The flight of the self: Exploring more-than-human companionship in rural Pakistan
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The construct of multispecies anthropology has helped explain some of the ways through which humans develop sensory and embodied connectedness with the more-than-human. Yet there is a need to fully comprehend how such connectedness leads to the discovery of the inner self. Through an ethnographic study carried out with rural South Punjabi pigeon flyers in Pakistan between 2008 and 2018, this paper argues that companionship with pigeons allows people to generate a meaningful relationship with their animals, explore their inner emotions and achieve a deeper understanding of the self. This paper takes inspiration from Donna Haraway's critique of Jacques Derrida's cat encounter, and philosophical thoughts of a 12th-century Muslim mystic poet, Farid ud-Din Attar, to examine how becoming-with pigeons enables the flyers to structure their lifeworlds, develop entrenched companionship and shape their social choices to achieve wellbeing despite everyday social troubles and emotional anxieties.
Key Questions
How can humans develop an intimate companionship with non-humans that provides them with a passage into the discovery of their inner self?
Inspirational Texts
Attar, Farid ud-Din. 1984. The Conference of the Birds. Translated by Dick Davis and Afkham Darbandi. London: Penguin Books.
Derrida, Jacques. 2008. The Animal That Therefore I Am. Edited by Marie-Luise Mallet. Translated by David Wills. New York: Fordham University Press.
Inspirational Quotes:
“The animal is there before me, there next to me, there in front of me—I who am (following) after it. And also, therefore, since it is before me, it is behind me. It surrounds me. And from the vantage of this being-there-before-me it can allow itself to be looked at, no doubt, but also—something that philosophy perhaps forgets, perhaps being this calculated forgetting itself—it can look at me. It has its point of view regarding me.”
“All nations in the world require a king;
How is it we alone have no such thing?
Only a kingdom can be justly run;
We need a king and must inquire for one”
“Their soul rose free of all they’d been before;
The past and all its actions were no more.
Their life came from that close, insistent sun
And in its vivid rays they shone as one.
There in the Simorgh’s radiant face they saw
Themselves, the Simorgh of the world—with awe
They gazed, and dared at last to comprehend
They were the Simorgh and the journey’s end.”
“‘Before we reach our goal,’ the hoopoe said,
‘The journey’s seven valleys lie ahead;
How far this is the world has never learned,
For no one who has gone there has returned”