Presentation short abstract

I explore the emotionality of human-wildlife interactions, through an ethnography of Gaddi pastoralists in India and interrogate the politics of emotions and ecology that centers a global north characterization of fear to justify top-down technocratic conservation management.

Presentation long abstract

The emotionality of human-wildlife interactions is assumed to be innate and universal within a majority of conservation literature and public discourse. In the context of human-carnivore interactions, especially in the global north, ‘fear’ is characterized as an inevitable negative emotion that can only be addressed through the removal of the source of fear and is often utilized to justify top-down technocratic solutions including the elimination of the entire carnivore species from the landscape. However, proponents of emotional geography build on the Foucauldian framework of capillary power and draw attention to ways in which the state or specific actors produce convenient narratives to evoke specific emotions in its subjects. Emotional geography thereby teaches us to carefully dissect rather than strive towards clean linear conceptualizations of emotions. Furthermore, anthropologists of emotions reveal ontological plurality in the conceptualizations of emotions across cultures, especially apparent in several animistic indigenous cosmologies. In this paper, I look to present an emic understanding of the role of emotions in the context of human-wildlife interactions, which is based on ethnographic research among the gaddi pastoralists of Himachal Pradesh, India. By doing so I look to explore the ways in which experiences of emotionality of human-wildlife interactions, transforms into narratives of emotionality. Through this paper, I look to illustrate the relevance of anthropological approaches to interrogate the politics of emotionality in human-wildlife interactions that have been dominated by understandings of fear from the global north.