In this second episode on Indigenous Ecologies, IAS postdoctoral fellows Olivia Arigho-Stiles and Adriana Suarez Delucchi are in conversation with Nayanika Mathur, Professor of Anthropology and South Asian Studies at Wolfson College, Oxford University.

Mathur's research is interested in the anthropology of politics, development, environment, law, human-animal studies, and research methods. She is the author of Paper Tiger: Law Bureaucracy and the Developmental State in Himalayan India, which addresses everyday bureaucratic life on the Himalayan borderland.

Her second book, Crooked Cats: Beastly Encounters in the Anthropocene (University of Chicago Press, 2021) is the starting point for this episode’s conversation. Arigho-Stiles, Suarez and Mathur embark on a discuss the term 'anthropocene', conservation practices and its bureaucratic challanges, including the impossibility of applying Western conservation practices to Indian species (and for that matter, non-Western natural environments more broadly).

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Olivia Arigho-Stiles and Adriana Suarez were postdoctoral research fellows at the Institute of Advanced Studies in 2023.

Arigho-Stiles is an interdisciplinary researcher of Indigenous histories and the rural world in Bolivia, focussing on Bolivian Indigenous-campesino movements. She is a lecturer in Latin American studies at the University of Essex.

Suarez Delucchi is a geographer working on natural resource management institutions at different scales in contested environments. Her work seeks to identify, address and challenge the marginalisation of rural and Indigenous groups from dominant management arrangements.

Together, they co-edited a special issue of the IAS online review Think Pieces which you can read here:

The episode was produced by Marthe Lisson, editor of Think Pieces.