Paper short abstract:

Critiquing the global conservation discourse that imagines elephants as pristine and wild, this paper examines the vibrant human-elephant sociality in Kerala. Secondly, the paper posits that such a 'pristine' view of elephants is not just an act of conservation, but co-produced through local actions

Paper long abstract:

Within the current framing of the Anthropocene moment and species extinction, elephants have become cosmopolitan figures, mobilized as a flagship species in conservation discourse (Barua 2014). Such discourses that evoke global ecological responsibilities where ethics becomes a more-than-human endeavor, frame elephants as ‘truly’ belonging in the wild, stripping them of their social history and cultural embeddedness with humans (Kulick 2017). Examining the ordinary yet extraordinary interactions between humans and elephants in Kerala, this paper reveals the diverse phenomenological subtleties of the relation that emerge through attunement and trust-building, that the global narratives on elephants obscure. Further, such narratives that imagine elephants as a cosmopolitan, wild species have been critiqued for their framing of environmental conservation in post-colonial contexts, where Western ideals of conservation or the hegemony of Indian elites that view elephants as pristine beings of the wild are imposed onto local South Asian communities (Guha 1989, 2006). In complicating such arguments that posit the notion of ‘pristine nature’ as a bigger entity emerging from the outside, this paper illustrates how local people appropriate and feed into the ‘global’ conservation discourse through mundane activities. Such local practices, although embedded with motivations different from conservation discourse, interact with each other to produce a narrative of elephant epistemology that is stripped of its historical and ritual specificities. Following Tsing (2005) who troubles the oppositional framing of global and local, the paper argues that the cosmopolitan elephant is not just a production of global discourse, but produced in interactions and interconnections.