Cats and the Vegetarian Dish in Colonial and Postcolonial Indonesia

Taking cats and the vegetarian dish in Indonesia as a case study, this chapter explores the heuristic value of following the perspective of animals in studying histories of environmental knowledge and empathy in colonial and postcolonial contexts. It first figures out the politics and understandings of environmental empathy in a global context, turning, for the period under scrutiny, to forms of empathy that dwelled around gendered and theosophical recognitions of the suffering body of the animal, which unsettled dominant views on human–animal relationships in the West. How this mattered to cats in (post-)colonial Indonesia, and what the social history of the theosophical vegetarian dish can tell us further about empathy there, is the subject of the remainder of the chapter. The experiment turns out to be unsettling, and therefore insightful. The lives of cats and the vegetarian dish cross the spatial, moral, gendered, and racial structures of (post)colonial society, and help us look beyond these frameworks of understanding history.