Infrastructures of Inattention and Necropolitical Kinship: Ritual, Capital, and the Time of the Law in India

Abstract This paper investigates the relationship between attention and large-scale killing that takes place away from warzones and battlefields. Structural femicide in India—dowry-deaths and female feticide—arguably erases as many lives every year as many wars and conflicts. The apathy towards structural femicide is puzzling in the context of the scale of killing and cannot simply be accounted for by the NGOification of women's movements in India, or then the juridification of dowry-deaths and sex-selection. This paper offers a new genealogy for the demise of the protests against dowry-deaths and the escalation of female feticide. In doing so, it excavates the new temporality inaugurated by The Hindu Marriage Act (1955), which wrested alliance-making from long-durée exchange to a delimited temporality calculable by law, making marriage payments conjoin with the logic of capital. Examining the waxing and waning of the public ire against dowry-deaths and a consistent indifference towards feticide reappraises the political work of attention and releases the anthropological scholarship on attention from its current overwhelming emphasis on algorithmic consumerism and self-cultivation. While the protests against dowry were an exceptional moment, what pushed them out of political attention span was not habituation, or loss of newness, but rather new infrastructures of inattention constituted by capital, ritual, and the law.