Date: 11 September 2017

In this talk, I analyze the emotional and experiential aspects of pigeon flying in Pakistan, and examine the flyers’ conception of time and its relevance with their understanding of work and passion for flying pigeons (shauq). I look at how they conceived of their historical time, as it was articulated in an ideal past in India where the practice of flying pigeons was associated with princes and kings. I also focus on the contemporary pigeon flyers’ attachment to their pigeons, and the complexity of their commitment to this activity. I argue that pigeon flying is a practice that enables the cultivation of the self which is achieved through the culturally constituted notion of shauq. The Hindi/Urdu word shauq is usually glossed as personal inclination, passionate predilection, or enthusiasm, and used for different sociable activities of everyday cultural importance. I suggest that in their shauq, pigeon flyers speak of entering in a near meditative state where they forget themselves and lose track of time and other mundane commitments. As such they achieve something similar to what Hungarian psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi has called flow—an optimal and intrinsically rewarding experience generated through deep concentration, altering the subjective experience of time and space, and allowing people to vividly view and achieve a sense of control over their goals. The men’s experience of time devoted in shauq is different from their time spent in work, as they often sacrifice the latter to delightfully experience the first. Such considerations of time render shauq, keeping and flying pigeons, far from an ordinary and passive type of enjoyment, but turn it into a richly rewarding and active ideal that colours a person’s life.