Paper short abstract:

In India, street dog subjectivities are often reduced to bodies that consume waste which further locate them in spatial politics of urbanisation. By reconsidering street dog lives through Uexkull’s umwelt, the paper asks how we can think about multiplicity outside human social histories.

Paper long abstract:

In India, street dog subjectivities in multispecies cities are often reduced to bodies that are out of place (‘stray’) and biological in their action and metabolical in their intention (carriers of rabies and consumers of waste). Rapid urbanisation has altered the lifeworlds of street dogs making them increasingly dependent on flows of garbage and food waste. I want to suggest that an imbrication at such an intimate level with human society and consumption produce a resistance that prevents us from imagining the lifeworld of the ‘other’. By tracing these entanglements such as the postcolonial legacy of waste rooted in “slow violence” and the caste history of scavenging, we can begin to see how garbage as sustenance locates street dogs in a multispecies city. I argue that this location is fixed as the street dog is trapped in these anthropogenic landscapes and cannot exceed them to produce any other meaning. I suggest that to break this intellectual bind, we ought to revisit Uexkull’s notion of the umwelt that sought to preserve subjectivities in a world free of hierarchies and human meaning. Intriguingly, each being is also guided by an affective frame of mood and tone. Depending on the ‘mood’ of the stray dog, a pile of garbage could be food (feeding tone), possible home (dwelling tone) or shelter (protective tone). I ask two interrelated questions: is waste waste if it is not perceived so by the street dog? Are nonhuman lifeworlds accessible to us through human socio-capital histories, however multiple?