Drawing on her ethnography in the Kumaon region of the Himalayas, Radhika Govindrajan in the book Animal Intimacies: Beastly Love in the Himalayas (2018) offers us a mosaic of narrative snapshots of multispecies relatedness. Through six chapters and an epilogue, she demonstrates how different life forms are intimately embedded in one another in this complex worlding. By doing so, she uncovers the gaps, hierarchies, anthropocentric readings, and colonial continuity and points us towards a more nuanced understanding of interspecies relatedness.

I particularly found it interesting and relevant how much of multispecies relationship and intimacies can be understood as queer kinship. If queerness signifies an “open mesh of possibilities, gaps, overlaps, dissonances, resonances, lapses and excesses of meaning” (Sedgwick, 1993: 7), then queer kinship should include all forms of combination of gender, species, number of family members or ways of procreation or parenting that puts the concept of ‘kinship’ into question. Simply put, a conventional genogram used for representing multispecies relatedness is inadequate and doesn’t recognise the innovative and productive potential of relationships other than blood ties and certain ‘fictive kinship’. Lucinda Ramberg’s scholarship (2013) on Jogati shows how kinship is ‘troubled’ when Dalit girsl marry the Goddess Yellamma in Northern Karnataka. 

A simple example from chapter two of the book shows how bovine beings are included, accommodated, and sometimes absorbed into Pahari families by establishing a transactional, affective, and symbolic relationship. Cows are not just domesticated animals raised to get milk and, in some cases, meat. Instead, they are complexly intertwined in the lived experiences of the Pahari people. What is even more interesting is how an ambivalently positioned ‘wild boar’ or pig in chapter four of the book is attempted to be kept in the confined domestic sphere by offering it extra food even being aware of its preference for ‘wilderness’. This draws our attention to how kinship is not a fixed category but is constantly challenged, contested, and reconfigured through these intimate acts of quotidian kindness and everyday domesticities. Pahari women, in particular, offer labour of love in incorporating them in the household and fold of the family, sometimes putting themselves in vulnerable positions in these regions.

The normative kinship of husband, wife, and biological children is often questioned in Indian geopolitical locations and cultural contexts. Family, a central unit of kinship, is a porous space that absorbs and constantly expands to include older adults, cousins, friends, domestic helps, and multiple animals. In my ethnography in small towns of Odisha, I discuss how fictive kinship is also produced and practised through ‘ritualised friendship’ when people of the same gender are integrated into each other’s families through an exchange of mango flowers, Cardamom and also sacred food offering to lord Jagannath in front of the village deity in the presence of the elders (Mishra, 2020).

Similarly, in the book, Govindrajan offers us many ethnographic evidence and a nuanced theoretical framework to think of interspecies relatedness as conventionally understood animal-human encounters rather than mutual interaction in a space they cohabit while enriching and influencing each other’s lives. The queer nature of such relationships is also seen in each chapter when their relationships further push the boundaries of normative kinship ties and intimacies. Additionally, the ambivalent relationship that some of the family members share with the sacrificial goat that dies for the family in chapter One cannot be adequately discussed in the dichotomous framework of violence-nonviolence, care and hostility or just human-animal relationship binary. This ambivalence is something, I argue, that makes their relationship and kinship queer.

The analysis of the narrative of a woman who helps/assists the goat to give birth to its kid in chapter one is another unconventional way of understanding maternal relatedness where the mutual emotions and the act of childbirth bind them together. This mutuality and reciprocation are further seen in the goat kid’s affection for the woman. Also, establishing these interspecies kinship structures and intimate relationships and their recognition offers us an alternative framework in which kinship can be reimagined. In chapter two, Govindarajan discusses a momentary attempt at dekinning when a cow was sold and separated from another cow. The one at home longed for her company, and the kinship tie was further restored by reuniting them. With this, we are offered another classic instance of non-anthropocentric conversation around kinship. Even people’s relationship with certain species is not fixed, monolithic, and predetermined. Instead, they are also decided by their historical contingencies and affective exchanges over time. So the inclusion and exclusion criteria in the kinship structure largely depend on shared intimacies and ‘doing’ of kinship (Schneider, 1984; Butler, 2002) rather than on the presupposed existing categories and processes. The monkeys labelled as outsiders and insiders based on their belongingness, behaviour and everyday performatives in chapter three is another such example.

This helps us formulate a theoretical framework in expanding the scope of queer kinship beyond ‘families we choose’ (Weston, 1997) to other beings and species. Kinship, in this case, exists in a continuum that is ever inclusive and is mainly dependent on everyday practices of kindness, friendship, and inter-dependence in the most quotidian ways.

In the most sexual sense of the term queer, another strand of queering of kinship needs to be foregrounded here. These are ‘stories’ of a bear taking away (not kidnapping) women and having sex with them in chapter six. Through these ethnographic narratives of women, Govindrajan shows how several women not only believed these are real events that have happened to fellow Pahari women, they also used these stories substantially to navigate their domestic, sexual and conjugal lives. The extended sections on bears as an interspecies sexual being, the fascination of women towards sexual acts of bears, and embodiedness of such sexual and erotic activities turn our attention to the queer subculture of ‘gay bear’: an important category in the transnational queer subculture.

Like the Pahari women’s fascination for the bear as a sexual being in its most corporeal sense, I think ‘gay bear’ also occupies a significant queer imaginaries and sociality in the global queer subculture. The ubiquitousness of gay bear- overweight/well-built gay men with body hair, can be felt in virtual spaces such as hook up sites to real-life clubs, bars and cultural spaces. Even in South Asia, bear subculture, including the chub-chaser categories, has found its ways to urban queerscapes through the internet, multimedia and queer’s participation in transnational queer culture post-liberalisation globalisation. Pattanaik’s Bearly India (2013) discusses how queer men in urban North India ambivalently relate to being a bear (Bhalu): some of them happily embracing and even celebrating these physical queer identity, whereas others culturally dissociate themselves from such outwardly imposed markers. But the presence of such markers cannot be denied in urban Indian queer spaces or otherwise.

Interestingly, the gay men who self-identify as bears are not necessarily fantasised by potential lovers as real bears. Instead, they have a fascination for a particular body type. Govindrajan discusses how women fantasised about bears as their husbands. I wanted to pose whether any of the Pahari women also imagined their hairy husband as bear either during sex or while lustfully ogling at them? Is there a constant preference for real bear over husbands, or at one point, the boundary between the hairy husband and real bear interpenetrates? This could be another interesting way to understand the multispecies relatedness by taking a cue from a queer subculture where gay men sometimes self-identify as a bear, cub (young hairy gay men) and otter (lean muscular hairy gay men) to project their identity to navigate socio-sexual relationships.

This book not only contributes to the literature on multispecies ethnography, but it also offers the readers a theoretical framework to reimagine kinship and intimacies. In addition to its value for teaching, I strongly recommend this book to any Anthropologist or ethnographer as a valuable learning resource to challenge and improve their own practice.

References:

Butler, J. (2002). Is kinship always already heterosexual?. Differences: A Journal of

Feminist Cultural Studies, 13(1), 14-44.

Govindrajan, R. (2018). Animal intimacies: interspecies relatedness in India’s Central Himalayas. University of Chicago Press.

Mishra, J. (2020). Negotiating Marriage, Family and Intimacy: An Ethnographic Study of Nonnormative Sexualities in Odisha, India [Unpublished PhD]. Indian Institute of Technology, Hyderabad, India.

Patnaik, P. P. (2013). Bearly Indian. Masculinity and Its Challenges in India: Essays on

Changing Perceptions, 93.

Ramberg, L. (2013). Troubling kinship: Sacred marriage and gender configuration in

South India. American Ethnologist, 40(4), 661-675.

Schneider, D. M. (1984). A Critique of the Study of Kinship. University of Michigan Press.

Sedgwick, E. K. (1993). Tendencies. Duke University Press.

Weston, K. (1997). Families we choose: Lesbians, gays, kinship. Columbia University Press.

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Jayaprakash Mishra has completed his PhD in Cultural Studies/Anthropology in the Department of Liberal arts at the Indian Institute of Technology. His research focused on gay men married to women and how they negotiate with the social institution of marriage and family. Some of the future projects he would be interested in are digital culture and South Asian diaspora studies.