Naisargi N. Dave

Naisargi N. Dave is Associate Professor of Anthropology. Her research and teaching interests include animal studies, ethics, affect and the senses, queer and feminist theory, imagination and expression, death and violence, and friendship and other intimacies. Davé’s most recent book is Indifference: On the Praxis of Interspecies Being (Duke 2023). Based on years of ethnographic fieldwork in India, Davé argues for an interspecies ethic that is premised on indifference, that is, a respect for others in their otherness that allows human and nonhuman animals to flourish in immanent encounters. Indifference, as a queer readiness to live in difference, offers a method of care and practice in everyday life. Davé’s first book, Queer Activism in India: A Story in the Anthropology of Ethics (Duke 2012) examines the relationship between queer desires and queer political formations. Queer Activism was awarded the Ruth Benedict Prize by the Association for Queer Anthropology. In her time at the lab, Davé will begin research for her third monograph, Murder: The Social Life of Violent Death in Queer India. The project spans the trials of sodomites and bestialists in the nineteenth century, provocation and honor defenses to justify the killing of gay men, the disappearances of hijras and sex workers, the slow death of people with HIV in Tihar Jail, and the lesbian double suicides across the subcontinent. The project asks what murder—how we talk about it, that is, its social life—tells us about the role of violent intimate spectacle in the manufacturing of social discipline and of the social itself. From another angle, Murder explores the turn in queer cultures towards horror, the gothic, and true crime. How is the social life of murder queer, and how has murder constituted the social life of queerness?