Anyone examining justifications for violence and motivations for nonviolence quickly encounters both animals and religion — and often both at the same time. This session draws together explorations of animals and religion at the watershed moments between violence and nonviolence in a range of traditions and practices—from discussion of cats and witchcraft in Yoruba Pentecostalism in Nigeria to premodern Islamic teachings about human and animal skins, from aspiration toward ahiṃsā / nonviolence in Jain and Hindu traditions to contemporary North American discussions of hunting rituals on Reddit. In all of these cases, animals are caught up conceptually and bodily in human questions about violence, dominance, difference, and virtue.
Using skin as an analytical tool (Ahmed), this study explores how, when, and to what ends premodern Islamic jurists, physicians, and religious thinkers affirmed or troubled customary divisions that separated humans from animals. Close readings of the rhetoric, laws, and practices surrounding the uses of animal skins for water consumption, medicine, prayer mats, disguises, travel accommodations, or parchment reveal ongoing declarations of human uniqueness and dominance, but also the tactile intimacies and health dangers that subverted those claims. Case studies examine several junctures at which Sunni and Shi’ite scholars asserted likeness over difference, or difference over likeness, between human and animal skins to trace deeper considerations of human/animal relations. In deliberations of what skins could touch what parts of whose bodies, under what conditions, and in what ways, we find unresolved tensions over the volatile lines separating humans from animals, and debates about how dis/similitude might best be determined.
This proposal examines the links between witchcraft accusations, femicide, and cat vilification within Nigerian Yoruba Pentecostalism, exploring how religious beliefs and cultural traditions contribute to violence against women and animals. In Yoruba communities, cats are often associated with witchcraft, leading to their persecution and the targeted killing of women accused of witchcraft. Utilising symbolic interactionism, this study aims to understand the social dynamics and stigmatisation driving these acts, focusing on the interplay of religious interpretations and cultural attitudes. It highlights the urgent need for interventions to address these harmful practices, contributing to discussions on social justice, gender equality, and animal welfare. By investigating these issues, the research underscores the impact of esoteric beliefs on societal development and the importance of challenging these beliefs for more inclusive, equitable societies.
Abstract:
Contemporary political debates diverge on whether multispecies solidarity can occur *with* or only *on behalf of* more-than-human beings. The South Asian concept of nonviolence (*ahiṃsā*), notably developed in the Jain tradition, challenges this either/or approach. Jain cosmology, emphasizing universal sentience with karmic difference, offers a foundation for solidarity *with* other beings. Its account of reciprocal suffering and responses of carefulness and compassion provide a foundation for solidarity *on behalf of* other beings. Moreover, the Jain view provides a third alternative—solidarity *as* other beings—through religious practices of cosmic merger missing in political accounts that presume a subject-centric “I think” as their onto-epistemic ground. Jain accounts of rebirth memory and fasting unto death provide modes of *un*selfing and *un*knowing necessary to support costly multispecies solidarity. Importantly, the Jain view maintains a clear sense of anthropocentric privilege, paradoxically occurring and reaching full expression only through multispecies nonviolence.
As a form of religious violence, animal sacrifice is a contentious but deeply rooted element in religions generally and in Indian religions specifically. Despite the overarching principle of non-violence, as espoused in Hindu theology, there exists a complex discourse wherein theologians endeavor to justify sacrificial violence towards animals. This paper examines the apologetics of violence in the Manubhāṣya (ca. 9th century), the exegesis of the Mānavadharmaśāstra (ca. 200 BCE-200 CE), which is the most influential legal treatise in pre-modern India. Through textual analysis, this paper scrutinizes how the exegesis defends sacrificial violence by highlighting the spiritual benefits accrued by the sacrificial animals and plants, although animals and plants are deemed incapable of actively seeking liberation. By analyzing this rhetoric of benefits, this research investigates how legal scholars in medieval India understand the spirituality of animals, their potential for liberation, and the notion of their hypothetical consent in sacrificial rituals.
Through a net ethnography of the r/Hunting subreddit on the social media website Reddit, I uncover the intricate ways white settler hunters imagine themselves in intimate relationships to human and non-human animals because of the violence they enact on their kills. For hunters on r/hunting, the moment of violence–euphemized as “harvesting”–is at once the point, and superfluous to it, serving as both the node of intimacy with the harvest animal as well as a necessary evil to be necessarily minimized: true hunting, they argue, is about limiting suffering–anything else is just sadistic killing. Indeed, this moment of violence, I show, anchors ethical scaffolding as well as religious cosmologies. Hunting, then–even white settler hunting–is the implicitly intimate moment where violence meets compassion, where life meets life, where humans are honest about the death they bring into the world.