Abstract
This chapter explores the powerful potential of cross-cultural encounters to disrupt naturalised boundaries between nature and culture, and between human and nonhuman animals. It uses the Bishnoi as a case study to demonstrate this potential. The Bishnoi are a small Vaishnavite community most densely located in Rajasthan. They are well known in Northwest India for defending and protecting the environment, sometimes even sacrificing their own lives to save trees or wild animals. This chapter is informed by the author’s short-term ethnographic study in the winter of 2013, and argues that these types of encounters with alternative ontological systems can provide transformative opportunities to imagine ourselves and others in new ways, potentially challenging harmful, divisive, or alienating ways of experiencing and understanding the world.
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Notes
- 1.
The term ‘Western’ is problematic; like many other scholars in the field I use the term as a kind of shorthand to refer to a tradition of thought and science in which the nature–culture dualism is deeply rooted.
- 2.
Amrita Devi’s quote ‘Sir santhe rooke rahe to bhi sasto jaan’ has been be translated in several ways, including ‘A chopped head is cheaper than a felled tree’ and ‘If a tree is saved even at the cost of one’s head, it’s worth it’.
- 3.
See Times of India (2014) “Bishnoi Youth Dies Protecting Chinkaras in Jodhpur,” The Times of India, January 30. Accessed April 1, 2015. http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/jaipur/Bishnoi-youth-dies-protecting-chinkaras-in-Jodhpur/articleshow/29571618.cms.
- 4.
See Reichert (2013) for more on the concept of sacrifice in the Bishnoi context.
- 5.
There is no single translation for the term dharma, and it is used slightly differently across traditions. Bishnoi scholar Pankaj Jain (2011, 60) explains that, in his writings, Guru Jambheshwar ‘uses the term “dharma” several times to signify both the socio-spiritual order and moral duty’.
- 6.
In this piece, Ingold is referring to hunter-gatherer communities in Canada, but this analysis can easily be extended to the Bishnoi and many other traditional communities.
- 7.
- 8.
The largest Bishnoi NGO is the All India Jeev Raksha Bishnoi Sabha. Examples of Bishnoi activism can be found in M.R. Bishnoi (2010).
- 9.
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Reichert, A. (2016). Transformative Encounters: Destabilising Human/Animal and Nature/Culture Binaries Through Cross-Cultural Engagement. In: Beaman, L., Sikka, S. (eds) Constructions of Self and Other in Yoga, Travel, and Tourism. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-32512-5_4
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