(cancelled) Social Anthropology Seminar - Dr Nayanika Mathur
| Dates: | 23 March 2020 |
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| Times: | 16:00 - 18:00 |
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| What is it: | Seminar |
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| Organiser: | School of Social Sciences |
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| Speaker: | Dr Nayanika Mathur |
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Entrapment: new ways of seeing big cats in India
This paper is taken from my forthcoming book, Crooked Cats, which is centred upon understanding how humans live in close proximity to potentially predatory big cats in contemporary India. In the talk, I study the conservationist practice of camera trapping in tandem with the expansion of CCTVs, smart phones, and the use of Whatsapp to circulate images of tigers and leopards. I argue that these new technologies are leading us to re-see big cats in critical and hitherto under-studied ways. Believed by many to constitute the future of conservation, these new technologies for entrapping animals are proliferating, unleashing a range of emotions – ranging from shock and horror, spine-chills, laughter, and – even – tears. These emotive responses to new visuals of big cats are often overlooked in the technocratic desire to know more about our nonhuman counterparts. What also remains unremarked upon are the ways new forms of secretive and elite knowledges are being created with troubling ethical questions of who comes to know what and who doesn’t about our feline friends and, sometime, enemies. The moral questions of should we or shouldn’t we share novel bits of information revealed by camera-trapping exercises or access to security cameras should push us to reconsider the ethics of both conservationism and amateur wildlife photography in new and unexpected manners. New legal questions related to copyrights and ownership of these images and knowledges are also beginning to be opened-up. I outline these ethical and legal questions in tandem with a description of the new forms of beastly intimacies that the entrapment of big cats is allowing for.
Speaker
Dr Nayanika Mathur
Role: Speaker
Organisation: University of Oxford
Travel and Contact Information
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2nd Floor Boardroom - 2.016/017
Arthur Lewis Building
Manchester
