Dangerous and Domestic: Human-animal encounters in the buffer zone

Abstract

The aim of the paper is to explore how possibilities of dangerous encounters shape the relationship between companion species. Expanding on Donna Haraway’s (2008) classification and concept, I consider “companion species” to include humans and an array of domestic animals, who inhabit a shared spatial, moral, and social universe, and are entwined in affective and generative relations of work, play, politics, and religion, and other aspects of social life. They are co-dependent for their health, nourishment, and well-being. Domestic animals are constructed as such through human actions and differentiations that posit them as separate from wild or feral animals. Pets are increasingly an integral part of people’s kin and familial networks, while also constituting status symbols. I focus on a settlement that is in the periphery of Corbett Tiger Reserve, a buffer zone that lies directly in an animal corridor. The villagers keep poultry, milch animals, dogs, horses that often draw leopards and tigers. The need to feed and provide fodder makes their humans venture into the forest, further opening possibilities of encounters with the wild. There is an inclination to draw boundaries between human and animal; and, between wild and domestic. The attempt of the paper will be to destabilise these normative classifications that are not so stable when examined and analysed ethnographically. The method used is ethnographic along with analysis of digital content created by some villagers.