Introduction: Animals, Ethics, and Enchantment in South Asia and the Middle East

This essay introduces six articles in the special section on animals and enchantment. The ethnographic bent of many of the essays in this special section demonstrates how the copresence of animal and human beings continues to make everyday life in South Asia a site of embodied philosophical engagement with questions regarding the bounds of self and community and our ethics toward others. We turn to these rich traditions, both textual and embodied, to confound and erase the sharp boundaries between the human, the animal, and the environment that have been, and continue to be, sites of incredible violence. The question of who gets the privilege to be considered a human is not an idle question. Animality is a constitutive part of the discursive terrain that marks out which life matters and which life can be erased.