Building on a long-term ethnographic engagement with Pakistani pigeon flyers, in this talk, I discuss the arrival of European racing pigeons in Pakistan and the capture of Pakistani “spy pigeons” at the India-Pakistan border. By examining the moral values created through culturally enshrined values of welcome and refusal, I ask what it means for a more-than-human Others “to come from abroad” in politically and economically transforming circumstances in South Asia and how mutually shared values of hospitality and hostility emerge and interplay when a pigeon arrives in a foreign land as an invited guest or an uninvited intruder. Building on Jacques Derrida’s (2000) account of hospitality and hostility and Punjabi Sufi poet-philosopher Waris Shah’s analysis of badal (reciprocity), I argue that in contemporary South Asia, reciprocal exchanges continue to produce and sustain cooperative, competitive, or antagonistic bonds that provide a reflective space to critically re-think deconstruction of the home as a sovereign space.

Dr Muhammad A. Kavesh is an Australian Research Council DECRA Fellow in Anthropology at the Australian National University. He is the author of Animal Enthusiasms: Life Beyond Cage and Leash in Rural Pakistan (2021) and co-editor of Nurturing Alternative Futures: Living with Diversity in a More-than-Human World (2023). He has also co-edited special journal issues in Anthropology Today (2023) and The Australian Journal of Anthropology (2021). Kavesh has published with American Ethnologist, American Anthropologist (forthcoming), Journal of Asian Studies, Oxford Journal of Development Studies, South Asia, Society & Animals and Senses & Society among others. He is currently working on his next book project, “Spies and Other Pigeons.”

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