Going Wild on Instagram: Tiger Safaris and India’s Protected Areas in the Age of Social Media

AbstractThrough the lens of tiger photography on Instagram, this paper investigates a desire for wilderness without the human footprint; based on a false separation between nature and society, this aspiration finds expression through visual aesthetics on the platform. Protected areas in India are increasing, but this has not halted nature’s financialisation. On the contrary, it has enhanced the availability of preserved nature for conversion to capital, mirroring earlier opportunities tied to resource extraction. Using insights from political ecology, I discuss how wildlife as hyper-spectacle on Instagram presents a natural world with the appearance of being untransformed by human intervention and available to tourism. Instagram offers a route into understanding the paradoxical stance of nature in contemporary tourism and conservation discourses.Keywords: EcotourismIndiaInstagramprotected areassocial mediatiger tourismwildlife photography Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).AcknowledgementsI would like to thank Spoorthi Niranjan, who was an undergraduate student at FLAME University at the time of writing, for assistance in the collection of Instagram posts. I also wish to thank the anonymous reviewers and journal editor for their suggestions. These inputs were very helpful in reformulating an earlier version of this paper.Notes1. Büscher describes what he calls the ‘nontransformation of nature’ as a nature-based commodity whose value is tied up in appearing as entirely ‘natural’: Bram Büscher, ‘The Value and Circulation of Liquid Nature and the Emergence of Fictitious Conservation’, in Nature Inc.: Environmental Conservation in the Neoliberal Age, ed. Bram Büscher, Wolfram Dressler and Robert Fletcher (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2014): 183–205.2. John M. MacKenzie, The Empire of Nature: Hunting, Conservation and British Imperialism (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988): 47. In this period, the colonial regime attempted to eliminate the tiger population for the supposed benefit of the people. Killing tigers was economically advantageous: fewer wild animals meant more timber, leading to prodigious sales and conversion of forest to agricultural land.3. Nada Farhoud, ‘Royals’ Bloody Trophy Hunting Past when Queen Posed with Tiger Shot by Prince Philip’, Mirror, January 29, 2021, accessed April 12, 2023, https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/royals-bloody-trophy-hunting-past-23410242.4. Jim Corbett, Man-Eaters of Kumaon (Bombay: Oxford University Press, 1944): 244.5. Radhika Govindrajan, Animal Intimacies: Interspecies Relatedness in India’s Central Himalayas (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018): 125.6. The Wildlife Protection Act of 1972 gave momentum to the conversion of hunting reserves belonging to maharajas into national parks.7. Ishan Kukreti, ‘Union Budget 2020–21: Big Chunk Goes to Tigers and Elephants’, Down to Earth, February 1, 2020, accessed May 13, 2022, https://www.downtoearth.org.in/news/wildlife-biodiversity/union-budget-2020-21-big-chunk-goes-to-tigers-and-elephants-69100.8. At the turn of the twentieth century, approximately 40,000 tigers inhabited India’s forested areas. When the Wildlife Protection Act (1972) and Project Tiger (1973) were introduced, hunting, poaching, prey reduction and habitat loss had decimated India’s tiger population to an estimated 1,827: S.P. Yadav, ‘Tiger Conservation in India: A Critical Analysis’, Stripes Quarterly Journal 10, no. 1 (2020): 7, accessed October 15, 2023, https://ntca.gov.in/assets/uploads/stripes/Vol1_Issue1_2020.pdf.9. As far back as Emperor Jalal-ud-Din Muhammad Akbar’s reign, shooting tigers served as coming-of-age rituals for young Indian princes, while these royal hunts provided symbolically rich subject matter for painting, prints and drawings.10. Meera Anna Oommen, ‘Beasts in the Garden: Human-Wildlife Coexistence in India’s Past and Present’, Frontiers in Conservation Science 2 (2021): 3, https://doi.org/10.3389/fcosc.2021.703432.11. In fact, there is no single algorithm powering Instagram’s display and functionality—it relies on numerous algorithms.12. In their monograph on Instagram, Leaver, Highfield and Abidin identify ‘three key ideas’ that can be seen as distinct areas of inquiry: ‘visual aesthetics, including genres and tropes of content and visual normalisation; user practices and norms; and audiences and motivations for Instagram use’: Tama Leaver, Tim Highfield and Crystal Abidin, Instagram (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2021): 40.13. Ibid., 72.14. Additionally, since 2015, Instagram has been restricting the interoperability of its API (Application Programming Interface) with third-party tools, thereby inhibiting software-assisted research.15. Danah Boyd and Kate Crawford, ‘Critical Questions for Big Data: Provocations for a Cultural, Technological, and Scholarly Phenomenon’, Information Communication and Society 15, no. 5 (2012), quoted in Laestadius and Witt, ‘Instagram Revisited’, 586.16. Linnea Laestadius and Alice Witt, ‘Instagram Revisited’, in The Sage Handbook of Social Media Research, ed. Anabel Quan-Haase and Luke Sloan (London: Sage Publications, 2022): 586.17. Ibid., 587.18. Leaver, Highfield and Abidin, Instagram, 205, emphasis in original.19. Oommen, ‘Beasts in the Garden’, 4.20. Ibid., 11.21. Ishan Kukreti, ‘Tigers and Tribals: Conservation Project Displaced 18,493 Families in 48 Years’, Down to Earth, October 9, 2020, accessed March 19, 2021, https://www.downtoearth.org.in/news/wildlife-biodiversity/tigers-and-tribals-conservation-project-displaced-18-493-families-in-48-yrs-73732.22. Oommen, ‘Beasts in the Garden’, 4.23. Annu Jalais, Forest of Tigers: People, Politics and Environment in the Sundarbans (New Delhi: Routledge, 2011).24. Ajit Menon and Nitin D. Rai, ‘Putting a Price on Tiger Reserves: Creating Conservation Value or Green Grabbing?’, Economic & Political Weekly 52, no. 52 (2017): 23–26; Ajit Menon and Nitin D. Rai, ‘The Mismeasure of Nature: The Political Ecology of Economic Valuation of Tiger Reserves in India’, Journal of Political Ecology 26, no. 1 (2019): 652–65; Robin J. Roth and Wolfram Dressler, ‘Market-Oriented Conservation Governance: The Particularities of Place’, Geoforum 43 (2012): 363–66.25. Jim Igoe, ‘Nature on the Move II: Contemplation Becomes Speculation’, in Nature Inc.: Environmental Conservation in the Neoliberal Age, ed. Bram Büscher, Wolfram Dressler and Robert Fletcher (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2014): 205–222, 206.26. Büscher, ‘Value and Circulation’, 184.27. Ibid., 185.28. For a critique of how financialising nature restores biodiversity, see Menon and Rai, ‘Putting a Price’.29. Pahari denotes someone ‘from the hills’, specifically the Himalayan regions of India and Nepal.30. Govindrajan, Animal Intimacies, 125.31. Tim Ingold, The Perception of the Environment: Essays on Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill (London: Routledge, 2000), quoted in ibid., 128.32. Govindrajan, Animal Intimacies, 129.33. Igoe, ‘Contemplation Becomes Speculation’, 205.34. Roth and Dressler, ‘Market-Oriented Conservation’, 363–66.35. Ibid.36. ‘Indigenous Peoples’, The World Bank, accessed March 15, 2023, https://www.worldbank.org/en/topic/indigenouspeoples.37. Sudha Vasan, ‘Consuming the Tiger: Experiencing Neoliberal Nature’, Conservation and Society 16, no. 4 (2018): 481–92; 487.38. Ibid.39. Ibid., 481–92.40. Ibid., 481.41. Shannon Dell, ‘Why Norway Is Teaching Travellers to Travel’, BBC Travel, October 17, 2017, accessed March 10, 2023, https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20171015-why-norway-is-teaching-travellers-to-travel.42. Igoe, ‘Contemplation Becomes Speculation’, 210.43. Ibid., 211.44. Zhayyn James, ‘Why Africa Will Make You a Better Wildlife Photographer’, Wildangle, September 21, 2020, accessed July 22, 2022, https://wildangle.in/blog/2020/09/21/why-africa-will-make-you-a-better-photographer/.45. Ibid.46. Ibid.47. Menon and Rao, ‘Mismeasure of Nature’, 654.48. Jim Igoe and Dan Brockington, ‘Neoliberal Conservation: A Brief Introduction’, Conservation & Society 5, no. 4 (2007): 432–49.49. Jim Igoe, ‘Nature on the Move II: Making, Marketing, and Managing an Accessible and Penetrable Nature that Seems to Dominate Our Environment by Virtue of Its Circulation’, Unpublished paper, 2013, quoted in Dan Brockington, ‘Celebrity Spectacle, Post-Democratic Politics, and Nature™ Inc’ in Nature Inc.: Environmental Conservation in the Neoliberal Age, ed. Bram Buscher, Wolfram Dressler and Robert Fletcher (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2014): 124.50. Aditya Joshi, quoted in Gayathri Vaidyanathan, ‘India’s Tigers Seem to Be a Massive Success’, Nature 574 (2019): 612–16; 615, accessed October 15, 2023, https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-03267-z.51. Ellie E. Armstrong et al., ‘Recent Evolutionary History of Tigers Highlights Contrasting Roles of Genetic Drift and Selection’, Molecular Biology and Evolution 38, no. 6 (2021): 2366–79, accessed May 15, 2022, https://doi.org/10.1093/molbev/msab032.52. Ibid.53. Vasan, ‘Consuming the Tiger’, 481–92.54. Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle, trans. Ken Knabb (Berkeley, CA: Bureau of Public Secrets, 2014): 4.55. Robert Fletcher, ‘Neoliberal Environmentality: Towards a Poststructuralist Political Ecology of the Conservation Debate’, Conservation and Society 8, no. 3 (2010): 171–81.56. Robert Fletcher, Wolfram Dressler and Bram Büscher, ‘The New Frontiers of Environmental Conservation’, in Nature Inc.: Environmental Conservation in the Neoliberal Age, ed. Bram Büscher, Wolfram Dressler and Robert Fletcher (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2014): 5.57. Igoe, ‘Contemplation Becomes Speculation’, 206, emphasis mine.58. David McDermott Hughes, ‘Third Nature: Making Space and Time in the Great Limpopo Conservation Area’, Cultural Anthropology 20, no. 2 (2005): 157–84.59. Ibid., 157–58.60. Ibid., 173.61. In The Coming of Photography in India, Pinney uses this term to qualify photography’s relationship to reality; he describes photography as having a higher ‘data ratio’ than other visual media such as drawing and painting: Christopher Pinney, The Coming of Photography in India (London: The British Library, 2008).62. Nayanika Mathur, Crooked Cats: Beastly Encounters in the Anthropocene (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2021): 10.63. Debord, Society of the Spectacle, 3.64. Ibid., 2.65. Ibid., 3.66. Ibid.67. Ibid.