Naisargi N. Dave

Associate Professor

(416) 978-6050

Campus

Downtown Toronto (St. George)

Fields of Study

Sociocultural Anthropology
South and Southeast 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 politics and relationality in contemporary urban India. My first 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. My second book project, tentatively titled Indifference: On the Praxis of Interspecies Being is a study of human-animal relationality in Indian cities including Delhi, Mumbai, and Hyderabad. The book is comprised of ten short chapters, each set within a unique sensorium and addressing a specific ethical question regarding how human and non-human animals live and die in a shared world. These questions are addressed ethnographically, through an attention to the everyday life of animals, activists, farmers, transporters, and of cities themselves. Among the questions the book attempts to answer are: How is activism exhausted? How do we become other? Can indifference be the basis for an ethical engagement with the world? Does that which is inevitable cease to matter? 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, queer anthropology, affect, & anthropological theory. 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:

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

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.