Margulies, J.D. orcid.org/0000-0003-2029-4424 (2019) Making the ‘man-eater’: Tiger conservation as necropolitics. Political Geography, 69. pp. 150-161. ISSN 0962-6298
Abstract
In this article I analyze the practice and politics of classifying a tiger as a ‘man-eater’ in South India to explore what doing so reveals more broadly about the relations between animal life and the kinds of human life marked as expendable by the state. I draw on Achille Mbembe's theory of necropolitics in order to analyze how the Indian State attempts to manage human-wildlife relations in a contested plantation landscape of high priority for wildlife conservation. While there is a large literature theorizing wildlife and biodiversity conservation as the practice of biopolitics, I argue conservation, as both a typology of space and set of ideologically malleable practices, remains under-theorized as a form of necropolitics, the politics mediating death. I examine how the Indian State goes about reclassifying tigers from a strictly protected endangered species to killable—the process of making the ‘man-eater’—in relation to how the state both values and devalues human and non-human life as a process rooted in colonial histories of accumulation by dispossession. This article responds to calls across political ecology and political geography to better theorize the role of non-human animals as essential subjects of inquiry in political contestations. It does so through exploring the spatial contours of deadly encounter between plantation workers and tigers in the plantation-conservation necropolis.
Metadata
Item Type: | Article |
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Authors/Creators: |
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Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information: | © 2019 Elsevier. This is an author produced version of a paper subsequently published in Political Geography. Uploaded in accordance with the publisher's self-archiving policy. Article available under the terms of the CC-BY-NC-ND licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/). |
Keywords: | Necropolitics; Tigers; India; Wildlife conservation; Less-than-human geographies; Political animal geography |
Dates: |
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Institution: | The University of Sheffield |
Academic Units: | The University of Sheffield > Faculty of Social Sciences (Sheffield) > Department of Politics and International Relations (Sheffield) |
Depositing User: | Symplectic Sheffield |
Date Deposited: | 05 Feb 2019 13:49 |
Last Modified: | 23 Jan 2021 01:38 |
Published Version: | https://doi.org/10.1016/j.polgeo.2018.12.011 |
Status: | Published |
Publisher: | Elsevier |
Refereed: | Yes |
Identification Number: | 10.1016/j.polgeo.2018.12.011 |
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID): | oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:142081 |
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