UC Berkeley

This dissertation examines human and dog interactions in Delhi, India. In this project I follow the multiple ways in which dog and human life rub up one upon the other. This approach to thinking about how entities encroach upon each other emerged from living with a particular pack of dogs in relationship to other dogs in one neighborhood. Becoming caught in a particular pack of dogs and their human supporters or detractors organized my possible interactions and ability to meet, greet, acknowledge or to know about particular dogs and humans in this neighborhood. Becoming caught in specific scenes, where references to any general belonging of type such as categories of species, country, breed or specific family lineages or inheritances could not always be at the forefront of what was organizing sociality and alliances, helped make visible how encroachments and avoidances and solidified and fragile histories of sensing can be understood at the level of individual entities, be they human or dog.

This specificity of movements of humans and dogs helped me think about understandings of encroachment, or how sneaking, creeping, hooking, seizing, impinging, and overreaching have influenced considerations of rightful occupations and invasions of both dogs and humans in Delhi. I examine this grasping, creeping and hooking in terms of juridical decisions about dog and human interactions, dog sanctuary experiments in living and relationships of kinship, servitude, the domestic and the interstice.

The dog in Delhi is also a locus of some practices within which struggles over reformulations of categories such as caste and the foreign are taking place. Some uncomfortable correspondences and complicated histories of breed, class and kinship interpolate both dogs and humans in Delhi. A detailed examination of exceedingly provincial configurations of relationship and place that cannot be made into a generic sense of belonging of kind for either dogs or humans in Delhi can help us think about how understandings of servitude, rightful occupation, invasion, sanctuary and everyday estrangement might question some common-sense notions of family, belonging, inheritance, lineage and legacy, as well as what often gets glossed as the post-colonial in a locale such as Delhi.