Colloquium Series: Out of Context and In Contradiction: On Humans and Animals (and a Passerby) in Urban India. Naisargi Dave

This paper begins with a story of a man who one summer afternoon killed several animal beings so that another could live. His story, like any concerning animal ethics in India raises two sorts of
questions: the first, in the realm of ethics, the problem of contradiction; the second, in the realm of politics, the problem of context. Both problematics, I argue, share two main features: the normopathic function of exhausting the ethically otherwise, and the dialectical fallacy of conflating concept with existence. In this paper I think ethnographically about what it means to embrace an immanently inconsistent ethics and, also, whether and how animals are thinkable in India outside Hindutva. In doing so, I turn to a passing figure both in and out of context.