Abstract
This conversation brings together two anthropologists who have conducted ethnographic and archival research in the Central Himalayan state of Uttarakhand in India for well over a decade. Mathur and Govindrajan will draw on their own research to discuss theoretical, methodological, political, and ethical issues related to the environmental humanities, specifically human-animal relationships, climate change, and religious ecology. They will also dwell upon what form the environmental humanities might take if considered from the place of the Indian Himalaya.
About the presenters
Nayanika Mathur
Nayanika Mathur is Professor of Anthropology and South Asian Studies at the University of Oxford. She is the author of Paper Tiger: Law, Bureaucracy, and the Developmental State in Himalayan India (Cambridge, 2016) and Crooked Cats: Beastly Encounters in the Indian Himalaya (Chicago, 2021) as well as co-editor of four collections including the recent The People of India: New India Politics in the 21st Century (Penguin 2022). She is currently writing on the changing form of the Indian state, as well as methodological challenges to the social sciences and humanities that have been opened out by the climate crisis.
Radhika Govindrajan
Radhika Govindrajan is an Associate Professor of Anthropology and International Studies at the University of Washington, Seattle. She is the author of Animal Intimacies: Interspecies Relatedness in India’s Central Himalayas, published by University of Chicago Press in 2018 and Penguin India in 2019. She works across the fields of multispecies ethnography, environmental anthropology, anthropology of religion, agrarian studies, and feminist studies.