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Paper short abstract

A multispecies autoethnographic relational account of a high mountain tiger and an anthropologist-ecologist in an Indigenous Himalayan territory. Using remote camera technology, the paper explores human-animal relationality, unequal marginalities, and the politics of conservation and development.

Paper long abstract

This paper is a multispecies autoethnographic account of the intersecting lives of a high mountain tiger living in an Indigenous territory in the Himalayas and an interdisciplinary anthropologist-ecologist (I). Our story unfolds within a crowded milieu of actors–an Indigenous community, conservation researchers, local elites, and other development and conservation actors. The paper experiments with knowledge produced through relationships forged between me and the tiger, whom I come to know exclusively through the application of remote camera technology. As our story develops through a series of serendipitous events over many years, I explore how tiger research is deployed to present very different visions of tigers, nature conservation, and development. Our story challenges preconceived conditions of marginality of Indigenous People and wild animals: who marginalises whom, when, for how long, and how. I show how tiger conservation is employed to dispossess local people of land, in turn dispossessing tigers of free-will and agency. However, the tiger's wide-ranging and elusive ecology means that it is at once easy for powerful actors to deny their existence (and push ahead with land diversion), and difficult because they can show up at any location at any time, making it challenging to draw hard boundaries between ‘wilderness’ and ‘civilisation’ in this vast landscape. Ultimately, the paper presents a novel case of multispecies relational fieldwork.