Rolling-stone multispecies ethnography: Intuition, intimacy, and violence in illegal animal production

In this paper, I attend to intuitively intentional fleeting intimate encounters with animal and human others in numerous similar but different informal or illegal dairying sites, often entwined with political violence, along India's dairy production continuum. In probing the emotional and physical risks to self, and the structural necessity of moving rapidly in illicit animal economies, I reflect on the impurity and promise of an intuitively hypermobile “rolling stones” multispecies ethnography in sites of enforced animal im/mobility and violence. I argue that in its intentional use of intuition as an ethnographic device, a “rolling-stone” approach can allow empathetic modes of sensing and witnessing animal experiences of intimacy and risk through a spectrum of interrelationships, human and non, across time and production spaces. The cumulative witnessing across similar sites serves a politics of accrual in visibilizing, naming and indeed, confirming slow, spectacular, and intimate violence, as such, against farmed animals, often unseen and/or normalized. Ultimately, I call for the cultivation of anti-anthropocentrism as intuition, by surrendering to the almost carnal viscerality of becoming ourselves transformed by who animals are, and what they’re experiencing. This, I suggest, is a cornerstone of ethical, liberatory animal ethnographies.