Senior Research Seminar with Professor Naisargi Davé (University of Toronto)

Professor Naisargi Davé (University of Toronto)

Indifference is an ethnographic exploration of interspecies life in urban India across a range of contexts, both surprising and expected. In addition to showing how human-animal relations often manifest through care and violence, what I also demonstrate, and seek to think through, is an ethic of indifference---that is, an orientation of mutual regard rather than curiosity, love, desire, or animus. Indifference, I argue, is a respect for others in their otherness that allows human and nonhuman animals to flourish in immanent encounters. Indifference, then, becomes the basis for an interspecies ethics and a method of care and practice in everyday life. It describes both a mode of relationality in the world and a scholarly approach: seeking what is possible when we approach ethico-political concepts with indifference rather than commitment or antagonism. Moments of indifference, I suggest, offer the promise of otherwise worlds. In the talk I will also build a conceptual bridge across queer activist practice, interspecies relationality, and my current research on the social life of murder in 21st century India.

Naisargi N. Davé is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Toronto. Her work concerns intra- and interspecies ethics, politics, and relationality in contemporary India. Davé is the author of two award-winning books, Indifference: On the Praxis of Interspecies Being (2023) and Queer Activism in India: A Story in the Anthropology of Ethics (2012), both from Duke University Press. She is currently working on a third book, Murder: The Social Life of Violent Death.