Description

Tales of fearsome “man-eaters” recur across South Asia. Blood thirsty human and non-human figures appear in many forms: from tigers and leopards to shapeshifting snakes, alluring women and unscrupulous politicians. This public conversation unfolds the many wicked tales of man-eaters found across the region. Using photographs, film clips, folk iconography and political imagery, the conversation introduces audiences to a catalogue of different types of 'man-eaters' and considers the ways in which such characters embody and comment on processes of exploitation and retribution in arenas of rapid social, ecological and political transition. By centring this ubiquitous and charismatic figure and working through the many different forms the man-eater (adamkhor) can take, this conversation aims to open out feminist, ecological, and political lenses on everyday phenomena for wider publics, thus sharing anthropological ways of thinking in accessible ways.

Beyond the ethnographic and historical importance of the adamkhor figure in the region, this conversation will also ask how anthropology can speak to other disciplines - from film studies to wildlife biology to history – and why such inter-disciplinary questions might be important in this moment. Our conversation is itself situated at such a movement across disciplinary silos as both of us work at the intersection of disciplines as a media anthropologist and an environmental anthropologist. The adamkhor figure demands we ponder how our specialised sub-fields can be creatively brought together. Telling and reframing the wicked tales of South Asia’s maneaters will open up a public conversation about forms of critique in the everyday.