Books by Muhammad A Kavesh
Animal Enthusiasms: Life Beyond Cage and Leash in Rural Pakistan, 2021
Animal Enthusiasms explores how human-animal relationships are conceived, developed, and carried ... more Animal Enthusiasms explores how human-animal relationships are conceived, developed, and carried out in rural Pakistani Muslim society through an examination of practices such as pigeon flying, cockfighting, and dogfighting. Based on two years of ethnographic fieldwork carried out between 2008 and 2018 in rural South Punjab, the book examines the crucial cultural concept of shauq (enthusiasm) and provides critical insight into the changing ways of life in contemporary Pakistan. It tracks the relationships between men mediated by non-human animals and discusses how such relationships in rural areas are coded in complex ways. The chapters draw on debates around transformations of animal activities over time, the changing forms of human-animal intimacy and their impact on familial relationships, and rural Punjabi values attached to the performance of masculine honour. The book will be of interest to scholars of anthropology, multi-species ethnography, gender and masculinity studies, and South Asian studies.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Papers by Muhammad A Kavesh
American Anthropologist, 2023
What do the welcome and the refusal mean when the one who arrives is not human? By examining the ... more What do the welcome and the refusal mean when the one who arrives is not human? By examining the moral attitude created through the acceptance of European racing pigeons in Pakistan and the capture of Pakistani "spy pigeons" at the India-Pakistan border, this article unknots multiple meanings of arrival and explores how shared values of hospitality and hostility emerge and interplay when a more-than-human Other arrives in a foreign land as an invited guest or an uninvited intruder. Drawing on Jacques Derrida's (2000) construction of hostpitality and Punjabi Sufi poet-philosopher Waris Shah's discussion of badal (reciprocity), this article contends that in South Asia, reciprocal exchanges produce and sustain cooperative, competitive, or antagonistic bonds and propound an analytical avenue to critically rethink deconstruction of the home as a sovereign space.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
American Ethnologist, 2023
The imperial underpinning of the early anthropology of Pakistan constituted "the other" as a subj... more The imperial underpinning of the early anthropology of Pakistan constituted "the other" as a subject of comprehension, categorization, and containment. Later, with the post-9/11 geopolitical backdrop, anthropologists focused on selected themes such as religious and ethnic disparity and political nationalism, eliding some topics or groups. What would it mean for the anthropology of Pakistan to consider alienated themes and groups while emphasizing the infinity of the Other? How would conceiving the Other beyond a political or religious other, or even beyond a human subject, create a possibility of decolonizing the anthropology of Pakistan while exploring multiple futures-emergent, imagined, and expected? Such an approach critically moots a reexamination of theoretical, methodological, and epistemological tenets and urges the discipline to engage with diverse lifeworlds. It brings the face of the Other face-to-face with anthropology beyond humanity to consider all beings, intersubjective and collaborative experiences, and shared values.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Oxford Development Studies
Commercialization of agriculture in patriarchal rural Pakistan has transformed women’s critical r... more Commercialization of agriculture in patriarchal rural Pakistan has transformed women’s critical roles in pulses production and has re-organised the gendered division of labour in what used to be widely known as a ‘women’s crop’. Pulses are grown in the marginal and arid lands by small-holder farming families where women care for the crops as an extension of their other caring roles for the households. Based on an ethnographic study of women pulse farmers in Pakistan, this paper examines the complex relations of women with the crop and the challenges they face. It argues that the restoration of a caring relationship between women and the pulses crop through a re-animation of multispecies contact zones may be a way to ensure everyday food provisioning in rural Punjab, maintain traditional socio-cultural and ecological relationships, understand the masculinity that has pushed women to the margins, and value women’s contribution, experience, and knowledge in agriculture.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
The Journal of Asian Studies, Apr 3, 2023
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Anthropology Today, Feb 1, 2023
As we grapple with climate change and myriad ecological crises, conceptual tools from other disci... more As we grapple with climate change and myriad ecological crises, conceptual tools from other disciplines offer opportunities for new analytical frameworks. In this issue, we bring a multispecies anthropological approach into dialogue with biological understandings of the relationships involved in domestication. We examine mutualism as a series of interspecies social interactions that, despite some costs, benefit each partner species on balance.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Anthropology Today
The Pakistani government's decision to export thousands of donkeys to China to manufactur... more The Pakistani government's decision to export thousands of donkeys to China to manufacture Chinese traditional medicine (ejiao) threatens the interdependence between donkeys and their keepers. This article seeks to unravel the mutualism between humans and donkeys in rural South Punjab and examines how forces of globalism and capitalism commodify the equine through parasitic disregard.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
OXFORD DEVELOPMENT STUDIES, 2023
Commercialization of agriculture in patriarchal rural Pakistan has transformed women’s critical r... more Commercialization of agriculture in patriarchal rural Pakistan has transformed women’s critical roles in pulses production and has re-organised
the gendered division of labour in what used to be widely known as
a ‘women’s crop’. Pulses are grown in the marginal and arid lands by
small-holder farming families where women care for the crops as an
extension of their other caring roles for the households. Based on
an ethnographic study of women pulse farmers in Pakistan, this paper examines the complex relations of women with the crop and the challenges
they face. It argues that the restoration of a caring relationship between
women and the pulses crop through a re-animation of multispecies contact
zones may be a way to ensure everyday food provisioning in rural
Punjab, maintain traditional socio-cultural and ecological relationships,
understand the masculinity that has pushed women to the margins, and
value women’s contribution, experience, and knowledge in agriculture.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Anthropology Today, 2023
The Pakistani government's decision to export thousands of donkeys to China to manufacture Chines... more The Pakistani government's decision to export thousands of donkeys to China to manufacture Chinese traditional medicine (ejiao) threatens the interdependence between donkeys and their keepers. This article seeks to unravel the mutualism between humans and donkeys in rural South Punjab and examines how forces of globalism and capitalism commodify the equine through parasitic disregard.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Anthropology Today, 2023
In the sub-Saharan African forests, a rather non-descript little
bird shares an intriguing mutual... more In the sub-Saharan African forests, a rather non-descript little
bird shares an intriguing mutualistic foraging relationship
with humans. Two species of the greater honeyguide have
led people to honeybee colonies for thousands of years. In a
communicative exchange, the hunters attract the honeyguide
through specific whistles and calls. Moving from branch
to branch with whistles, flapping of wings and fanning of
tail feathers, the bird then guides the hunters to a hive. The
hunters break open the hive and take the honey, while the
honeyguide benefits from the larvae and waxy honeycombs
the small bird could not otherwise access.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, 2017
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
The Senses and Society, 2021
How can care and cruelty, intimacy and indifference, passion and
combat, and attachment and detac... more How can care and cruelty, intimacy and indifference, passion and
combat, and attachment and detachment coexist in interspecies
relations? How can we develop a deeper understanding of morethan-
human relatedness through the study of this nexus?
Specifically, how can an understanding of cockfighting as an
expression of intimacy lead us to redefine crucial cultural themes
such as “masculinity” and “honor” in a rural Pakistani setting? Based
on yearlong ethnographic fieldwork in rural South Punjab, this
paper argues that in order to understand the multiple modalities
of human-rooster relationship, our analysis should delve beneath
the visual spectacle and engage with local ways of sensing and
understandings of the practice. It contends that a multisensory
analysis of cockfighting that focuses on the interplay of different
senses – including the sound of roosters, the smell of their bodies,
their preference in taste, texture of their plumage and muscles, and
the sight of their fight – can help critique and refigure Clifford
Geertz’s interpretation of cockfighting as a “cultural text.”
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
The Australian Journal of Anthropology, 2021
The construct of multispecies anthropology has helped
explain some of the ways through which huma... more The construct of multispecies anthropology has helped
explain some of the ways through which humans develop
sensory and embodied connectedness with the more-than-human.
Yet there is a need to fully comprehend how such
connectedness leads to the discovery of the inner self.
Through an ethnographic study carried out with rural South
Punjabi pigeon flyers in Pakistan between 2008 and 2018,
this paper argues that companionship with pigeons allows
people to generate a meaningful relationship with their animals,
explore their inner emotions and achieve a deeper understanding
of the self. This paper takes inspiration from
Donna Haraway's critique of Jacques Derrida's cat encounter,
and philosophical thoughts of a 12th-century Muslim
mystic poet, Farid ud-Din Attar, to examine how becoming with
pigeons enables the flyers to structure their lifeworlds,
develop entrenched companionship and shape their social
choices to achieve wellbeing despite everyday social troubles
and emotional anxieties.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
The Australian Journal of Anthropology, 2020
Free article link:
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/share/author/VHEPVCFVBI2ZVFNCFPKS?target=10.1... more Free article link:
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/share/author/VHEPVCFVBI2ZVFNCFPKS?target=10.1111/taja.12379
This special issue suggests that the need to examine the entangled
lives of species, selves and other beings through a
multisensory perspective is crucial and timely. Developing
on a sensory analysis, one that emerges through what Anna
Tsing refers to as the ‘arts of noticing’ (2015), this introductory
paper explores how both nonhuman and human lives
are intertwined, and how their close examination can guide
anthropologists in their ability to capture the subtleties of
more-than-human engagement, connection and relatedness.
Through articles within this issue from Australian anthropology
and beyond, we ask how becoming-with more-thanhumans
helps us to construct a post-humanist analysis in
the combination of sensory anthropology and multispecies
anthropology. Through a combination of these two fields,
the paper suggests, anthropology can take up the opportunity
to think about animals as subjects, through our ability
to communicate beyond language and to engage in a more
meaningful way through interspecies knowledge-making.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Pakistan Journal of Historical Studies, 2019
Before the mid-nineteenth century, pigeon flying, cockfighting, and dogfighting were predominantl... more Before the mid-nineteenth century, pigeon flying, cockfighting, and dogfighting were predominantly elite pursuits in India, a part of court recreation, and favoured pastimes of local rulers and early colonial officials. For the Indian elite and the British, these sports served as symbols of power and displayed different forms of overlapping and contesting masculinities. Later, in the late colonial era, the elites withdrew their support from these activities and adopted “gentlemanly” sports like cricket, tennis and hunting. The common people, whose limited contact with the British meant that they could practise many “banned” activities with few repercussions, enthusiastically adopted pigeon flying, cockfighting, and dogfighting. This paper examines the socio-historical transformation of these three pursuits and explains how they canvas a plurality of masculinities that evolved since the sixteenth century. Till present times, many rural people continue to practise these animal related sports in ways similar to those of the Mughal elites as a means of fulfilling their enthusiasm, demonstrating their domination over others, achieving status among peers, and reproducing masculinities.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
South Asia, 2019
The concept of shauq or shauk connotes a passionate interest, galvanising individuals across Sout... more The concept of shauq or shauk connotes a passionate interest, galvanising individuals across South Asia to devote time, energy and resources beyond their expected social roles and towards particular chosen activities. This essay explores explications of shauq encountered in the course of field research on men's pigeon flying in Pakistan and village women's singing in India, situating insights from the field amid available scholarly literature on shauq. Shauq can make fieldwork the arena for a spirited transmission of knowledge. We explore how people express the well-being emerging from shauq, the sociality of shared interest, and why shauq can be dangerous.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Society and Animal, 2019
Dog fighting, along with other nonhuman-animal-fighting activities, is a popular pastime in rural... more Dog fighting, along with other nonhuman-animal-fighting activities, is a popular pastime in rural South Punjab, Pakistan. This article explicates dog fighting and discusses its symbolic significance to those who control the game, organize it, and participate in the performance. In discussing the activity, the paper raises multiple questions: how do rural men develop an attachment to their fighting dogs? What motivates the men to engage in dog fighting? How is dog fighting a cultural practice? What type of social gains do dog fighters make when there is no gambling involved? Finally, what symbolic meanings can be drawn from this activity from an emic perspective? The article is based on year-long ethnographic fieldwork with dog fighters in South Punjab, Pakistan, and examines the activity within the Punjabi cultural context where it is taken as an enthusiastic predilection (shauq) for displaying masculinity (mardāngī) to achieve honor (izzat).
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Book Chapters by Muhammad A Kavesh
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Uploads
Books by Muhammad A Kavesh
Papers by Muhammad A Kavesh
the gendered division of labour in what used to be widely known as
a ‘women’s crop’. Pulses are grown in the marginal and arid lands by
small-holder farming families where women care for the crops as an
extension of their other caring roles for the households. Based on
an ethnographic study of women pulse farmers in Pakistan, this paper examines the complex relations of women with the crop and the challenges
they face. It argues that the restoration of a caring relationship between
women and the pulses crop through a re-animation of multispecies contact
zones may be a way to ensure everyday food provisioning in rural
Punjab, maintain traditional socio-cultural and ecological relationships,
understand the masculinity that has pushed women to the margins, and
value women’s contribution, experience, and knowledge in agriculture.
bird shares an intriguing mutualistic foraging relationship
with humans. Two species of the greater honeyguide have
led people to honeybee colonies for thousands of years. In a
communicative exchange, the hunters attract the honeyguide
through specific whistles and calls. Moving from branch
to branch with whistles, flapping of wings and fanning of
tail feathers, the bird then guides the hunters to a hive. The
hunters break open the hive and take the honey, while the
honeyguide benefits from the larvae and waxy honeycombs
the small bird could not otherwise access.
combat, and attachment and detachment coexist in interspecies
relations? How can we develop a deeper understanding of morethan-
human relatedness through the study of this nexus?
Specifically, how can an understanding of cockfighting as an
expression of intimacy lead us to redefine crucial cultural themes
such as “masculinity” and “honor” in a rural Pakistani setting? Based
on yearlong ethnographic fieldwork in rural South Punjab, this
paper argues that in order to understand the multiple modalities
of human-rooster relationship, our analysis should delve beneath
the visual spectacle and engage with local ways of sensing and
understandings of the practice. It contends that a multisensory
analysis of cockfighting that focuses on the interplay of different
senses – including the sound of roosters, the smell of their bodies,
their preference in taste, texture of their plumage and muscles, and
the sight of their fight – can help critique and refigure Clifford
Geertz’s interpretation of cockfighting as a “cultural text.”
explain some of the ways through which humans develop
sensory and embodied connectedness with the more-than-human.
Yet there is a need to fully comprehend how such
connectedness leads to the discovery of the inner self.
Through an ethnographic study carried out with rural South
Punjabi pigeon flyers in Pakistan between 2008 and 2018,
this paper argues that companionship with pigeons allows
people to generate a meaningful relationship with their animals,
explore their inner emotions and achieve a deeper understanding
of the self. This paper takes inspiration from
Donna Haraway's critique of Jacques Derrida's cat encounter,
and philosophical thoughts of a 12th-century Muslim
mystic poet, Farid ud-Din Attar, to examine how becoming with
pigeons enables the flyers to structure their lifeworlds,
develop entrenched companionship and shape their social
choices to achieve wellbeing despite everyday social troubles
and emotional anxieties.
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/share/author/VHEPVCFVBI2ZVFNCFPKS?target=10.1111/taja.12379
This special issue suggests that the need to examine the entangled
lives of species, selves and other beings through a
multisensory perspective is crucial and timely. Developing
on a sensory analysis, one that emerges through what Anna
Tsing refers to as the ‘arts of noticing’ (2015), this introductory
paper explores how both nonhuman and human lives
are intertwined, and how their close examination can guide
anthropologists in their ability to capture the subtleties of
more-than-human engagement, connection and relatedness.
Through articles within this issue from Australian anthropology
and beyond, we ask how becoming-with more-thanhumans
helps us to construct a post-humanist analysis in
the combination of sensory anthropology and multispecies
anthropology. Through a combination of these two fields,
the paper suggests, anthropology can take up the opportunity
to think about animals as subjects, through our ability
to communicate beyond language and to engage in a more
meaningful way through interspecies knowledge-making.
Book Chapters by Muhammad A Kavesh
the gendered division of labour in what used to be widely known as
a ‘women’s crop’. Pulses are grown in the marginal and arid lands by
small-holder farming families where women care for the crops as an
extension of their other caring roles for the households. Based on
an ethnographic study of women pulse farmers in Pakistan, this paper examines the complex relations of women with the crop and the challenges
they face. It argues that the restoration of a caring relationship between
women and the pulses crop through a re-animation of multispecies contact
zones may be a way to ensure everyday food provisioning in rural
Punjab, maintain traditional socio-cultural and ecological relationships,
understand the masculinity that has pushed women to the margins, and
value women’s contribution, experience, and knowledge in agriculture.
bird shares an intriguing mutualistic foraging relationship
with humans. Two species of the greater honeyguide have
led people to honeybee colonies for thousands of years. In a
communicative exchange, the hunters attract the honeyguide
through specific whistles and calls. Moving from branch
to branch with whistles, flapping of wings and fanning of
tail feathers, the bird then guides the hunters to a hive. The
hunters break open the hive and take the honey, while the
honeyguide benefits from the larvae and waxy honeycombs
the small bird could not otherwise access.
combat, and attachment and detachment coexist in interspecies
relations? How can we develop a deeper understanding of morethan-
human relatedness through the study of this nexus?
Specifically, how can an understanding of cockfighting as an
expression of intimacy lead us to redefine crucial cultural themes
such as “masculinity” and “honor” in a rural Pakistani setting? Based
on yearlong ethnographic fieldwork in rural South Punjab, this
paper argues that in order to understand the multiple modalities
of human-rooster relationship, our analysis should delve beneath
the visual spectacle and engage with local ways of sensing and
understandings of the practice. It contends that a multisensory
analysis of cockfighting that focuses on the interplay of different
senses – including the sound of roosters, the smell of their bodies,
their preference in taste, texture of their plumage and muscles, and
the sight of their fight – can help critique and refigure Clifford
Geertz’s interpretation of cockfighting as a “cultural text.”
explain some of the ways through which humans develop
sensory and embodied connectedness with the more-than-human.
Yet there is a need to fully comprehend how such
connectedness leads to the discovery of the inner self.
Through an ethnographic study carried out with rural South
Punjabi pigeon flyers in Pakistan between 2008 and 2018,
this paper argues that companionship with pigeons allows
people to generate a meaningful relationship with their animals,
explore their inner emotions and achieve a deeper understanding
of the self. This paper takes inspiration from
Donna Haraway's critique of Jacques Derrida's cat encounter,
and philosophical thoughts of a 12th-century Muslim
mystic poet, Farid ud-Din Attar, to examine how becoming with
pigeons enables the flyers to structure their lifeworlds,
develop entrenched companionship and shape their social
choices to achieve wellbeing despite everyday social troubles
and emotional anxieties.
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/share/author/VHEPVCFVBI2ZVFNCFPKS?target=10.1111/taja.12379
This special issue suggests that the need to examine the entangled
lives of species, selves and other beings through a
multisensory perspective is crucial and timely. Developing
on a sensory analysis, one that emerges through what Anna
Tsing refers to as the ‘arts of noticing’ (2015), this introductory
paper explores how both nonhuman and human lives
are intertwined, and how their close examination can guide
anthropologists in their ability to capture the subtleties of
more-than-human engagement, connection and relatedness.
Through articles within this issue from Australian anthropology
and beyond, we ask how becoming-with more-thanhumans
helps us to construct a post-humanist analysis in
the combination of sensory anthropology and multispecies
anthropology. Through a combination of these two fields,
the paper suggests, anthropology can take up the opportunity
to think about animals as subjects, through our ability
to communicate beyond language and to engage in a more
meaningful way through interspecies knowledge-making.
snow leopard conservation and develops on more than 15 years of qualitative fieldwork to present an engaging ethnographic portrait of the tangled relationships of wildlife-farmers and villager-conservationists in the Baltistan region of Northern Pakistan. The theoretically dense and historically rich chapters provide a nuanced understanding of how the life of the snow leopard is intertwined with the life of the goat and other livestock that are kept by the poor Balti herders in open corrals to meet their everyday nutritional needs.