Talk by Nayanika Mathur (Anthropology, University of Oxford, UK)

This talk weaves together beastly tales of big cats that make prey of humans in India to ask what may they be telling us about a planet in crisis. There are many theories on why and how a big cat comes to prey on humans, with the ecological collapse emerging as a central explanatory factor. Yet, uncertainty over the precise cause of crookedness persists. Drawing upon over 15 years of anthropological research in India, conducted largely in the Himalaya, this talk explores the many lived complexities that arise from this absence of certain knowledge to offer new insights into both the governance of nonhuman animals and their intimate entanglements with humans. It deploys ethnographic storytelling to explain the Anthropocene in three critical ways: as method, as a way of reframing human-nonhuman relations on the planet, and as a political tool indicating the urgency of academic engagement.

Nayanika Mathur is Associate Professor in the Anthropology of South Asia, Fellow of Wolfson College, and Director of the South Asia center at the University of Oxford. She is the author of Paper Tiger: Law, Bureaucracy, and the Developmental State in Himalayan India (Cambridge University Press, 2016) and Crooked Cats: Beastly Encounters in the Anthropocene (University of Chicago Press, 2021).

Co-sponsored by the Anthropology Department