Being macaque: Nonhuman ethnographies of urban India

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Co-Authored with Maan Barua, In: Posthumanism and India: A Critical Cartography (Eds. Banerji D, Islam M M and Sengupta S). Bloomsbury Academic India, New Delhi, pp. 75-91
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We are confronting, in recent times, an urgent need to investigate multispecies ethnographies of non/humans and delineate the potential of such unexplored approaches to understand the sentient lives of animals within increasingly human-dominated, ecological contexts of the Anthropocene. This is especially true for a country like India, where the close physical and emotional proximity of human and nonhuman species over thousands of years have not only led to intense interspecies behavioural exchanges and the generation of immersive and affective, more-than-human environments but also, in turn, to the slow, but irreversible, synurbisation of wild nonhuman populations in recent times. Drawing on our ongoing studies on the synurbisation of macaques, a group of remarkably adaptable nonhuman primate species, from across the country, we highlight, in this chapter, what living in drastically altered socioecological environments might mean to both macaques and humans, and, in the process, reflect on the urban ecologies of our future.

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