Making the 'man eater' Tiger conservation as necropolitics
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.
Political Geography