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Studies find a direct association of collective violence with relational distance: lower the relational distance, lower the violence. Where people live as neighbours, spatial proximity provides more opportunity for contact. However, perpetrators of mass violence are often neighbours who had previously coexisted with their victims in apparent harmony. Neighbour-on-neighbour violence is a social violation: it shakes our confidence in the collective values of 'neighbourliness' and the strength of prior relations. In two state-orchestrated pogroms in India – against Sikhs in 1984 and Muslims in 2002 – the nature of prior neighbour relationships is delineated to identify why some neighbours participated in attacks, others in rescues. A qualitative analysis of 50 survivor affidavits and 41 in-depth interviews enabled reconstructing the texture of these relationships. Neighbourliness and situational factors (timing of attacks; built environment) provided a more nuanced understanding of behaviour. For democratic polities that authorise pogroms, findings challenge existing knowledge on contact and violence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is a study of Delhi's monkey-catchers, municipal contractors who trap and relocate simians. I examine their perspectives, as well as those of planners and residents. Parallel but competing dispositions vis-à-vis monkeys – fascination and repulsion, piousness and annoyance – are detailed. In so doing, the article addresses the following themes: purification and displacement, the neighbour and stranger, multi-species cohabitation, planning and modernization, and the circulation of gift and sin. Three interwoven arguments bear on studies of modernity, urban governance, and post-humanism. First, Indian cities are not becoming irreversibly bourgeois and sanitized; humans engage in varied ways with monkeys and are complicit in their presence, by ritually gifting food. The logic of the gift vies with the desire to cleanse; a supernatural current animates the modernist city. Second, studies of bureaucratic power often presume coherence and efficiency. In contrast, I illustrate official ambivalence to cleansing, as well as structural constraints and makeshift arrangements that conspire against the master plan. Third, I question post-humanist and multi-species theories that seek to transcend Western ontology. The monkey-catchers’ porous taxonomy for human–animal differences affirms human primacy as much as it dissolves dichotomies. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]