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Afterword: Cruelty and the Imagination of Animals in India
- Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East
- Duke University Press
- Volume 35, Number 2, August 2015
- pp. 277-280
- Article
- Additional Information
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This essay is a response to the five essays included in this special section “Animals and Enchantment in South Asia.” In addition to summarizing these essays, this essay argues that animals keep eluding and exceeding the intellectual categories and cages humans set for them. Religion has always been the source of much of the human imagination of animals, but this imagination has often been more imprisoning than liberating. This volume points us toward extant resources within religious traditions as well as emergent human ethical responses that acknowledge the ever more intertwined fates of humans and animals on our crowded planet.