Includes bibliographical references and index.

What Is Indifference? -- Witness : How Do We Come to Occupy a Different Skin? -- Biography : Why Is Moral Attention to the Animal so Repulsive? -- Contradiction : How Is the Otherwise Exhausted? -- Sound : Can the Subaltern Be Silent? -- Interlude : Take a Walk with Me -- Touch : Can Indifference Be the Basis for an Ethical Engagement with the World? -- Sex : What Does Cow Protection Protect? (with Alok Gupta) -- Appetite : Does That Which Is Inevitable Cease to Matter?

"Through ethnographic fieldwork with animal healers, animal activists, farmers, laborers, transporters, and animals themselves, Naisargi N. Dave illuminates an interspecies relationality premised on indifference: that is, premised on mutual regard rather than curiosity, love, fascination, desire, or animus. Building on the work of Edouard Glissant, Dave argues against the invasiveness and whiteness of curiosity in favor of indifference. In this formulation of indifference, it becomes a way to show respect for other creatures and their privacy and allows us to exist in difference from one another without intrusively gazing upon the differences of the other. The chapters span settings from animal shelters, slaughterhouses, dairy farms, city streets, and poultry factories to show how human-animal relations manifest through care and violence, but find promise in moments of indifference. Indifference describes both a mode of relationality in the world and a scholarly approach: seeking what is possible when we approach ethico-political explanations with indifference rather than commitment or antagonism"-- Provided by publisher.