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Remembering shared landscapes, disrupting modernist orders, and a more-than-human proposal: Living with elephants in Assam, India
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SYSNO ASEP 0548458 Document Type A - Abstract R&D Document Type The record was not marked in the RIV R&D Document Type Není vybrán druh dokumentu Title Remembering shared landscapes, disrupting modernist orders, and a more-than-human proposal: Living with elephants in Assam, India Author(s) Keil, Paul G. (UEF-S) RID, SAI Number of authors 1 Number of pages 5 s. Action Anthropology and Conservation Event date 25.10.2021 - 29.10.2021 VEvent location Online Country GB - United Kingdom Event type WRD Language eng - English Keywords human-elephant ; coexistence ; India Subject RIV AC - Archeology, Anthropology, Ethnology OECD category Antropology, ethnology Institutional support UEF-S - RVO:68378076 Annotation The British colonial administration in India enforced an environmental order and land-use regime that excluded people from areas notified as “forest”, and, in turn, wildlife would eventually be excluded from places not reserved as forest. Along the foothills of Guwahati, Assam, few socio-ecologies remain which have not only conserved a wild and endangered Asian elephant population, but also conserved a convivial mode of co-inhabitance where human and elephant communities continue to share both forest and non-forest spaces. This paper will explore how both species historically shared a landscape prior to its exclusionary reconfiguration. Understanding the past in correspondence with current ethnographic examples of co-existence can help us to imagine the possibility and future of human-elephant worlds.
Elephants who enter anthropocentric space are not representative of human-wildlife conflict or the need to reinforce nature-society boundaries, rather they are a result of a failed modernist, environmental order. And instead of characterising elephant agency in this context as a reactive response to lack of resources, this paper will understand elephants as weaving together unprecedented hybrid ranges, and respond to their project as a more-than-human proposal for a new kind of shared world with people. Scientists have been listening to wildlife, and nonhumans have significantly shaped their conception of conservation landscapes. Still, greater attention must be given to lived, local examples of co-inhabitance. And greater acknowledgement that the worlds which elephants are trying to advance can evade anthropogenic logic and design.Workplace Institute of Ethnology Contact Veronika Novotná, novotna@eu.cas.cz, Tel.: 532 290 277 Year of Publishing 2022
Number of the records: 1