42. Interspecies Relatedness with Radhika Govindrajan
““We are in many ways engaging in imaginative processes. But I think it’s worth it not to be scared of the imagination.””
This week we discuss inter-species relationships, and inter-species thinking, and its consequences for architecture, with Radhika Govindrajan. Radhika is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Washington who has recently published her book, Animal Intimacies: Interspecies Relatedness in India’s Central Himalayas.
Timestamp Outline
1:18 Radhika Govindrajan’s book: Animal Intimacies: Interspecies Relatedness in India’s Central Himalayas
1:54 Women and bear intimacies; bestiality; sex work on farms
7:55 Interspecies relatedness and an interest in the nonhuman
9:41 Frantz Fanon: colonialism predicated on animality of the colonized
10:19 Donna Haraway’s A Cyborg Manifesto (pdf)
10:52 “The human has never been a stable category, and who gets included within the human is a question of power...Humans are never formed alone but are formed with relationships and interactions with all sorts of nonhumans.”
11:50 Anna Tsing anthropologist: ‘To be human is always to be in an interspecies relationship.’
13:08 Louis Kahn talking to a brick: the human-brick interrelatedness as design
15:14 The characteristics of different kinds of clay
16:15 Masters of materials vs collaborators with materials
16:45 Bovine flatulence
20:23 Frans de Waal: anthropomorphism vs anthropodenial
21:50 “We are in many ways engaging in imaginative processes. But I think it’s worth it not to be scared of the imagination.”
22:28 A mistranslation experience with other species?
23:30 Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: communicating with machines
25:46 “At many times our conversation occurs at this very broad level where the nonhuman makes sense as a category, but it really doesn’t. Because to think of a brick and an animal - even between animals, a goat and a leopard - in the same way, doesn’t make sense.”
27:02 Architecture as the instrumentation of sacrifice: Hindu temples, Greek temples, etc
29:38 The ethics of killing animals
36:48 Indian temples as sites of caste power
39:38 Timothy Pachirat and the politics of sight in slaughterhouses
42:08 Sacrifice / slaughterhouse rules in India
44:10 Historian Harriet Ritvo on emergence of pet keeping in Victorian England
45:38 Undocumented and unregulated laborers in US slaughterhouses
46:18 On pit bulls and racism
