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Animal Intimacies: Interspecies Relatedness in India's Central Himalayas
What does it mean to live and die in relation to other animals? Animal Intimacies posits this central question alongside the intimate—and intense—moments of care, kinship, violence, politics, indifference, and desire that occur between human and non-human animals.
Built on extensive ethnographic fieldwork in the mountain villages of India’s Central Himalayas, Radhika Govindrajan’s book explores the number of ways that human and animal interact to cultivate relationships as interconnected, related beings. Whether it is through the study of the affect and ethics of ritual animal sacrifice, analysis of the right-wing political project of cow-protection, or examination of villagers’ talk about bears who abduct women and have sex with them, Govindrajan illustrates that multispecies relatedness relies on both difference and ineffable affinity between animals. Animal Intimacies breaks substantial new ground in animal studies, and Govindrajan’s detailed portrait of the social, political and religious life of the region will be of interest to cultural anthropologists and scholars of South Asia as well.
Built on extensive ethnographic fieldwork in the mountain villages of India’s Central Himalayas, Radhika Govindrajan’s book explores the number of ways that human and animal interact to cultivate relationships as interconnected, related beings. Whether it is through the study of the affect and ethics of ritual animal sacrifice, analysis of the right-wing political project of cow-protection, or examination of villagers’ talk about bears who abduct women and have sex with them, Govindrajan illustrates that multispecies relatedness relies on both difference and ineffable affinity between animals. Animal Intimacies breaks substantial new ground in animal studies, and Govindrajan’s detailed portrait of the social, political and religious life of the region will be of interest to cultural anthropologists and scholars of South Asia as well.
256 pages, Paperback
Published May 29, 2018
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 33 reviews
December 16, 2019
This is an extremely interesting book if you have even an iota of interest in anthropological studies of animal behaviours and their interaction with humans. Not just the everyday pets but also animals such as Bears, Monkeys, Cows, Wild boars, Leopards et al. This is an exemplary field work by author, Radhika, in the villages of Uttaranchal and takes the reader through the rights and wrongs about Religious sacrifices, Gau-raksha, Sex-with-bears (!) etc. i think this book is a classic case study for how there is a strong interrelatedness amongst animals and humans and how it impacts the daily loves of everyone involved.
Recommended for those who can relate to this topic and want to know more. For casual reading, it is intriguing but not fictional, so take your pick :)
Recommended for those who can relate to this topic and want to know more. For casual reading, it is intriguing but not fictional, so take your pick :)
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January 19, 2019Outstanding -- this is anthropology at its best. Beautifully written and thought provoking.
March 7, 2021
It feels like coming home when you read a great anthropology text with enough theory as a framework, great storytelling, detailed writing, incisive editing. What a wonderful book. Deserves more book prizes! I highly recommend this book for pleasure reading and teaching various anthropology courses - ranging from methods, theory (particularly kinship), religion, political/legal anthropology, environment/climate change courses, philosophy/ethics courses. This book covers all topics and touches on more important core issues. I will discuss in detail below why.
Unlike a traditional monograph model, Govindrajan structures the chapters in degrees of intimacy beginning from the closest one (goats) and fanning out to the distant one - the leopards in which only material traces remain rather than seeing the actual animal. It is a pretty intuitive way to reconstruct the multispecies world of her informants but she was not explicit about it. If she did, readers will directly understand the affective degrees of animal relatedness and the nuances of emotional ties of the villagers to their environment. However, she is not overly concerned with building an abstract model of kinship or multispecies relationality (as I am interested). She set out to study animals as individuals and not as things outside of the human selves. In doing so, she distinguishes her study in comparison with other multispecies ethnography - think Forest, Insectopedia, or Alien Ocean.
At the heart of her stories is relatedness as framework following Janet Carsten's Heat of the Hearth work in which kinship is created from various practices of feeding, care, and sharing. Instead of just humans, she extends it to animals. For every chapter, she details how this care and opening up of bodies and labour create deep relatedness with household and jungle animals. This is a feminist work in that kin building is gendered labour. Women care for the animals daily and this is predominantly their story. I believe that if she included a lot of male voices this would be a totally different book, similar to other multispecies ethnographic approach. Let me detail why.
She has a very heartfelt discussion about the close bond with goats in the first chapter. What is different in her tales of individuated animals are that these goats are named. However, unlike pets, goats are ritually sacrificed for their gods. She sets out a different type of ritual analysis in which the male aspect of the ritual performances are muted almost, and what is left is the mother crying because the goats who are now like children for her is going to be killed. I've read and specialized in ritual practice. Any ritual performance is analysed based on a formalist approach, Victor Turner approach, and such. Govindrajan focuses on the mother crying and mourning for the loss. Affect is what sets apart this chapter even if another male character decries the barbarism and backwardness of this ritual practice. It doesn't change the fact that mother loved her goats. This is an aspect of ritual sacrifice that is usually ignored in anthropological literature and I think this is good to include in a religion class.
This sets the stage to talk about "ethical kinship" in chapter 2 but also echoes in chapter 1. That is, relatedness invokes violence of death and killing. Govindrajan's point is that ethical kinship does not preclude these. And so this is the case with the goats as with the cows. These animals are destined to die but as in the case of the cow, a hot political topic in Hindi nationalism and animal rights activists, banned these animals from dying. In other words, Govindrajan presents two forms of "ethical kinship" with the cow (or in animals in general). One is a form in which violence - through death or killing - is a part of relatedness practice. It does not erase the ethical practices that is seen in the everyday context of care. For the activists, Govindrajan points out that they want to institute a singular form of ethics that does not include death and this creates a lot of practical problems with aging cows, abandoned cows, caste shunning of cow handlers and slaughterers and great problem among villagers of the economic burden of unproductive cows. This chapter is suited for ethics, philosophy, environmental and climate change classes that would present a debate on the issue beyond the sacred cow of Marvin Harris.
The ethics debate carries over with the relationship with the rhesus macaques when trade of macaques were halted due to ethical understanding of the monkey's role in HIndu nationalism. Ironically, the rise of aggression of humans come from the capture of troops with the sale but also with the relocation of monkeys in rural areas. And this is the heart of the practical problem of livelihood destruction. Chapter 3 offers a different form of relatedness and that is one of hatred. I love that Govindrajan also included dislike and hatred as part of relatedness. This is the relationship of the villagers with monkeys and she uses this as backdrop to talk about the exclusion/inclusion and other racial issues brought about by the invasive monkey species from urban areas reminiscent of the "invasive" species seen in the chapter of Alien Ocean on Hawaii and the politics behind such concepts. This is perhaps my least favored chapter.
I particularly love the pig chapter because bacon! but seriously, the concepts between what is domestic vs. what is wild (boar) is a fascinating ongoing debate on the ethics of killing. If killing wild boar is banned because of environmental reasons, what happens when they behave like domesticated pigs i.e. eat the food of humans and behave like domesticated animals. With the problem of the singular ethic of non-killing, this becomes a sorry state in agriculture hurting the village. I love that pgs are seen as animals with agency and the propensity to go "wild" so they are called the "domesticated wild" with even stories about how domesticated pigs became wild boars. Pigs transgress these boundaries and brings the discussion back to invasive/endemic and ethics of killing into fore. She refers a book called Animals of Empires that talks of the different kind of care and disciplining of animals in the 18th-19th American settlers that requires a look.
The bear chapter is deliciously written, as if I am eavesdropping into a women's private conversation. The bear is a figure of desire and longing for women that transgresses expectations and roles. Here the female informants become alive, animated, and sexually charged telling tales of the bear with fear but also aspiring to be in that state of being (sexually) desirable. There's a bit of trepidation in this chapter because it is in these contexts that women's domestic abuse comes out jokingly that is discomfiting because the women themselves gloss over it, like a khatta-meetha balance of ("sour") toxic masculinity and "sweet" expected in relationships. Where women's bodies are controlled and removed of the animal desire much like bears. Relatedness here is traced through the mappings of desire enscribed in the control of female bodies and kinship with the wild, dangerous, and sexually charged bears.
The bears are rarely seen except for their material traces in the forest. Much like leopards whose relationship with humans are through the disappearances of dogs who are thought to disappear because of their relationship as food to them. What we see here is a three way relationship in which humans mourn for their beloved dog pets in the inevitable consequence of being attacked and eaten by the leopards. This circles back to the specific relationship of humans with their pets and eventual deaths at the hands of another.
She raises three important rebuttals to her argument - that to asssert that love includes violence "privileges the remorse of the human over the life of the animal." However, for Radhika, what she wanted to show was that there is no pure or uncomplicated categories of human or non human in as much as "mutual recognition"of each other is the way to go for posthumanism. (178-179)
I appreciate her point that "love is not entirely ethical because it is always related to desire." That we are prone to save only those whom we love and that love is necessarily situated in injustice whether it is building a Hindu nationalism with specific ways to love a cow or to love them for productive ends. Between everyday practices to abstract or transcendental interpretation of love, Radhika challenges that the ethical power of love, though imperfect, is transformational.
All I wish was that she explained how she wrote this book, how she stumbled upon her project (did she originally set out to do this), what choices she made on not to use let's say the Marxist approach, political, or religious and even thoroughly ecological approach to her work. What happens if she wrote it with her male friends or the impression of the children of these women on the amount of care displayed to animals. Were they jealous of them? Dis she have access to the husbands? Omitted interviews? Definitely would provide some insights and strength to her observation. By choosing though to focus on women, she implicitly gave voice to the everyday gendered labour of kinship and unique view of animals.
Beautiful book, worth the read, be touched.
Unlike a traditional monograph model, Govindrajan structures the chapters in degrees of intimacy beginning from the closest one (goats) and fanning out to the distant one - the leopards in which only material traces remain rather than seeing the actual animal. It is a pretty intuitive way to reconstruct the multispecies world of her informants but she was not explicit about it. If she did, readers will directly understand the affective degrees of animal relatedness and the nuances of emotional ties of the villagers to their environment. However, she is not overly concerned with building an abstract model of kinship or multispecies relationality (as I am interested). She set out to study animals as individuals and not as things outside of the human selves. In doing so, she distinguishes her study in comparison with other multispecies ethnography - think Forest, Insectopedia, or Alien Ocean.
At the heart of her stories is relatedness as framework following Janet Carsten's Heat of the Hearth work in which kinship is created from various practices of feeding, care, and sharing. Instead of just humans, she extends it to animals. For every chapter, she details how this care and opening up of bodies and labour create deep relatedness with household and jungle animals. This is a feminist work in that kin building is gendered labour. Women care for the animals daily and this is predominantly their story. I believe that if she included a lot of male voices this would be a totally different book, similar to other multispecies ethnographic approach. Let me detail why.
She has a very heartfelt discussion about the close bond with goats in the first chapter. What is different in her tales of individuated animals are that these goats are named. However, unlike pets, goats are ritually sacrificed for their gods. She sets out a different type of ritual analysis in which the male aspect of the ritual performances are muted almost, and what is left is the mother crying because the goats who are now like children for her is going to be killed. I've read and specialized in ritual practice. Any ritual performance is analysed based on a formalist approach, Victor Turner approach, and such. Govindrajan focuses on the mother crying and mourning for the loss. Affect is what sets apart this chapter even if another male character decries the barbarism and backwardness of this ritual practice. It doesn't change the fact that mother loved her goats. This is an aspect of ritual sacrifice that is usually ignored in anthropological literature and I think this is good to include in a religion class.
This sets the stage to talk about "ethical kinship" in chapter 2 but also echoes in chapter 1. That is, relatedness invokes violence of death and killing. Govindrajan's point is that ethical kinship does not preclude these. And so this is the case with the goats as with the cows. These animals are destined to die but as in the case of the cow, a hot political topic in Hindi nationalism and animal rights activists, banned these animals from dying. In other words, Govindrajan presents two forms of "ethical kinship" with the cow (or in animals in general). One is a form in which violence - through death or killing - is a part of relatedness practice. It does not erase the ethical practices that is seen in the everyday context of care. For the activists, Govindrajan points out that they want to institute a singular form of ethics that does not include death and this creates a lot of practical problems with aging cows, abandoned cows, caste shunning of cow handlers and slaughterers and great problem among villagers of the economic burden of unproductive cows. This chapter is suited for ethics, philosophy, environmental and climate change classes that would present a debate on the issue beyond the sacred cow of Marvin Harris.
The ethics debate carries over with the relationship with the rhesus macaques when trade of macaques were halted due to ethical understanding of the monkey's role in HIndu nationalism. Ironically, the rise of aggression of humans come from the capture of troops with the sale but also with the relocation of monkeys in rural areas. And this is the heart of the practical problem of livelihood destruction. Chapter 3 offers a different form of relatedness and that is one of hatred. I love that Govindrajan also included dislike and hatred as part of relatedness. This is the relationship of the villagers with monkeys and she uses this as backdrop to talk about the exclusion/inclusion and other racial issues brought about by the invasive monkey species from urban areas reminiscent of the "invasive" species seen in the chapter of Alien Ocean on Hawaii and the politics behind such concepts. This is perhaps my least favored chapter.
I particularly love the pig chapter because bacon! but seriously, the concepts between what is domestic vs. what is wild (boar) is a fascinating ongoing debate on the ethics of killing. If killing wild boar is banned because of environmental reasons, what happens when they behave like domesticated pigs i.e. eat the food of humans and behave like domesticated animals. With the problem of the singular ethic of non-killing, this becomes a sorry state in agriculture hurting the village. I love that pgs are seen as animals with agency and the propensity to go "wild" so they are called the "domesticated wild" with even stories about how domesticated pigs became wild boars. Pigs transgress these boundaries and brings the discussion back to invasive/endemic and ethics of killing into fore. She refers a book called Animals of Empires that talks of the different kind of care and disciplining of animals in the 18th-19th American settlers that requires a look.
The bear chapter is deliciously written, as if I am eavesdropping into a women's private conversation. The bear is a figure of desire and longing for women that transgresses expectations and roles. Here the female informants become alive, animated, and sexually charged telling tales of the bear with fear but also aspiring to be in that state of being (sexually) desirable. There's a bit of trepidation in this chapter because it is in these contexts that women's domestic abuse comes out jokingly that is discomfiting because the women themselves gloss over it, like a khatta-meetha balance of ("sour") toxic masculinity and "sweet" expected in relationships. Where women's bodies are controlled and removed of the animal desire much like bears. Relatedness here is traced through the mappings of desire enscribed in the control of female bodies and kinship with the wild, dangerous, and sexually charged bears.
The bears are rarely seen except for their material traces in the forest. Much like leopards whose relationship with humans are through the disappearances of dogs who are thought to disappear because of their relationship as food to them. What we see here is a three way relationship in which humans mourn for their beloved dog pets in the inevitable consequence of being attacked and eaten by the leopards. This circles back to the specific relationship of humans with their pets and eventual deaths at the hands of another.
She raises three important rebuttals to her argument - that to asssert that love includes violence "privileges the remorse of the human over the life of the animal." However, for Radhika, what she wanted to show was that there is no pure or uncomplicated categories of human or non human in as much as "mutual recognition"of each other is the way to go for posthumanism. (178-179)
I appreciate her point that "love is not entirely ethical because it is always related to desire." That we are prone to save only those whom we love and that love is necessarily situated in injustice whether it is building a Hindu nationalism with specific ways to love a cow or to love them for productive ends. Between everyday practices to abstract or transcendental interpretation of love, Radhika challenges that the ethical power of love, though imperfect, is transformational.
All I wish was that she explained how she wrote this book, how she stumbled upon her project (did she originally set out to do this), what choices she made on not to use let's say the Marxist approach, political, or religious and even thoroughly ecological approach to her work. What happens if she wrote it with her male friends or the impression of the children of these women on the amount of care displayed to animals. Were they jealous of them? Dis she have access to the husbands? Omitted interviews? Definitely would provide some insights and strength to her observation. By choosing though to focus on women, she implicitly gave voice to the everyday gendered labour of kinship and unique view of animals.
Beautiful book, worth the read, be touched.
April 9, 2024
This was actually so so good. I loved reading it. Such an amazing ethnography.
March 27, 2023
Ik moest dit boek lezen voor uni (culturele antropologie) en het was verrassend leuk en interessant om te lezen. Ik vond het vooral heel tof om over een cultuur te leren waar ik zo goed als niks over weet en naar deze cultuur te kijken vanuit het perspectief wat Govindrajan zo goed kan overbrengen. Ze schreef heel goed en ze was heel goed te volgen, wat de gecompliceerde materie beter te volgen maakte.
Ik vond het feministische perspectief ontzettend verfrissend en vooral anders dan de andere feministische werken die ik heb gelezen.
Als je geïnteresseerd bent in culturele antropologie (of India) is het zeker een aanrader! Anders zou ik lekker een ander boekje uit de kast pakken.
Ik vond het feministische perspectief ontzettend verfrissend en vooral anders dan de andere feministische werken die ik heb gelezen.
Als je geïnteresseerd bent in culturele antropologie (of India) is het zeker een aanrader! Anders zou ik lekker een ander boekje uit de kast pakken.
December 5, 2025
Ik vind het oprecht een goed boek. Je moet wel redelijk wat voorkennis hebben omdat ze veel theorie en concepten aan haar observaties en onderzoek koppelt. Het is echt goed geschreven en super interessant, het gaat over verwantschap tussen mensen en dieren. Het laatste hoofdstuk is echt bizar, maar wel grappig ofzo. Ik vind het boek wel een aanrader!!
May 8, 2022
This book is a friendly and welcoming ethnography in the line of one of the most prominent arcs in the anthropology of today - integrate humans with the larger natural ecosystem to save the world in this Era of the Anthropocene. The book narrates the lives of men and women as they interact with animals behaving 'human-like ways' in the eyes of these people: goats that are brethren within the family and willing to die for it, monkeys from the city causing menace to people, foreign cows that are not worth the gauraksha effort but completely deserve love, pigs that are detested and boars that are relished, and bears that have sex with women and impregnate them. The book has some really subtle and lovely insights. Read this line for example: “For such preachers, the Jersey cow, even if she could not be slayed, was a creature unworthy of care, consideration, and respect. For women like Neeta and Rekha chachi, on the other hand, the Jersey, even if she was killable, was a cow to be nourished and cherished.”
Yet there seems to be an incompleteness as often happens with anthropological studies, and scholarship in general. When will you take a side?
Yet there seems to be an incompleteness as often happens with anthropological studies, and scholarship in general. When will you take a side?
February 20, 2021
It was an invaluable insight into the world of rural Kumaon in the north Indian state of Uttarakhand.
Radhika Govindrajan does a great job of weaving together what she has studied in books and what she has seen in different villages in Uttarakhand.
The text is replete with verbatims popular in the anthropology universe and citations of varied scholars, meaning you can go as deep as you want in the related studies/research papers. It also gave a sneak peak into the rural folklore, people's relationship with the animals who live with them. Touching on topics ranging from motherly love to desire. The author ends on a beautiful note suggesting that "relatedness is all that we might have left", because, in a way, everyone is a refugee - The village folk get educated and move to the city for refuge, the uneducated ones leave for the sake of better learning opportunities for the refuge of making ends meet and the remaining have their youth moved away and have their goats and dogs wherein they seek refuge for love.
Radhika Govindrajan does a great job of weaving together what she has studied in books and what she has seen in different villages in Uttarakhand.
The text is replete with verbatims popular in the anthropology universe and citations of varied scholars, meaning you can go as deep as you want in the related studies/research papers. It also gave a sneak peak into the rural folklore, people's relationship with the animals who live with them. Touching on topics ranging from motherly love to desire. The author ends on a beautiful note suggesting that "relatedness is all that we might have left", because, in a way, everyone is a refugee - The village folk get educated and move to the city for refuge, the uneducated ones leave for the sake of better learning opportunities for the refuge of making ends meet and the remaining have their youth moved away and have their goats and dogs wherein they seek refuge for love.
January 11, 2024
My friend, with whom I studied sociology, recommended this beautiful (South Asian) ethnography to me. It is for those interested in animal studies/multispecies studies and the Anthropocene. Additionally, for enthusiasts of visual anthropology, the book includes photographs taken by the author.
By exploring the relationship between human animals with others across the spectrum of domestic and wild, the book provides profound insights into our co-existence. Exploring various animals such as goats, cows, pigs & boars, monkeys, bears, dogs, and leopards, Radhika Govindrajan delves into themes of love, intimacy, care, ethics, religion, politics, identity, development, caste, gender, sexuality, conflict, among others.
Set against the backdrop of the Himalayas, with its multiplicity of geography, culture, ecology, and history, the book's focus on the Kumaon region was particularly special for me. My maternal family resides in this region, although in the foothills.
By exploring the relationship between human animals with others across the spectrum of domestic and wild, the book provides profound insights into our co-existence. Exploring various animals such as goats, cows, pigs & boars, monkeys, bears, dogs, and leopards, Radhika Govindrajan delves into themes of love, intimacy, care, ethics, religion, politics, identity, development, caste, gender, sexuality, conflict, among others.
Set against the backdrop of the Himalayas, with its multiplicity of geography, culture, ecology, and history, the book's focus on the Kumaon region was particularly special for me. My maternal family resides in this region, although in the foothills.
September 24, 2023
Perhaps the story covered here has existed long ago - in the colonial times and before the discourse of modernization and nationalism emerged. The intimately related but marginal figures - mountains, forests, villages, animals, women - were tied to the life of violence and love imposed by the hegemonic system but also entangled with desiring and resistance.
What is new about the book is the author's patience and attentiveness, the gesture to not simply reduce ethnographic data to policy or theory but to put them in tension with ideology to simplify things and fit them into rigid categories. To tell such stories, with the elegant and emphatic prose, is to showcase how relationships continue in all their messiness.
What is new about the book is the author's patience and attentiveness, the gesture to not simply reduce ethnographic data to policy or theory but to put them in tension with ideology to simplify things and fit them into rigid categories. To tell such stories, with the elegant and emphatic prose, is to showcase how relationships continue in all their messiness.
August 20, 2025
"...to be related to another is to have one's life marked by the experience of varying levels of violence. Every act of violence only reinforces and regenerates the connection of lives and fates".
This was a great read. Govindrajan through a regaling of years of fieldwork in the Central Himalayas in India, paints a picture of the various ways in which human and nonhuman species relate with and to one another. From rhesus monkeys, sacrificial goats, and stories of sexually promiscuous bears, this book parses through the nuances of human and non-human relationships, concluding that it is vital in this day and age to "(re)create refuges for the human and the non human or other-than-human to become in relation to one another".
This was a great read. Govindrajan through a regaling of years of fieldwork in the Central Himalayas in India, paints a picture of the various ways in which human and nonhuman species relate with and to one another. From rhesus monkeys, sacrificial goats, and stories of sexually promiscuous bears, this book parses through the nuances of human and non-human relationships, concluding that it is vital in this day and age to "(re)create refuges for the human and the non human or other-than-human to become in relation to one another".
August 25, 2019
Tracing experiences from her time in Uttarakhand, Govindrajan explores the entwined relationships that humans and animals weave as they co-construct a shared existence. In stories of sacrificial goats, hybrid cows, marauding monkeys and pigs, and philandering bears, she explores the boundary regions of otherness, wildness and sacredness. She mixes deft storytelling with anthropological inquiry, raising troubling questions along the way of the dangers of caricaturing uniquely embodied, complex and personal relationships as merely 'human' and 'animal' as part of regressive and simplistic political ideologies.
January 13, 2021
"..An old man kept a notebook in which he made a little mark to represent each goat his family had sacrificed so that he could account for exactly how many deaths he was responsible. A guru told me that he muttered a little prayer for the soul of a goat before sacrificing him during midnight pujas to Masan, the lord of the cremation ground who comes in many different forms. A woman in her twenties told me she still wept every time she thought of the different goats that she had raised and then seen sacrificed; she said that she had taken a vow to never sacrifice an animal again. These were all small but significant acts of care that, without "calling undue attention to themselves" were directed toward other bodies."
The bond between humans and animals is a sacred one in the Central Himalayas, where the author spent countless days observing and exploring this relationship. Whether it's the emotional attachment of villagers with their domesticated cows, or the legends and fables attached to the wild boars and bears ("maybe the bear was a better husband!"), the book covers extensive analysis and reports on several fonts how the survival of the locals is affected or influenced by these.
The bond between humans and animals is a sacred one in the Central Himalayas, where the author spent countless days observing and exploring this relationship. Whether it's the emotional attachment of villagers with their domesticated cows, or the legends and fables attached to the wild boars and bears ("maybe the bear was a better husband!"), the book covers extensive analysis and reports on several fonts how the survival of the locals is affected or influenced by these.
June 20, 2025
I am a fan of Govindrajan’s work, and this has been on my reading list for a while. This ethnography did not disappoint! The ethnographic narratives are compelling, and it is very well written. Each chapter focuses on a particular animal. I enjoyed the chapters that focused on cows and goats. I would recommend this to anthropology students, especially those interested in multispecies and human-animal relationships.
February 28, 2026
Fascinating. How the author manages to capture various ways of viewing the intertwining of humans and animals through different case studies/ethnographies is exceptional. My favorite themes:
- Violence is embedded in love (e.g. through animal sacrifices). What "love" is varies greatly depending on one's social and political context.
- Interactions and care for the animals form cross-species kinship
- How women interact with wild animals reflects greater suppression and gender inequality
- Violence is embedded in love (e.g. through animal sacrifices). What "love" is varies greatly depending on one's social and political context.
- Interactions and care for the animals form cross-species kinship
- How women interact with wild animals reflects greater suppression and gender inequality
March 9, 2020
I had to read this for an anthropology class. If you are just getting into anthropology and are interested in animals and their relation to humans then it's a fairly good read. The author gives plenty of good and interesting examples from her fieldwork which makes it a bit easier to read. However I thought it was a bit slow and I wasn't immensely interested so 3 stars
December 5, 2022
Wonderfully written ethnography. Great descriptions of how particular people make relations with particular animals. I think she illustrates her understanding of relatedness very well and demonstrates that human-animal intimacy has existed long before current attempts to 'integrate' humans and animals.
May 24, 2021
About Animals and humans relationship and effect of sex, class, caste, religion.
I can't describe it properly but for me summary is that I am not shocked but sad about thinking of people mentioned in book.
I can't describe it properly but for me summary is that I am not shocked but sad about thinking of people mentioned in book.
November 24, 2022
poignant and so incredibly well-written. Govindrajan has the ability to weave together complex, multispecies relationships in ways that are both humane and animal in nature. i’ve recommended this book to others already
January 22, 2023
Fascinating book detailing the lives, beliefs and practices of Pahari residents of Uttarakhand, India. I was gripped by the descriptions of everyday mountain life and how Govindrajan connected them to larger themes of multispecies relations and Indian politics.
November 19, 2023
Totally engaging, brilliantly written, fascinating topic. Despite being thoroughly academic it felt warm and enjoyable to read and build momentary attachments to the subjects in the book. Where’s part two!?
May 1, 2025
Decided to read this as part of my thesis work. I felt kind of sceptical about the claims Govindrajan makes at some parts, but on the whole this is convincing and compelling work, written with clarity and much compassion. I think the cow, monkey and bear chapters are especially strong.
April 11, 2021
So interesting! Love the concept of exploring love and violence among humans and animals. Would have been a 4.5 or a 5 if the writing style was stronger (it was a little dry) but still enjoyed it!
September 1, 2022
very interesting research & i appreciate the fairly novel way in which it was presented. but, i still think that if you aren't already used to reading academic/scientific/research papers, this would be difficult to read.
December 24, 2023
Just so beautiful, Govindrajan is a beautiful writer and I will remember this one for a long long time
February 25, 2026
echt super super interessant, echt heel leerzaam en n aanrader zelfs als je geen antropologie interesse hebt!!
March 1, 2026
BRILLIANT!
Displaying 1 - 30 of 33 reviews