Venue: Madison, WI

Date: 1 Nov 2024

In present-day Pakistan, the donkey has become a poignant symbol of pollution and drudgery, often relegating their keepers to social marginalization. In this talk, I explore how donkeys and their keepers become vulnerable and subject to systematic and general subjection. Systematic subjection is driven by state actions, particularly evident when donkeys are exported to China for their skin, which is used in traditional Chinese medicine called ejiao. General subjection manifests as sporadic violence against donkeys and their caretakers, a practice normalized as public contempt. Based on my ethnography with Pakistani donkey keepers, I argue in this working paper that understanding this shared vulnerability—that transcends species boundaries and invites a reinterpretation of exclusion and hierarchies in present-day Pakistan—requires an exploration of how humans become-donkeys and donkeys become-Others.