Elephant in the Room

The Nagaland government’s July 2020 announcement of a ban on the sale of dog-meat stimulated a flood of articles on various aspects of the debate. The war of words pitted animal rights activists against the defenders of cultural rights. This article highlights the persistent circulation of ‘culture’ and unpacks its strategic potential for resistance due to its fluidity in the dog-meat debate and in other issues affecting present-Nagas and Northeast India. We trace and disambiguate the use of ‘culture’ in resistance narratives which have circulated through binary oppositions and racialized caricatures to re-animate discussions on race, cultural nationalism and citizenship politics. While anthropology has critiqued culture, we identify how the concept still circulates as a strategic resource and as a trope in contemporary Naga social history. We identify new itineraries of culture’s circulation that are otherwise muddled in recent public debates, which received an impetus after the reinvigoration of discussions on racism in mid-2020. This was sparked by the dog-meat ban and the release of a film in mid-2020, and the global anti-Asian racism triggered by the Covid-19 pandemic that year. We highlight the contestations in the domain of race, representation, and citizenship that have emerged in Northeast Indian Himalayan contexts in the last decades, due to twenty-five years of indefinite ceasefires with major armed groups. Tensions arise with the regional aspirations, engaging their position of belonging within India but also globally oriented agendas fuelled by new forms of capital and mobility. Such tensions are playing out in the domain of food-politics and human-animal relations that straddle different rights regimes. We underline this caution around culture’s essentialism and its circulation as a historical trope due to its divisive potential in scripting narratives of social history and minority citizenship, at a time when Indian nation-building projects in the region are changing

Elephant in the Room

This poem tries to express the difficulty of staying focused on one\u27s research when there is so much turmoil in the world

Elephant in the Room

Over the past several decades, the student population at law schools across the country has become more and more racially diverse. In 1987, for example, only about 1 in every 10 law students identified as a person of color; by 2019, that percentage shot up to almost 1 out of 3. Yet take a look at virtually any collection of recommended manuals on writing. You are unlikely to find even one that is authored by a person of color. The composition of law schools may be dramatically changing, but the materials that students are given to help them figure out how to put together documents that are proper, persuasive, and professional are designed pretty much exclusively by white people. “To write right,” we seem to be saying, “you need to write white.” This essay describes an in-class exercise that was used to highlight that bias. It also shares an out-of-class assignment that successfully pushed students to broaden their mental library of exemplars

The Elephant in the Room:

https://place.asburyseminary.edu/firstfruitspapers/1092/thumbnail.jp

The Elephant in the Room

Darrien Hertzler was born in Augusta, Maine as the first child of two military parents who are now divorced, so she has lived in several places. Most of her poetry is usually about her fiancée and the troubles they face in a long-distance relationship. She also writes about other events from her life in which she has experienced abuse, violence, addictions, and unacceptance. She tries her best not to sensor or sugarcoat her world because she feels that it makes it less realistic and less likely to speak to people

The Elephant in the Room

According to the Swedish legislator, animal welfare is an important ethical issue in the country that has deep and broad anchoring in human consciousness. Nevertheless, criticism regarding urgent measures needed to raise the level of legislative protection for animals has been articulated in international comparisons. One of these measures being that Sweden ought to ban the use of all wild animals for entertainment purposes. Correspondingly, when the new Swedish Animal Welfare Act 2018:1192 was incorporated in 2019, the supplementary Animal Welfare Ordinance 2019:66 also followed which now added elephants to a list of 11 other kinds of wild animals prohibited to be displayed at circuses or similar operations. Notably, the new ban did however not prohibit the exhibition of elephants at zoos in Sweden. The reason behind the ban was according to the responsible minister that it was obvious that elephants’ natural behavior could not be satisfied in a circus. The Animal Welfare Act distinctly contains the contingent of natural behavior as a stipulation for a good animal environment. This critical animal law article consequently focuses its analysis to the issue of elephant’s prospects of natural behavior in both the circus as well as in the zoo environment. By utilizing elephants as an example and by comparing these two different institutions of entertainment, a systematic study illustrates an inconsistent use in the application of the legal requirement ‘natural behavior’. Key words: Animal Law, Animal Protection, Animal Rights, Animal Welfare, Critical Animal Studies, Ethology, Natural Behavior