Thus, Dave argues, against some strains of contemporary political thought, love is not the antithesis to ethical indiffer…
Abundance and Loss: Queer Intimacies in South Asia
Abundance and Loss: Queer Intimacies in South Asia Naisargi N. Dave Queerness, definitively, is no longer "a question of silence" in Indian arts and letters. When Mary John and Janaki Nair published their important edited volume A Question of Silence? The Sexual Economies of India in 1998, with "lesbian" and "gay" largely relegated to a brief section on "alter nate sexualities," so much was just on the horizon. Deepa Mehta's Fire, a film about th…
Impossible Desires: Queer Diasporas and South Asian Public Cultures by Gayatri Gopinath
To Render Real the Imagined: An Ethnographic History of Lesbian Community in India
Among the preoccupations of the anthropology of sexuality has been demonstrating the cultural uniqueness of queer sexual forms around the world, a task most effectively begun by excavating a range of vernacular, culturally specific, sexual identity terms. Often missed in this attention to difference is an engagement with the processes by which the term “lesbian” has offered itself as a site for passionate personal attachment and as a node for ima…
Abundance and Loss: Queer Intimacies in South Asia
Abundance and Loss: Queer Intimacies in South Asia Naisargi N. Dave Queerness, definitively, is no longer "a question of silence" in Indian arts and letters. When Mary John and Janaki Nair published their important edited volume A Question of Silence? The Sexual Economies of India in 1998, with "lesbian" and "gay" largely relegated to a brief section on "alter nate sexualities," so much was just on the horizon. Deepa Mehta's Fire, a film about th…
Activism as Ethical Practice: Queer Politics in Contemporary India
Why are activists, activists? In this article I address that question, as well as what it means for an ethnographer to ask it. Based on fieldwork with lesbian and gay activists in New Delhi, I argue that activism emerges as ethical practice, and that 'ethical practice' consists of three affective exercises: problematizing established social norms, inventing alternatives to those norms, and creatively practicing those newly invented relational pos…
Indian and lesbian and what came next: Affect, commensuration, and queer emergences
In this article, I demonstrate how a new social world of lesbian activists emerged in India around the text of a sign reading "Indian and Lesbian," which was held aloft at a demonstration and then pictured in newspapers the following morning. I argue that the efficacy of this sign lay not in its commensuration of "Indian" and "lesbian" but, rather, in its introduction of an incommensurability that now had to be resolved. I understand incommensura…
Queer Activism in India: A Story in the Anthropology of Ethics
introduction''Where do we go now?''Gautam wondered aloud.His expression was of optimism and loss, touching on both but settling on neither.We were all sitting, the dozens of us, on the floor of a gallery and performance space on the second floor of a building in New Delhi's Connaught Place.It was a familiar and comfortable scene, even if some of the faces were new.A group of college-aged gay boys, in their neatly pressed kurtas and colorful scarv…
Witness: Humans, Animals, and the Politics of Becoming
A prominent animal rights activist in New Delhi, explaining her relentlessness on behalf of animals, said to me the following: "I only wish there were a slaughterhouse next door. To witness that violence, to hear those screams . . . I would never be able to rest." She was not alone among animal welfare activists in India in linking the witnessing of violence against an animal to the creation of a profound bond that demanded from her a life of res…
On the Killing and Killability of Animals
In this article we explore particular sacred and profane forms in which animals are killed in contemporary India. Taking up religious and secular, rural and urban, industrial and domestic instances from our fieldwork, we examine the affects, doubts, pleasures, cruelties and forms of indifference expressed by our ethnographic interlocutors while witnessing or executing the death of animals. Rather than indicting such acts and emotions, we emphasiz…
Witness: Humans, Animals, and the Politics of Becoming
Something, Everything, Nothing; Or, Cows, Dogs, and Maggots
This article tries to locate the missing something that enables radical social projects to persevere, in this case, the social project of animal activism in India. The author argues that we will find the missing something buried in and by the tyranny of consistency (or contradiction thinking), which demands that any ethics in an oppositional or oblique relationship to the way things are account for its apparent inconsistencies or contradictions. …
Afterword: For a Synaesthetics of Seeing
This Afterword explores the volume's ambivalent relationship to witnessing, and argues for a synaesthetics of seeing. Drawing on literature fictive and otherwise, with an emphasis on animality (fictive and otherwise), it reflects on how sound and touch enable us to see
Part Seven. Ethical Life: Encounters with History, Religion, and the Political
Love and Other Injustices
In this article, Naisargi N. Dave examines the relationship between animals and love in India, animals and love in multispecies anthropology, and between ethics and love more generally. She argues that ahimsa (nonviolence) and love share the characteristic of abnegating moral responsibility beyond the self and its attachments. Thus, Dave argues, against some strains of contemporary political thought, love is not the antithesis to ethical indiffer…
The permissible and the perverse: Indian geographies of interspecies sex
We argue in this paper that what separates permissible from perverse acts of killing, or sex with, an animal is a matter of material and symbolic space. We focus on interspecies sex -which is often, but not always, bound up with killing -to argue that what separates permissible from perverse acts of interspecies sex in India, or husbandry from bestiality, is where it occurs geographically in proximity to an upper-caste, anthropatriarchal imaginar…
A writing life
A Writing Life" (Dillard 1989) is part of a special section of "hundreds" in honor of Kathleen Stewart. This "hundred" concerns the work of cultivating inspiration, openness, and observation
A decolonial anthropology: You can dismantle the master's house with the master's tools
The 2022 meeting of the Group for Debates in Anthropological Theory (GDAT) Social Anthropology, University of Manchester. The motion is, of course, a riff on Audre Lorde's well-known 1984 claim that 'the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house. They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change.' Lorde is asking about the tools of a racist and constitutionally excl…
Clay tips of thought
Semiotics of Rape: Sexual Subjectivity and Violation in Rural India
Sociology (14 works) · Political science (11 works) · Law (10 works) · Gender Studies (8 works) · Aesthetics (7 works) · Anthropological Studies and Insights (7 works) · Philosophy (7 works) · Psychology (7 works) · Queer (7 works) · Environmental ethics (6 works)