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What do the welcome and the refusal mean when the one who arrives is not human? By examining the moral attitude created through the acceptance of European racing pigeons in Pakistan and the capture of Pakistani "spy pigeons" at the India‐Pakistan border, this article unknots multiple meanings of arrival and explores how shared values of hospitality and hostility emerge and interplay when a more‐than‐human Other arrives in a foreign land as an invited guest or an uninvited intruder. Drawing on Jacques Derrida's (2000) construction of hostpitality and Punjabi Sufi poet‐philosopher Waris Shah's discussion of badal (reciprocity), this article contends that in South Asia, reciprocal exchanges produce and sustain cooperative, competitive, or antagonistic bonds and propound an analytical avenue to critically rethink deconstruction of the home as a sovereign space. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The imperial underpinning of the early anthropology of Pakistan constituted "the other" as a subject of comprehension, categorization, and containment. Later, with the post‐9/11 geopolitical backdrop, anthropologists focused on selected themes such as religious and ethnic disparity and political nationalism, eliding some topics or groups. What would it mean for the anthropology of Pakistan to consider alienated themes and groups while emphasizing the infinity of the Other? How would conceiving the Other beyond a political or religious other, or even beyond a human subject, create a possibility of decolonizing the anthropology of Pakistan while exploring multiple futures—emergent, imagined, and expected? Such an approach critically moots a reexamination of theoretical, methodological, and epistemological tenets and urges the discipline to engage with diverse lifeworlds. It brings the face of the Other face‐to‐face with anthropology beyond humanity to consider all beings, intersubjective and collaborative experiences, and shared values. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite the invention and sophistication of drones and unarmed aerial vehicles, satellites, and more recently, cyber espionage, "spy pigeons" remain a serious threat at the India-Pakistan border. The entanglement between flying pigeons for "sport" and capturing pigeons for "espionage" is critical to construe multiple meanings of more-than-human border intrusion in South Asia. Such an incursion not only endangers long-standing values of human-pigeon companionship but also moots a perplexity of intrusion that lies between the ethical acceptance of the more-than-human intruders and necessary resistance to their hostile infiltration. Explored through the geopolitically complex experiences of intrusion that have shaped the India-Pakistan relationship since Partition, intruding spy pigeons provide a critical perspective on distrust, animosity, and espionage in South Asia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Dog fighting, along with other nonhuman-animal-fighting activities, is a popular pastime in rural South Punjab, Pakistan. This article explicates dog fighting and discusses its symbolic significance to those who control the game, organize it, and participate in the performance. In discussing the activity, the paper raises multiple questions: how do rural men develop an attachment to their fighting dogs? What motivates the men to engage in dog fighting? How is dog fighting a cultural practice? What type of social gains do dog fighters make when there is no gambling involved? Finally, what symbolic meanings can be drawn from this activity from an emic perspective? The article is based on year-long ethnographic fieldwork with dog fighters in South Punjab, Pakistan, and examines the activity within the Punjabi cultural context where it is taken as an enthusiastic predilection (shauq) for displaying masculinity (mardāngī) to achieve honor (izzat). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This special issue suggests that the need to examine the entangled lives of species, selves and other beings through a multisensory perspective is crucial and timely. Developing on a sensory analysis, one that emerges through what Anna Tsing refers to as the 'arts of noticing' (2015), this introductory paper explores how both nonhuman and human lives are intertwined, and how their close examination can guide anthropologists in their ability to capture the subtleties of more‐than‐human engagement, connection and relatedness. Through articles within this issue from Australian anthropology and beyond, we ask how becoming‐with more‐than‐humans helps us to construct a post‐humanist analysis in the combination of sensory anthropology and multispecies anthropology. Through a combination of these two fields, the paper suggests, anthropology can take up the opportunity to think about animals as subjects, through our ability to communicate beyond language and to engage in a more meaningful way through interspecies knowledge‐making. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]