This essay reads nineteenth-century imperial India as the mise en scène for certain critical concatenations of human sovereignty, divinity, and animality. It does so by focusing on the imperial state's war upon human and extrahuman forms of predation, showcasing in the process a cluster of texts on collective criminal activity, hunting, and popular religion and folklore that share certain grids of intelligibility and vocabularies of rule. Collocating these texts on human and nonhuman predation brings into visibility the degree to which imperial sovereignty in the Victorian period entails traffic across human and extrahuman domains. Thus, thinking about the sanctioned killing of fearsome animal predators comes to be twinned with thinking about wars of pacification against dangerous humans and noxious deities. To think imperial sovereignty consequently involves thinking with humans and animals but also thinking with mutually antagonistic theological forces, Hindu and Christian—and in thinking these together. An attentiveness to these heterogeneous ecologies of empire might serve to illuminate the degree to which the imperial project depends on a complex mesh of transversal and co-constitutive life-forms and forces.

中文翻译：

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奇怪的帝国生态

这篇文章将 19 世纪的印度帝国视为人类主权、神性和动物性的某些批判性串联的场景。它通过关注帝国国家对人类和超人类掠夺形式的战争来做到这一点，在这个过程中展示了一系列关于集体犯罪活动、狩猎、流行宗教和民间传说的文本，这些文本具有一定的可理解性和规则词汇。将这些关于人类和非人类捕食的文本搭配在一起，可以看出维多利亚时期的帝国主权在多大程度上需要跨越人类和超人类领域的交通。因此，考虑对可怕的动物捕食者的认可杀戮与考虑对危险人类和有毒神灵的和平战争的思考是孪生的。因此，思考帝国主权需要与人类和动物一起思考，但也需要与相互对立的神学力量、印度教和基督教一起思考——并且将它们一起思考。关注帝国的这些异质生态可能有助于阐明帝国计划在多大程度上依赖于横向和共同构成的生命形式和力量的复杂网格。