Research Articles

“Where Language Does Not Live”

Description: “In starting this research, my goal was to enter into the web of horses, students, volunteers, and staff and find some sort of coherence amongst this collision of species, communication, and collaboration happening on True Hearts. Within this web, I had so many questions. What does multispecies research look like when nonhuman animals (in my case, horses) are not just entangled with the lives of humans, but also active participants in both their work and community, on one hand, and my ethnography, on the other hand? Could I understand the horses at True Hearts as informants? And then, once I decentered verbal, speech-based communication, could I think differently about the people in my story, many of whom are nonverbal, yet also present, agentic, and equally communicative? What does anthropology look like when communication is capacious, multispecied, and embodied?” (2024, American Anthropologist, 1-5, December 2024)

“The Art of Therapeutic Horsemanship: Communication, Choreography and Collaboration in Equine Therapy”

Abstract: “This article questions the idea of “equine therapy” and explores the communication occurring between horses and humans in the equine therapy encounter. The choreography performed by horses, riders, and the staff and volunteers who facilitate lessons often appears to simply happen – human-horse partnerships occlude the layers of trust and collaboration that goes into the functioning of an equine therapy facility. I argue that horsemanship, and particularly “therapeutic horsemanship,” is the foundation of what makes the therapy space a safe and productive environment for both horses and humans. Through fieldwork conducted at an equine therapy facility in Eastern Pennsylvania, this article asks: how do horses participate in the encounter of equine therapy? How can equine therapy be used to think, anthropologically, beyond the human? And what happens when non-human animals, like horses, inhabit the position of ethnographic informant? Through the breakdown of therapeutic horsemanship at a high-profile National horse show, this article draws attention to the successes and failures of horse-human communication in equine therapy. Attending to “therapeutic horsemanship” as a form of communication provides new ways to imagine the work of thinking together, across species and beyond words. ” (2022, Anthropological Quarterly, Vol. 95, No.3, p. 621-648)

Ghosts in the Gallery: The Vitality of Anachronism in a Mumbai Chawl

Abstract: “At the turn of the 20th century, rural labor migrants began moving to theIndian city of Mumbai, sleeping in tenement buildings known as chawls and working around the clock at the city’s many textile mills. The mill lands made Mumbai, transforming a fishing village into a bustling port city. But when the economy shifted in the 1950s, followed by massive mill closings and layoffs in the 1980s, this enclave of industrial workers began to fall apart. In contemporary Mumbai, old low lying textile mills and chawls are being developed into shopping malls, high rise apartment buildings, and luxury hotels, transforming the neighborhood into a space of elite residence and consumption. For contemporary industrial worker communities still residing in these neighborhoods, the disjunction between the occupied material space of mills and chawls and the looming material space of cranes and construction results in an occupation of place and time that diverges from the temporal expectations of progress and development. In this article, I argue that chawl life operates according to “chawl time,” atemporal-spatial frame located between industrial and postindustrial time.In making this argument, I draw attention to how chawl residents exist in both this contemporary moment of rapid redevelopment and revitalization of former industrial spaces and a perceived past moment of industrial activity and working class stability. In doing so, this article reveals how anachronistic subjectivities are vital products of modernity.” (2018, Anthropological Quarterly, Vol. 91, No. 3, p. 937–968)

Landscapes of Invisibility: Anachronistic Subjects and Allochronous Spaces in Mill Land Mumbai

Abstract: “Based on fieldwork conducted in the mill lands of Mumbai, India, this article investigates how deindustrialization shapes contemporary textile mill workers’ identities. The centrality of textile manufacturing in Mumbai once made employment in the mills meaningful work. As mills closed and workers began to lose their jobs, the narrative of deindustrialization emphasized the need to protect the rights of the unemployed and eclipsed the reality that some individuals continue to work in the mills and emplace themselves in the city through their identification with mill work. This article demonstrates how deindustrialization discourse tends to erase contemporary textile workers from the city or frame workers as fake or relics of the past. I argue that framing textile workers as anachronistic while labor continues is an aspect of modernity and illuminates Mumbai’s mill lands as an allochronous space that is indeed relevant to the city.Deindustrialization produces unemployment; however, it also produces other forms of marginality such as unprotected and unrepresented labor. Given that employed millworkers are not relics of the past, their perspectives are relevant to contemporary understanding of deindustrialization.” (2016, City and Society, Vol. 27, Issue 3, pp. 250–271)