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In this latest Think Pieces Podcast episode, Olivia Arigho-Stiles and Adriana Suarez are in conversation with Nayanika Mathur, Professor of Anthropology and South Asian Studies at Wolfson College, Oxford University, about her second book, Crooked Cats: Beastly Encounters in the Anthropocene. They discuss the term ‘anthropocene’, conservation practices and its bureaucratic challanges, including the impossibility of applying Western conservation practices to Indian species and, for that matter, non-Western natural environments more broadly.
Nayanika Mathur’s research is interested in the anthropology of politics, development, environment, law, human-animal studies, and research methods. She is the author of Paper Tiger: Law Bureaucracy and the Developmental State in Himalayan India, which addresses everyday bureaucratic life on the Himalayan borderland. Crooked Cats: Beastly Encounters in the Anthropocene was published in 2021 by the University of Chicago Press.
Olivia Arigho-Stiles and Adriana Suarez were postdoctoral research fellows at the Institute of Advanced Studies in 2023. Together they co-edited the journal issue on Indigenous Ecologies for Think Pieces.
Arigho-Stiles is an interdisciplinary researcher of Indigenous histories and the rural world in Bolivia, focussing on Bolivian Indigenous-campesino movements. She is a lecturer in Latin American studies at the University of Essex.
Suarez is a geographer working on natural resource management institutions at different scales in contested environments. Her work seeks to identify, address and challenge the marginalisation of rural and Indigenous groups from dominant management arrangements.