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ABSTRACT
The Anthropocene introduces a new ‘universal collective’ – the human species seen as a group and acting as a global geophysical agent. This ‘universal collective’ has usually been written about from a Western perspective. It has rarely been explored in relation to what a ‘collective’ might mean outside the Euro-American zone. The challenge is to rethink ‘universal’ from within local traditions of intellection so as to, in a sense, ‘provincialize’ it (after Dipesh Chakrabarty). Highlighting some of the recent anthropological literature on debates about the environment and the nonhuman in the Indic sphere, this article critically examines how contradictions about this ‘collective’ often return us to deep-seated ideas about what it means to be human – especially in relation to segregating beliefs about caste, gender and, ultimately, also nonhumans. In other words, this article attempts to underscore what lies at the heart of the complex endeavour of making sense of the ‘collective’, from an Indic perspective, in a time of climate breakdown.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 Margaret Mead in 1975 contributed to what must be one of the first ‘climate’ conferences (‘The Atmosphere: Endangered and Endangering’). See Hans A Baer and Thomas Reuter, ‘Anthropological Perspectives on Climate Change and Sustainability: Implications for Policy and Action’, Global Sustainable Development Report, 2015, pp 1–3. In the South Asian context, one can recall the deep engagement of historians Madhav Gadgil and Ramchandra Guha, This Fissured Land: An Ecological History of India, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1992, and Amita Baviskar, In the Belly of the River: Tribal Conflicts Over Development in the Narmada Valley, New York: Oxford University Press, 1995. Anthropologists Steve Rayner and Elizabeth Malone were arguing ‘Why Study Human Choice and Climate Change?’ in the introduction to their edited book Human Choice and Climate Change: An International Assessment (vol. 1: The Societal Framework), Battelle, 1998, where Mary Douglas (along with Des Gasper, Steven Ney and Michael Thompson) discussed ‘Human needs and wants’. Archaeologists too were in the fray much earlier than historians – see Carole Crumley’s review of ‘Ethics, Religion, and Biodiversity: Relations between Conservation and Cultural Values (Lawrence S Hamilton, ed.)’, in Bioscience, 44(11), 1994, pp 776–777, and Brian Fagan, The Little Ice Age: How Climate Made History, 1300–1850, New York, NY: Basic Books, 2000.
2 Amita Baviskar, India Today, 21 July 2016.
3 Cymene Howe and Anand Pandian, ‘Lexicon for an Anthropocene Yet Unseen’, Cultural Anthropology, 21 January 2016, https://culanth.org/fieldsights/series/lexicon-for-an-anthropocene-yet-unseen (accessed 1 March 2016).
4 Andrew Revkin, ‘An Anthropocene Journey’, Anthropocene, October 2016, https://www.anthropocenemagazine.org/anthropocenejourney/ (accessed 15 November 2016).
5 Dipesh Chakrabarty, ‘The Climate of History: Four Theses’, Critical Inquiry, 2009, p 222.
6 See Bruno Latour, ‘Agency at the Time of the Anthropocene’, New Literary History, 45(1), 2014, pp 1–18.
7 This is partly inspired by a close reading of Amitav Ghosh, The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2016, and Nayanika Mathur, ‘The Task of the Climate Translator’, Economic and Political Weekly, 2017, pp 77–84. For a recent article summarizing climate change and the Global South, read Rohan D’Souza, ‘Environmentalism and the Politics of Pre-emption: Reconsidering South Asia’s Environmental History in the Epoch of the Anthropocene’, Geoforum, 101, 2019, pp 242–249.
8 Val Plumwood, ‘Animals and Ecology: Towards a Better Integration’, unpublished article (available at: https://openresearch-repository.anu.edu.au/bitstream/1885/41767/3/Vegpap6.pdf), 2003, p 2.
9 One is reminded of the seminal work of Ramchandra Guha and Madhav Gadgil in This Fissured Land and Ecology and Equity: The Use and Abuse of Nature in Contemporary India, London, New York: Routledge, 1994. Also see K Sivaramakrishnan, ‘Imagining the Past in Present Politics: Colonialism and Forestry in India’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 37(1), 1995, pp 3–40, and Modern Forests: Statemaking and Environmental Change in Colonial Eastern India, Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1999; Amita Baviskar, In the Belly of the River; and Michael Painter and William H Durham (eds), The Social Causes of Environmental Destruction in Latin America, Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1995. Rohan D’Souza, in Drowned and Dammed: Colonial Capitalism and Flood Control in Eastern India, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2006, looks at colonial repercussions on dam-building. Rob Nixon’s Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor, Boston, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013, is also important here.
10 As Mahesh Rangarajan, Harini Nagendra and Mukul Sharma point out in a recent article, ‘India’s unique mix of diversity, size and economic and social conditions’ make this not just a complicated affair but ‘a daunting’ one where there are no ‘easy solutions to balancing the imperatives of economic growth, ecological sustainability and social justice’, especially in Indian cities. Mahesh Rangarajan et al., ‘The Problem’, Seminar, 744, August 2021.
11 ‘Viewed from an unprejudiced perspective, however, the very existence of nature as an autonomous domain is no more a raw given of experience than are talking animals or kinship ties between men and kangaroos.’ Philippe Descola, ‘Constructing Natures: Symbolic Ecology and Social Practice’, in Philippe Descola and Gisli Palsson (eds), Nature and Society: Anthropological Perspectives, London: Routledge, 1996, p 88.
12 Descola, ‘Constructing Natures’, p 82.
13 Bruno Latour, ‘Ethnography of a “High-Tech” Case: About Aramis’, in Pierre Lemonnier (ed), Technological Choices: Transformation in Material Cultures since the Neolithic, London, New York: Routledge, 1993.
14 Descola, ‘Constructing Natures’, pp 86–87.
15 K. Sivaramakrishnan, ‘Ethics of Nature in Indian Environmental History’, Modern Asian Studies, 49(4), 2015, pp 1261–1310.
16 Alex Aisher and Vinita Damodaran, ‘Introduction: Human–Nature Interactions through a Multispecies Lens’, Conservation and Society, 14(4), 2016, pp 293–304.
17 Suvadip Sinha and Amit R Baishya (eds), ‘Introduction’, in Postcolonial Animalities, New York, London: Routledge, 2020, p 13.
18 Sinha and Baishya, ‘Introduction’, p 13.
19 Anand Pandian and Daud Ali (eds), Ethical Life in South Asia, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2010, p 10.
20 Sivaramakrishnan, ‘Ethics of Nature’, p 1276.
21 Sivaramakrishnan, ‘Ethics of Nature’, p 1277.
22 Prasenjit Duara, The Crisis of Global Modernity: Asian Traditions and a Sustainable Future, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015.
23 Duara, The Crisis of Global Modernity, p 1.
24 Duara, The Crisis of Global Modernity, p 1.
25 Duara, The Crisis of Global Modernity, p 1.
26 Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Talcott Parsons (trans), London: Routledge, 1992. Especially relevant here is the author’s introduction, pp xxviii–xlii.
27 Duara, The Crisis of Global Modernity, p 2.
28 Duara, The Crisis of Global Modernity, p 2.
29 Duara, The Crisis of Global Modernity, p 6.
30 Duara, The Crisis of Global Modernity, p 4.
31 Duara, The Crisis of Global Modernity, p 14.
32 Duara reasons that one could think of this ‘dialogic transcendence’ as an inviolable (sacred) moral space that may not be fundamentally religious but may be a condition for human aspirations. The distinctive feature of Duara’s book is that religion or the ‘moral authority’ of Asian spiritual traditions that he calls ‘dialogic transcendence’ is important if we want to understand as well as address our environmental predicament, as I explain in Annu Jalais, ‘Reworlding the Ancient Chinese Tiger in the Realm of the Asian Anthropocene’, International Communication of Chinese Culture, 5(1–2), May 2018, pp 121–144, p 3.
33 For a clear-eyed study of the ‘ethics of coexistence’ in post-independence South Asian literature and film and how this does not match reality, see Priya Kumar, Limiting Secularism: The Ethics of Coexistence in Indian Literature and Film, Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2008.
34 Duara, The Crisis of Global Modernity, p 132.
35 Duara, The Crisis of Global Modernity, p 132.
36 Duara, The Crisis of Global Modernity, p 133.
37 Duara, The Crisis of Global Modernity, p 133.
38 For an interesting study of the hierarchies of animals and the way in which humans are made to stand in this animal hierarchy, see Amit Rahul Baishya, ‘Endangered (and Endangering) Species: Exploring the Animacy Hierarchy in Malik Sajad’s Munnu’, South Asian Review, 39(1–2), 2018, pp 50–69.
39 Duara, The Crisis of Global Modernity, p 133.
40 Ghar-wapsi is a term meaning ‘coming home’ that Hindu religious extremists in India use converting Muslims and Christians to Hinduism on the grounds that Indians were ancestrally “Hindu” and hence conversion to Hinduism should be one of ‘returning home’ to their roots. However, the vexing problem of caste remained for the proponents of this programme i.e. in which caste should the converts be placed?
41 The name under which the Hare Krishna Movement is known; it is a movement that practices caste and gender distinctions.
42 The Jagannath temple of Puri is the bastion of conservative Hinduism and refuses entry even to those non-Indians who have converted to Hinduism.
43 Richard Davis, ‘Introduction’, in Donald J Lopez (ed), Religions of India in Practice, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995, pp 3–51.
44 Davis, ‘Introduction’, p 13.
45 Joseph S Alter, ‘Celibacy and Sexuality: Transformations of Gender into Nationalism’, in Moral Materialism: Sex and Masculinity in Modern India, Penguin, 2011, pp 21–54.
46 Ghosh, The Great Derangement.
47 Ghosh, The Great Derangement, p 30.
48 Ghosh, The Great Derangement, p 40.
49 Ghosh, The Great Derangement, p 40.
50 Ghosh, The Great Derangement, p 41.
51 Ghosh, The Great Derangement, p 42.
52 Ghosh, The Great Derangement, p 43.
53 Ghosh, The Great Derangement, p 49.
54 Ghosh, The Great Derangement, p 44.
55 Annu Jalais, ‘The Human and the Nonhuman: Bengali “Environmental” Ecotones and their Contradictions’, in Markus Arnold, Corinne Duboin and Judith Misrahi-Barak (eds), Borders and Ecotones in the Indian Ocean: Cultural and Literary Perspectives, Collection ‘Horizons anglophones: PoCoPages’, Montpellier: Presses Universitaires de la Méditerranée (PULM), 2020, p 142.
56 Descola initially had only three ontologies (animism, naturalism and totemism) in his book In the Society of Nature: A Native Ecology in Amazonia, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. He only added analogism later in Beyond Nature and Culture, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2013, p 122. He places Indic human–nonhuman interactions in the analogism sphere, and he is probably right if we are looking at nonhumans from a savarna caste-based perspective. However, as I argue in Forest of Tigers (New York, London: Routledge, 2010), I believe that the Sundarbans islanders’ ontology of human–nonhuman relations, especially with tigers, is based on what Descola terms ‘animism’.
57 Through movements such as the Matua religion, as explored by Sekhar Bandyopadhyay in Caste, Protest and Identity in Colonial India: The Namasudras of Bengal, 1872–1947, London: Curzon, 1997. I also argued this in Jalais, ‘The Human and the Nonhuman’, p 142.
58 Davis, Religions of India in Practice, p 29.
59 Davis, Religions of India in Practice, p 30.
60 Very similar to what Radhika Govindrajan argues in ‘“The Goat that Died for Family”: Animal Sacrifice and Interspecies Kinship in India’s Central Himalayas’, American Ethnologist, 42(3), 2015, pp 504–519.
61 On the Bauls, see Carola E Lorea, Folklore, Religion and the Songs of a Bengali Madman: A Journey Between Performance and the Politics of Cultural Representation, Amsterdam: Brill, 2016, and on the Matuas, Carola E Lorea, ‘Religion, Caste, and Displacement: The Matua Community’, Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Asian History, Oxford University Press USA, 2020.
62 Ambika Aiyadurai, Tigers Are Our Brothers: Anthropology of Wildlife Conservation in Northeast India, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2021; Radhika Govindrajan, Animal Intimacies: Interspecies Relatedness in India’s Central Himalayas, Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 2018; Maan Barua, ‘Volatile Ecologies: Towards a Material Politics of Human-Animal Relations’, Environment and Planning, 46(6), 2013, pp 1462–1478; and Jalais, Forest of Tigers: People, Politics and Environment in the Sundarbans, London, New York, New Delhi: Routledge, 2010.
63 Jalais, Forest of Tigers.
64 As described by Descola in his book In the Society of Nature; see also Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, ‘Cosmological Deixis and Amerindian Perspectivism’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 4(3), 1998, pp 469–488, and Eduardo Kohn, ‘Runa Realism: Upper Amazonian Attitudes to Nature Knowing’, Ethnos, 70(2), 2005, pp 171–196.
65 Philippe Descola, ‘Societies of Nature and the Nature of Society’, in A Kuper (ed), Conceptualizing Society, London: Routledge, 1992, pp 107–126, and Nature and Society: Anthropological Perspectives; Adrian Franklin, Animals and Modern Cultures: A Sociology of Human–Animal Relations in Modernity, London: Sage, 1999, Nature and Social Theory, London: Sage, 2002 and studies in the edited volume by Tim Ingold, What Is an Animal?, London: Unwin Hyman Ltd, 1988; Molly Mullin, ‘Mirrors and Windows: Sociocultural Studies of Human-Animal Relationships’, Annual Review of Anthropology, 28, 1999, pp 201–224; Mahesh Rangarajan, India’s Wildlife History, Delhi: Permanent Black, 2001; K Sivaramakrishnan, ‘Imagining the Past in Present Politics’, and more recently in K Sivaramakrishnan and Anne Rademacher (eds), Ecologies of Urbanism in India: Metropolitan Civility and Sustainability, Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2013, and Places of Nature in Ecologies of Urbanism, Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2017. Also see Anna L Tsing, Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005, Anna L Tsing, J P Brosius and C Zerner, ‘Introduction: Raising Questions about Communities and Conservation’, in Anna L Tsing, P Brosius and C Zerner (eds), Communities and Conservation: Histories and Politics of Community-Based Natural Resource Management, Plymouth: Altamira Press, 2005, pp 1–34; Paige West, J Igoe and D Brockington, ‘Parks and Peoples: The Social Impact of Protected Areas’, Annual Review of Anthropology, 35, 2006, pp 251–277, and Paige West, Conservation Is Our Government Now: The Politics of Ecology in Papua New Guinea, Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2006.
66 Franklin, Animals and Modern Cultures, p 2.
67 Here I would like to broaden the discourse to mean not just ‘society’ (i.e. a cluster of humans more or less similar as in a caste or a community) but to go beyond, and through the term ‘collective’ incorporate all the beings that constitute a ‘world’ or an environment.
68 Malini Sur, Jungle Passports: Fences, Mobility, and Citizenship at the Northeast India-Bangladesh Border, Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021, p 122.
69 Phil Macnaghten and John Urry, Contested Natures, London: Sage, 1998, p 15.
70 Mukul Sharma, ‘Dalits and Indian Environmental Politics’, Economic and Political Weekly, XLVII(23), 2012, pp 46–52, and Sharma, Green and Saffron: Hindu Nationalism and Indian Environmental Politics, New Delhi: Permanent Black, 2012.
71 Arpitha Kodiveri, ‘Changing Terrains of Environmental Citizenship in India’s Forests’, Socio-Legal Review 12(2), 2016, pp 74–104.
72 Aiyadurai, ‘“Tigers Are Our Brothers”’, p 306.
73 Aiyadurai, ‘“Tigers are Our Brothers”’, p 309.
74 Aarthi Sridhar, ‘Dignifying “Indian” Environmentalism’, Seminar, 744, August 2021.
75 Anna L Tsing, ‘More-than-human-sociality’, Anthropology and Nature, New York, NY: Routledge, 2013, pp 27–42.
76 Amitav Ghosh, The Hungry Tide, HarperCollins, 2005, p 150.
78 See websites on the Southern Collective and on the Asian Bestiary.
79 As I explain with Amites Mukhopadhyay in our article ‘Of Pandemics and Storms in the Sundarbans’, in Calynn Dowler (ed), ‘Intersecting Crises’, American Ethnologist website, September 2020, and in Annu Jalais, ‘Amidst the wreckage of Amphan, a heartwarming reminder from Sundarbans of what it means to be human’, Scroll.in, June 2020.
80 Aarthi Sridhar, ‘Writing Proposals and Dreaming Fieldwork during Lockdown’; Aarthi Sridhar and Annu Jalais, ‘Introduction: A Collaboratory of Indian Ocean Ethnographies’, in Moving Voices, Fieldsights, 23 September 2021, https://culanth.org/fieldsights/introduction-a-collaboratory-of-indian-ocean-ethnographies.
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Annu Jalais
Annu Jalais is an environmental anthropologist working on the human–animal interface, environmental justice, religious identity, caste and migration, particularly in Bangladesh and India. She authored Forest of Tigers: People, Politics and Environment in the Sundarbans (Routledge, 2010) and co-authored, with Joya Chatterji (History, Trinity College, Cambridge) and Claire Alexander (Sociology, Manchester), The Bengal Diaspora: Rethinking Muslim Migration (Routledge, 2016). She has taught at the National University of Singapore (NUS), London School of Economics (LSE), Goldsmiths College, and been affiliated with the Agrarian Studies Program, Yale University; the International Institute of Asian Studies (IIAS), Leiden; and the Centre d’Études de l’Inde et de l’Asie du Sud (CEIAS) at the EHESS, Paris, amongst others. Since the start of the pandemic, Jalais has engaged in collaborative and interdisciplinary research that brings together community leaders, NGO practitioners, artists, academics and students to explore anthropological, environmental, historical methods and materials to address some of the burning issues of our time.