Anand Pandian

Race, nature, and the politics of difference

How do race and nature work as terrains of power? From eighteenth-century claims that climate determined character to twentieth-century medical debates about the racial dimensions of genetic disease, concepts of race and nature are integrally connected, woven into notions of body, landscape, and nation. Yet rarely are these complex entanglements explored in relation to the contemporary cultural politics of difference. This volume takes up that challenge. Distinguished contributors chart the traffic between race and nature across sites including rainforests, colonies, and courtrooms. Synthesizing a number of fields—anthropology, cultural studies, and critical race, feminist, and postcolonial theory—this collection analyzes diverse historical, cultural, and spatial locations. Contributors draw on thinkers such as Fanon, Foucault, and Gramsci to investigate themes ranging from exclusionary notions of whiteness and wilderness in North America to linguistic purity in Germany. Some essayists focus on the racialized violence of imperial rule and evolutionary science and the biopolitics of race and class in the Guatemalan civil war. Others examine how race and nature are fused in biogenetic discourse—in the emergence of “racial diseases” such as sickle cell anemia, in a case of mistaken in vitro fertilization in which a white couple gave birth to a black child, and even in the world of North American dog breeding. Several essays tackle the politics of representation surrounding environmental justice movements, transnational sex tourism, and indigenous struggles for land and resource rights in Indonesia and Brazil. Contributors. Bruce Braun, Giovanna Di Chiro, Paul Gilroy, Steven Gregory, Donna Haraway, Jake Kosek, Tania Murray Li, Uli Linke, Zine Magubane, Donald S. Moore, Diane Nelson, Anand Pandian, Alcida Rita Ramos, Keith Wailoo, Robyn Wiegman

Crooked stalks : cultivating virtue in South India

How do people come to live as they ought to live? Crooked Stalks seeks an answer to this enduring question in diverse practices of cultivation : in the moral horizons of development intervention, in the forms of virtue through which people may work upon their own desires, deeds, and habits, and in the material labors that turn inhabited worlds into environments for both moral and natural growth. Focusing on the colonial subjection and contemporary condition of the Piramalai Kallar caste—classified, condemned, and policed for decades as a “criminal tribe”—Anand Pandian argues that the work of cultivation in all of these senses has been essential to the pursuit of modernity in south India. Colonial engagements with the Kallars in the early twentieth century relied heavily upon agrarian strategies of moral reform, an approach that echoed longstanding imaginations of the rural cultivator as a morally cultivated being in Tamil literary, moral, and religious tradition. These intertwined histories profoundly shape how people of the community struggle with themselves as ethical subjects today. In vivid, inventive, and engaging prose, Pandian weaves together ethnographic encounters, archival investigations, and elements drawn from Tamil poetry, prose, and popular cinema. Tacking deftly between ploughed soils and plundered orchards, schoolroom lessons and stationhouse registers, household hearths and riverine dams, he reveals moral life in the postcolonial present as a palimpsest of traces inherited from multiple pasts. Pursuing these legacies through the fragmentary play of desire, dream, slander, and counsel, Pandian calls attention not only to the moral potential of ordinary existence, but also to the inescapable force of accident, chance, and failure in the making of ethical lives. Rarely are the moral coordinates of modern power sketched with such intimacy and delicacy.

Predatory Care: The Imperial Hunt in Mughal and British India

Taking the hunt as both metaphor of rule and political practice, this paper compares the predatory exercises of two imperial formations in India: the late British Raj and the sixteenth-century Mughal empire. The British pursuit of man-eaters confronted feline terror with sovereign might, securing the bodies and hearts of resistant subjects through spectacles of responsible force. The Mughal hunt, on the other hand, took unruly nobles and chieftains as the objects of its fearful care, winning their obedient submission through the exercise of a predatory sovereignty. Both instances of ‘predatory care’ shed light on the troubling intimacy of biopolitical cultivation and sovereign violence.

The remembering village Looking back on Louis Dumont from rural Tamil Nadu

Louis Dumont (1911–98) was one of the foremost anthropologists of the 20th century and a central figure in essential debates on the sociology of India. He is known especially for his work on social institutions such as caste, and for studying such institutions from a holistic and comparative standpoint. What is not acknowledged often enough, however, is that his later work on subjects such as hierarchy and purity—the focus even now of lively controversy—built outward from extensive ethnographic fieldwork conducted in south India. In an early essay on renunciation published in Contributions to Indian Sociology in 1960, for example, Dumont notes that ‘the direct study of a small Hindu group led me to abstract certain principles which, it then appeared, could be more widely applied’ (Dumont 1960: 37). Between 1948 and 1950, Dumont spent two years in Tamil Nadu and eight months, in particular, studying the Piramalai Kallar caste in the countryside west of Madurai. T.N. Madan has written that Dumont’s experiences with the Kallars and more generally in the Tamil country had made the strongest and most durable impressions upon him (Madan 1999: 478). As Dumont mused in a 1979 interview with Jean-Claude Galey: ‘The Tamils are born sociologists and the culture is beautiful. I am deeply attached to the Tamils’ (Galey 1982: 21).

Thinking like a mountain

Comment on Kohn, Eduardo. 2013. How forests think: Toward an anthropology beyond the human. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Securing the rural citizen The anti-Kallar movement of 1896

This article concerns the politics of security and caste difference in the late nineteenth century Madras Presidency. Relying on a vernacular principle of interpretation emerging from the colonial archive itself—a Sanskrit ‘Law of Coincidence’—the article makes a case for collective identity in colonial India as a conjunctural attribution. I closely examine the trajectory of a widespread peasant movement that sought in 1896 to evict a single caste from hundreds of settlements altogether. The article tracks an intimate traffic between administrative sociology and native stereotype that converged on an assessment of this caste as thieving and predatory by nature. This racialised politics of intrinsic character enabled a popular programme of violent eviction. At the same time, peasant efforts to secure property and territory from threat may be understood as an alternative project of rural government, one that marked a crucial turn in the development of a moral order in the southern Tamil countryside.

In the Light of Experience: An Indian Cameraman

Light invites an epic scale of imagination. Focusing on the thought and work of a contemporary Indian cameraman, this article explores experience of light in cinema. I examine practical struggles to engage light’s movement and potency, in relation to cinematographic problems of composition, effect, and aesthetics. Relying most closely on ethnographic fieldwork with a studio set constructed for a 2010 Tamil feature film, the article devotes sustained attention to the interplay between luminescent philosophy and practice—to interrelated forms of thinking and working with light.