The Human and the Nonhuman

‘Socio-environmental’ Ecotones and Deep Contradictions in the Bengali Heartland

Bibliographic Data

ID20072623
AuthorsAnnu Jalais (0000-0003-1859-8744, National Environment Agency, corresponding author)
Year2020
Pages127-150
Publication date2020-01-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeCHAPTER
VenueBorders and Ecotones in the Indian Ocean (SOURCE_BOOK)
PublisherPresses universitaires de la Méditerranée (PUBLISHER • FR)
DOI10.4000/books.pulm.6802
OpenAlexW3152455331
ISBN9782367814223
LanguageEN
References cited56

Highlighting recent debates around environmentalism and its meanings and purposes in the context of South Asia, this paper reintroduces caste and religious marginality, to critically examine the different ways people have of apprehending their environment. The paper argues that the use and understanding of ‘nature’ in contemporary middle-class India contrasts with modes of engaged multi-species environmental ‘ecotones’ that have been experienced by the subaltern majority of Bengalis both in Bangladesh as well as in West Bengal. The paper does that by exploring some of the recent politicised use of the cow and contrasting it to how ‘ecotonal societies’ have lived with nonhuman animals to argue that these engagements are linked to ways of understanding our purpose within our environment. In a way, the politicised Hindutva middle class regulate, control, protect what they have come to see as ‘their world’ and this is distinct from a position where subaltern groups from ecotones see themselves as part of a whole collective, one not theirs to ‘regulate’, ‘control’, or ‘protect’ but one to experience and try make sense of

Bengali · Biology · Caste · Ecotone · Environmental ethics · Environmentalism · Geography · Hindutva · Ideology · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Subaltern · Anthropological Studies and Insights · Gender Studies · Geographies of human-animal interactions · Law · Rangeland Management and Livestock Ecology · Ecology

Tools

Open DOIOpen Access