Date: 6–9 May 2021.

In this talk, I develop on an interconnection between multi-sensory and multi-species anthropology to explore how care and cruelty, attachment and detachment, and intimacy and indifference coexist through activities like cockfighting. Developing on my ethnographic material from rural Pakistan, I suggest that those fighting their rooster to gain masculine status do not always consider the bird a passive object of entertainment. To understand different modalities of human-rooster relationships, our analysis should go beyond the visual spectacle and engage with non-Western interpretations of the practice. Such a sensory analysis, I contend, can help critique and refigure the interpretation of cockfighting as a “cultural text.”