Naisargi N. Dave

Professor

(416) 978-6050

Campus

Downtown Toronto (St. George)

Fields of Study

Sociocultural Anthropology
South Asia

Areas of Interest

Areas of Interest/Research keywords: Animal studies, extraordinary ethics, affect & the senses, queer & feminist theory, imagination & expression, death & violence, anthropology & philosophy, friendship & intimacies.

Research Region: India.

Biography

My research concerns emergent forms of intra- and interspecies ethics, politics, and relationality in contemporary India. My latest book, Indifference: On the Praxis of Interspecies Being (Duke 2023), examines the complex worlds of animalists and animalism in India. Moving across animal shelters and dairy farms to city streets and abattoirs, I show how human-animal relations manifest through care and violence, but also, crucially, an ethic of indifference— that is, an orientation of mutual regard rather than curiosity, love, desire, or animus. Indifference, the book demonstrates, is a respect for others in their otherness that allows human and nonhuman animals to flourish in immanent encounters. Indifference was awarded the 2024 Gregory Bateson Prize by the Society for Cultural Anthropology and received an Honorable Mention for the Ruth Benedict Prize from the Association for Queer Anthropology.

My previous book, Queer Activism in India: A Story in the Anthropology of Ethics (Duke 2012) examines the relationship between queer desires and queer political formations. I argue, in short, that activism is an ethical practice comprised of critique, invention, and creative relational practice. Queer Activism was awarded the 2013 Ruth Benedict Prize by the Association for Queer Anthropology. I am currently working on a new book project provisionally titled Murder: The Social Life of Violent Death in Queer India.

Across my projects, I have an interest in practices of ethnographic expression, and in the work of narrative. I teach courses on animality, the otherwise, literary anthropology, sports, nature, friendship, death, queer anthropology, affect, & anthropological theory. In my department, I serve as representative for the Sociocultural and Linguistic (SCL) subfield. On campus, I am affiliated with the Centre for South Asian Studies and serve on the steering committee of the Bonham Centre for Sexual Diversity Studies.

“Dave” is pronounced Davé.

Prior Education:

PhD, University of Michigan

Publications:

2023. Indifference: On the Praxis of Interspecies Being. Durham: Duke University Press.

2023. A Writing Life. Anthropology & Humanism.

2023. The Permissible & the Perverse: Indian Geographies of Interspecies Sex. With Alok Gupta. Environment & Planning E.

2022. Love & Other Injustices: On Humans, Animals, and an Ethics of Indifference. • Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East Volume 42, Number 3, December 2022

2021. For a Synaesthetics of Seeing. The Cambridge Journal of Anthropology 39(1): 143-149.

2019. Kamadhenu’s Last Stand: On Animal Refusal to Work. In How Nature Works: Rethinking Labor on a Troubled Planet, Sarah Besky and Alex Blanchette, eds. University of New Mexico Press.

2019. Narcissus. In Anthropocene Unseen: A Lexicon, Anand Pandian and Cymene Howe, eds. Punctum Books.

2019. The Tyranny of Consistency. In Messy Eating: Conversations on Animals as Food, Samantha King, et al, eds. Fordham University Press.

2017. Something, Everything, Nothing; or, Cows, Dogs, and Maggots. Social Text 35 (1): 35-57.

2017. Witness: Humans, Animals, and the Politics of Becoming. In Unfinished: The Anthropology of Becoming, Joao Biehl and Peter Locke, eds. Duke University Press.

2015. Brighupati Singh & Naisargi Dave. On the Killing and Killability of Animals: Nonmoral Thoughts for the Anthropology of Ethics. Comparative Studies in South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East 35(2): 232-245.

2014. Witness: Humans, Animals, and the Politics of Becoming. Cultural Anthropology 29(3): 433-456. Reprinted, with minor edits, in Unfinished (2017).

2014. Death and Family: Queer Archives of the Space Between. In Leela Fernandes (ed.), The Handbook on Gender in South Asia. London: Routledge.

2012. Queer Activism in India: A Story in the Anthropology of Ethics. Durham: Duke University Press. (South Asia edition published in 2016, New Delhi: Zubaan)

2011. Indian and Lesbian and What Came Next: Affect, Commensuration, and Queer Emergences. American Ethnologist 38 (4): 650-665.

2011. “Abundance and Loss: Queer Intimacies in South Asia.” Feminist Studies 37(1): 1-15.

2011. “Activism as Ethical Practice: Queer Politics in Contemporary India.” Cultural Dynamics. 23(1): 3-20.

2011. “Ordering Justice, Fixing Dreams: An Ethnography of Queer Legal Activism.” In Law Like Love: Queer Perspectives on Law in India. Arvind Narrain and Alok Gupta, editors. Pp. 25-42. New Delhi: Yoda Press.

2010. “To Render Real the Imagined: An Ethnographic History of Lesbian Community in India.” In Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 35(3): 595-619.