Date: 4 November 2025

As the donkey emerges as a poignant symbol of pollution and drudgery in Pakistan, this talk examines how donkey keepers become donkeys through their affective relations with their equine companions. Drawing on Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987) concept of becoming-animal, I approach such becoming as an experiential transformation that requires an affective deterritorialization from established modes of being and a reterritorialization into a different register of existence. Yet, Deleuze and Guattari remain largely silent on how entrenched caste and class hierarchies inflect and constrain such becomings. In this talk, I explore how these hierarchies render becoming-donkey an ethically contested process with multiple implications for the life of donkeys and their keepers.