Making the ‘man-eater’: Tiger conservation as necropolitics

Abstract

In this article I analyze the practice and politics of classifying a tiger as a ‘man-eater’ in South India to explore what doing so reveals more broadly about the relations between animal life and the kinds of human life marked as expendable by the state. I draw on Achille Mbembe's theory of necropolitics in order to analyze how the Indian State attempts to manage human-wildlife relations in a contested plantation landscape of high priority for wildlife conservation. While there is a large literature theorizing wildlife and biodiversity conservation as the practice of biopolitics, I argue conservation, as both a typology of space and set of ideologically malleable practices, remains under-theorized as a form of necropolitics, the politics mediating death. I examine how the Indian State goes about reclassifying tigers from a strictly protected endangered species to killable—the process of making the ‘man-eater’—in relation to how the state both values and devalues human and non-human life as a process rooted in colonial histories of accumulation by dispossession. This article responds to calls across political ecology and political geography to better theorize the role of non-human animals as essential subjects of inquiry in political contestations. It does so through exploring the spatial contours of deadly encounter between plantation workers and tigers in the plantation-conservation necropolis.