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Accepted Paper:

The flight of the soul: understanding the self through pigeon flying in rural Pakistan  
Muhammad Kavesh (University of Toronto)

Paper short abstract:

Pigeon flying is a popular passion in rural Pakistan. By intertwining the sensory experiences of pigeon flyers and their ultimate passion for keeping pigeons, this talk outlines the importance of personal enthusiasm in multispecies ethnography.

Paper long abstract:

The construct of multispecies ethnography has helped explain some of the ways in which humans shape their lifeworld around nonhumans. Yet there is a need to fully comprehend the underlying motivates that weave such inter-species relationship and enable the existence of multispecies sociality, unbounded affection, and the knowledge of the self and others. Through an ethnographic study carried out with Pakistani pigeon flyers between 2008 and 2017, this talk takes the shauq or strong enthusiasm for keeping and flying pigeons as the underlying motive, and argues that it allows the rural men to generate a meaningful interaction with their animals, explore their emotions, and achieve a deeper understanding of the self to obtain profoundest delight and fulfilment. By linking the discussion of shauq with the larger literature in the anthropology of personal passion, and by taking inspiration from the philosophical thoughts of twelfth-century Muslim mystic poet Farid Ud-Din Attar, the talk discusses how this interspecies relationship leads enthusiasts to structure their daily routines, develop friendships, and shape their social universe to achieve wellbeing despite everyday social troubles and emotional anxieties. The talk will include a five-minute video to illuminate the existence of sensory multispecies relationship—developed through breeding, keeping, feeding, and touching pigeons—and explains how a sensuous scholarship can lead us to understand the dynamics of pigeon keeping shauq in rural Pakistan.

Panel P05
Sense-making in a more-than-human world
  Session 1 Tuesday 3 December, 2019, -