Naisargi N. Davé won the 2024 Gregory Bateson Book Prize for her book, Indifference: On the Praxis of Interspecies Being. In awarding the prize, the Society for Cultural Anthropology jury praised Davé for her exquisite writing and for making a significant contribution to anthropology, offering a compelling case for indifference as a desirable ethics of relationality. In this interview, Davé reflects on key aspects of the book, including what drew her to indifference as a way of understanding interspecies relationality, the relationship between ethics and politics in anthropological thought, and her approach to the craft of ethnographic writing.

Poornima Rajeshwar (PR): I want to begin with the observation that there are a few subtly distinct yet interconnected ways in which “indifference” as an orientation emerges in the book: as a refusal to stare or scrutinize—the opposite of curiosity; as an ethical practice without attachment to outcomes or differentiation—“an ethics without a future” (Davé 2023, 56); and as a mode of coexistence grounded in mutual regard, without the compulsion to intimately understand or transcend difference.

You offer indifference as an alternate ground of ethics—as not-desiring difference—while simultaneously pushing against the conventional view of indifference as apathy or disengagement. Could you start us off by reflecting on how you arrived at “indifference” as an analytic for your project?

Naisargi Davé (ND): Thank you! I first started thinking about indifference about a decade ago when I gave a paper at the annual conference on South Asia on a panel about love. One of the things that struck me was how the animal “lover’s” love is understood as a kind of failed affect because of the animalist’s inability to differentiate along a hierarchy of values, to differentiate between human worth and animal worth, or even to differentiate among animals—in other words, the animalist’s love is failed love—queer love, perhaps in an older, pre-homonormativity sense—because it doesn’t or can’t discriminate. If proper love is the ability and readiness to differentiate, what might a queer, improper, interspecies being-together-not-quite-together look like? And that is where I settled on indifference, as a readiness to live in difference, to refuse the humanist/romantic polemics of difference towards immanent relationality.

PR: Through a range of stories and encounters you demonstrate how indifference, rather than an investment in difference, can open new possibilities for living side-by-side rather than face-to-face with others. What also struck me is how the two orientations can at times produce similar effects. Both can result in similar forms of action; both can also lead to inaction, or a refusal to be overwhelmed by the demands of care.

For instance, you describe a man who insisted on removing a dying bull from his property in the name of ahimsa (nonviolence), drawing upon a doctrine of compassion to justify his (in)actions. Contrary to viewing this as a form of indifference to animal suffering, you read it as a deeply “interested” act of refusal to be emotionally or materially implicated. At the same time, Dipesh's daily efforts as an animal welfare worker who saves dogs from maggots in their bodies but not necessarily from other dangers, such as being hit by a vehicle on the road, also result in a form of inaction, but one that emerges from an ethics of indifference to the consequences of his care work. 

What do you think these two orientations—difference and indifference—might share? In the limits they impose on ethical practice, or in the kinds of action they enable?

ND: That’s a perfect follow-up question because my answer above risks suggesting that indifferent care is “better.” It is not always or not necessarily. It’s simply a difference of orientation. But let me use another example, because the landowner is just too easy to dislike. In another example of inaction, a Jain gaushala manager who cares for abandoned cows for a living refuses to treat a bloody, maggot-ridden wound on a calf because the maggot and the calf “equally” have a right to life. Here, there is a refusal to differentiate (between maggot and cow) but it’s premised on a foundational difference: between life and non-life. The gaushala manager’s commitment to difference requires inaction and has to be indifferent (in the vernacular sense) to the sensorium of the present moment: the calf’s evident decline, the smell of putrefaction. In the Dipesh example, Dipesh, I think, is immersed in the world of experience in which differences of capacity and attention are always inescapably emergent, requiring judgement, including the decision to not act. In the first example, the world of experience must conform to first principles. In the second, I argue, practice (including that of action followed by inaction) arises immanently from the world of experience.

PR: Throughout the book, but particularly in chapter three, you offer a compelling critique of the imperative to “contextualize,” as a demand for consistency that exhausts “otherwise readings.” Even as you situate animal ethics in questions of caste, Hindu fascism, or liberalism—working through their implications for India—you also point to the limits of overdetermined frames that often come to stand for context. You are instead interested in how immanent acts and gestures carry their own history, which may depart from the dominant frames.

What does it mean for you to contextualize in this manner? How did you navigate the tension between engaging histories and structures that, as you say, do matter, and resisting their “rote demands” (Davé 2023, 72)?

ND: Contextualizing with “oblique cuts” (a phrase I borrow from the Brazilian novelist Clarice Lispector) means two things to me: one, relying on ethical judgement and, two, thinking aesthetically. I navigated the tension you point out—between providing necessary context and resisting the rote demands of “context”—primarily through a lot of trial and error. Too much context at first, which sapped the life out of the ethnography by explaining it away; overcorrecting in another iteration, which risked outsourcing work to the reader or absolving myself of interpretative commitment. So, the ethical judgement was about deciding what the truths of the book are and how those truths scaffold and infuse the text. I suppose you could call these the “non-negotiables.” But not everything is non-negotiable! So, thinking aesthetically, what can be played with, what frames can be squashed or bent out of shape, what felicitous associations made or constellations engendered?

PR: I want to extend the previous question to an enduring concern in anthropology on the relationship between ethics and politics. In the book, at times you foreground political formations, as in the co-authored chapter with Alok Gupta, where you argue that cow protection in India—like the protection of women—is not about cows or women, but about preserving “the exclusive Hindu anthropatriarchal right to bestial sex,” (Davé 2023, 145). At other moments, you turn to ethical practice as something that exceeds and cannot be subsumed by the political structures that enable it. For instance, in attending to the lives of animal welfarists in India you resist flattening interspecies relationality as purely anthropocentric or instrumental to ideological projects of fascism or liberalism.

Could you elaborate on this tension between ethics and politics, and how it unfolds in the book?

ND: This, too, follows so nicely, thank you. I define the political in the book as “that which is always determined by context,” which is also to say, politics is overdetermined by a given frame, for example, the state, the community, the human. Politics is important, obviously. But it’s also not everything. The stance I take in the book, drawing from a combination of Fred Moten and Stefano Harney and Julietta Singh, is what I called depolitics: on ongoing obliqueness to lines of force, or to put it another way, a never being satisfied with political explanations or political solutions. (Even though the explanation of cow protection as a preservation of the Hindu anthropatriarchal right to bestial sex is, I think, a good one!) Ethics, on the other hand, I define as necessarily being immanent. Ethics can give rise to new politics or resist existing politics, but is not determined by politics. This distinction is important in Indifference because what is thinkable in terms of interspecies relations is so profoundly limited by the sphere of the political in which what prevails is the metaphor and sensibility of war. In both politics and ethics, something must be decided for and against—choice is unavoidable. But in ethics, as in the Dipesh example above, we don’t know what it is until we enter, or become, the situation.

PR: One of the striking features of Indifference is its affective range. You are explicitly attuned to the moods that accompany animal welfare work. The book moves between scenes that evoke laughter and others that register horror or deep discomfort, drawing out the joy, absurdity, hopelessness, and endurance that shape these encounters. How did you think about tone as part of your writing craft? What challenges did you face in working across such emotional registers?

ND: Thank you, I’m so glad you found the book funny, and I appreciate how you put this. I’m not sure I thought much about the tone, other than knowing at every step how important tone is, especially for a book like this one. The main challenges are linked: trying to convey something new on a subject most people already have firm political commitments around, and wanting a reader to want to stay with material that even I want to turn away from. I needed to write something that offers and contains openings. And that’s where writing with levity comes in—having a light touch, making laugh, and laughing at self-seriousness. At the same time, I think ethnography—interspecies ethnography particularly, but not exclusively—is a bit of a grief genre. I read Juno Parreñas’s Decolonizing Extinction and Alex Blanchette’s Porkopolis with my Anthropology of Animals class last term and we were struck by just how much loss there is in both of those books, and the interesting stoicism that the ethnographer has to maintain to both do and write the work. Loss is a theme in Indifference, and I also try to draw attention to those practices and performances of attempted distance from scenes of death. Lastly, what you say about the range of emotional registers, that’s just trying to stay true to the world of the ethnography.

PR: I would like to ask you to reflect more on form as it relates to ethnographic methods. You travel with your questions and ideas across several parts of India—Udaipur, Delhi, Mumbai, Hyderabad—visiting farms, abattoirs, and NGO offices; speaking to activists; accompanying welfare workers on the street; and working in slaughterhouses. You also weave in events, stories, and figures from popular discourse and shared imaginaries.

How did the affective and ethical stakes of indifference—as “not acquiring, not desiring, not in thrall, not hankering, not assimilating, not repairing, not consuming, not anthropologizing, not staring”—influence your ethnographic approach as well as the narrative form the book ultimately takes?

ND: As I’ve jokingly said in other answers to this question, while I’m quite systematic and orderly in most areas of my life, as an ethnographer I’m much more openhearted and intuitive. If I were to describe this as a principle, though, it’s an ethos of Derridean hospitality: saying yes to who and what turns up. This method, if we want to call it that, first became apparent to me as an ethic rather than a method when I was doing research for my first book, Queer Activism in India. It was clear to me, as the beneficiary of generosity and as a student of queer worldmaking, how central radical hospitality is to queer life. When researching Indifference—a queer book about queer ways to be in the world with nonhuman others—radical hospitality became both a method and a theoretical approach: an indifferent way of learning, and an indifferent modality of care. By “indifferent way of learning,” I mean, what kinships and constellations come into view when we approach ethnography with an indifference to the boundedness of categories? Of course a book about nonhumans would be a queer anti-caste book and a book about queer people would be an anti-caste book about nonhumans! And by “indifferent modality of care,” I mean that radical hospitality is not uncritical or undemanding. Yes, it indifferently says yes to what turns up, but what makes it radical are its expectations: of attention, of space to flourish, of being alongside, of respect and regard.

PR: There are a few particularly exciting pages in the book where you go back and forth on how to understand Dipesh’s commitment to animal care. You offer a reading of his actions as grounded in indifference—a kind of relentless attention to street animals without overt identification or investment in outcomes. But a few pages later, you stage a moment of self-doubt after finding field notes where Dipesh asks you to take a picture of him while he works (Davé 2023, 57). Suddenly, he appears interested, his ethics not so immanent after all.

Of course, you’re making a larger point about how the demand to resolve contradictions—our own or others’—can be exhausting, and can exhaust people out of action.

But as a closing thought, I’m drawn to the realness of that moment: the feeling of not quite knowing how to think about a situation, or the frameworks that carry our analysis. What are some of the questions from your fieldwork, or from writing Indifference, that remain unresolved for you—and how do they inform what you're working on now?

ND: I’m working on a new project I’m calling Murder: The Social Life of Violent Death in 21st Century India. It shows how the contours of personhood are, paradoxically, shaped by violent death and how we talk about it. It takes up foundational questions that animated both my previous books, Queer Activism in India and Indifference: who and what matters, how do those things come to matter, and who and what gets to be? But on a more personal level, the questions that remain unresolved for me from Indifference are variations on how to live with attention and grace (and how to write about those who do).