Human–buffalo conflicts and intimacies in ‘modernising’ Nepal

Abstract

In Nepal ‘development’ (bikas) frames local socio-cultural practices, including gendered and environmental practices, with lasting gendered and ecological outcomes. This tension is at the heart of everyday life in Ludigaun, a Bahun (high caste Hindu) village in West Nepal. Utilising a framework of a local familiar tension between ‘traditional’ ideas/practices and those imagined through ‘modernity’, I draw on ethnographic material describing a year-long family conflict over keeping buffalo, to allow the tension and contradictions inherent in village life – of gender, generations, and caste – and their articulation with national and global relations – to come into focus. For an older generation of women, their work and relationships with buffalo are at stake, presenting an uncertain future and a possible crisis of identity and of place. I argue that the relationship between these women and their buffalo extends beyond material needs and is a crucial emotional attachment; it is an intimate ‘mode of care’ that is integral to village social reproduction. Women's work with buffalo (although it has no positive status of its own) demonstrates the older generation of women are not passive but active players in constituting caste, gendered and social status identities. Keeping buffalo is fundamental to the ways in which and older generation of Bahun women exert their influence. Building on the work of Campbell (Animals in Person: Cultural Perspectives on Human–Animal Intimacies, 2005b, pp. 79–100; Living Between Juniper and Palm: Nature, Culture and Power in the Himalayas, 2013), Tsing (The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins, 2015), Harraway (Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene, 2016) and Govindrajan (Animal Intimacies: Interspecies Relatedness in India’s Central Himalayas, 2018), the human–buffalo relationship presented here demonstrates the human–animal relationship as a key relationship of value to Bahun women at a time when the out-migration phenomenon has taken their children away. I argue that in this way, and at a time when human–environment relationships are increasingly disembedded, human–buffalo relationships in West Nepal emphasise a unity between humans and their environment and remind us that intimacy and becoming are multispecies affairs.