Spies and Other Pigeons
Hospitality and Hostility in Multispecies Pakistan
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Across Pakistan's rooftops, pigeon flyers devote enormous care and labor to birds that soar the skies, take part in competitions, and knit together communities otherwise divided by caste, class, language, and ethnicity. Spies and Other Pigeons follows these flyers across four provinces, revealing a world of shauq (passionate pursuits) where training, feeding, and flying become affective acts to welcome a more-than-human other into the home.
When cherished birds cross the militarized India-Pakistan border, they are recast as intruders and “spies," exposing the thin line between welcome and suspicion, hospitality and hostility. Through long-term ethnography, Muhammed Kavesh traces the layered meanings of arrival, both at the home and the homeland, showing how pigeons illuminate political tensions while sustaining bonds of play, care, and enthusiasm. Interweaving anthropology, South Asian studies, and multispecies studies with the Punjabi folktale of Heer Ranjha, Kavesh offers a conceptually rich account of human-pigeon relatedness. Moving from village lofts and urban rooftops to racing clubs and borderlands, the book demonstrates how animals mediate danger, belonging, and reciprocity across contested lines.
Original and exciting, Spies and Other Pigeons reframes multispecies anthropology through a South Asian lens, revealing how the care and labor of pigeon keeping anchor local worlds and unsettle national borders.
“It was a true delight to read this beautifully written, masterful, carefully woven, and theoretically compelling ethnographic text. Kavesh offers a complex exploration of the concept of shauq as ‘dedicated passion’ or ‘entrenched enthusiasm’ for pigeons in cityscapes of Pakistan. This should be a springboard for researchers to consider other such passionate and enthusiastic immersions into animal worlds.”
““Hospitality is at the center of this sensitive book rooted in the lives of Pakistani pigeon fliers and their talented birds. “Home“ is built with dedicated passion and rich bonding like kinship between these special pigeons and their people. But home is at stake when avian companions become enemy captives accused of spying across a fraught border. Love and danger are the root realities. Read this wonderful book!””
“At once poetic and philosophical, this captivating ethnography asks how attending to people’s relationships with pigeons across the contested borderlands of South Asia might yield insight into fraught questions of what it means to arrive home and belong. Beautifully written, brimming with humor and compassion, and rich with insight on every page, Spies and Other Pigeons marks a landmark contribution to multispecies ethnography, South Asian Studies, and the anthropology of belonging.”