GSSC Seminar Series

14 July 2026

When is an Animal not one Animal? Conservation, Caste, and the Making of Multiple Pygmy Hogs

Mridutpal Sinharay, University of Cologne

12:00-13:00

In the grasslands near Assam’s Nameri National Park in India, a small pig is being taught to be wild again. The pygmy hog - the world’s smallest and one of its rarest wild pigs - lies at the heart of South Asia’s premier rewilding initiative. But its story is more tangled than conservation alone can tell. For some local religious practitioners, this tiny hog carries the weight of the sacred: an echo of Vishnu’s boar incarnation, Varaha. Its domestic and feral cousins carry the opposite - impurity, destruction, pollution. Somewhere between these worlds, the pygmy hog slips through the ancient Vedic categories meant to hold it. Drawing on anthropologist Marisol de la Cadena's idea of “not only,” this talk asks: what if there isn’t just one pygmy hog? What if there are several - a threatened species, a sacred incarnation, a future livestock resource - each one entangled with caste, religion, and the politics of who gets to protect, revere, or eat a pig? Following the Pygmy Hog Conservation Programme (PHCP) as it translates these multiplicities into the singular legal category of the endangered “protected species,” this talk explores how a conservation project participates in ontological politics by negotiating between worlds that do not quite agree on what a pig is - or what it should be.

Mridutpal Sinharay is a DAAD-funded PhD researcher in Environmental Anthropology at the University of Cologne, affiliated with the Global South Studies Center. His research focuses on South Asia, with particular interests in multispecies ethnography, extinction studies, and animal history. He also has an amateur fascination with borders, maps, poetry, and photography. Prior to his doctoral research, he earned a Bachelor's degree in Economics with minors in Mathematics and Statistics from the University of Calcutta in 2019, followed by an M.A. in Development Studies from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Guwahati in 2021. He was affiliated with the University of Geneva, Switzerland, as a researcher (2021–2022) and was a visiting scholar at the University of Edinburgh, UK, in 2024.