Aust J Anthropol. 2021;00:1–20. | 1 wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/taja Accepted: 11 November 2021 DOI: 10.1111/taja.12414 ORIGINAL ARTICLE Human–buffalo conflicts and intimacies in ‘modernising’ Nepal Sascha Fuller © 2021 Australian Anthropological Society Research and Innovation Division, University of Newcastle, Callaghan, Australia Correspondence Sascha Fuller, Research and Innovation Division, University of Newcastle, Callaghan 2308, Australia. Email: sascha.fuller@newcastle.edu.au Abstract In Nepal ‘development’ (bikas) frames local socio- cultural practices, including gendered and environ- mental practices, with lasting gendered and ecological outcomes. This tension is at the heart of everyday life in Ludigaun, a Bahun (high caste Hindu) village in West Nepal. Utilising a framework of a local familiar tension between ‘traditional’ ideas/practices and those imag- ined through ‘modernity’, I draw on ethnographic mate- rial describing a year-long family conflict over keeping buffalo, to allow the tension and contradictions inherent in village life – of gender, generations, and caste – and their articulation with national and global relations – to come into focus. For an older generation of women, their work and relationships with buffalo are at stake, presenting an uncertain future and a possible crisis of identity and of place. I argue that the relationship be- tween these women and their buffalo extends beyond material needs and is a crucial emotional attachment; it is an intimate ‘mode of care’ that is integral to vil- lage social reproduction. Women's work with buffalo (although it has no positive status of its own) demon- strates the older generation of women are not passive but active players in constituting caste, gendered and social status identities. Keeping buffalo is fundamen- tal to the ways in which and older generation of Bahun women exert their influence. Building on the work of Campbell (Animals in Person: Cultural Perspectives on