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Paper short abstract:

Ethnography is commonly used as a participatory method in which researcher immerse into the field. Studies have shown that the recent human-wildlife conflicts in South India have not been examined as development crisis. This study explores participatory and co-producing method for more visuality.

Paper long abstract:

It has never been considered that human-wildlife conflicts are developmentally induced crisis in which Adivasis of Wayanad are immensely entrapped. It is observed that in recent times, the intense and incendiary conflicts are taking place in which Adivasis are facing new survival threats. They live in the borders of forests, and they depend upon foraging. While developmental crisis intensifies, these marginalised communities are affected by it. More than anything, the developmental crisis brought their life/livelihoods into peril.

Apart from the migration of people, a series of British colonial initiatives/decrees for enacting several forest laws and the Wildlife Act of 1972 have seen Adivasis losing their rights to use forest resources. This has led to the loss of their land, allowed the state to control the entire forest including the wildlife. Thereby, the community management of forest by the Advasis has ended (Gadgil and Guha 1995: 61).

Traditional ethnography prefers oral narrative as a strategy to portray development crisis like human-wildlife conflicts. This strategy has a limited scope of depicting reality in two ways : contextual deepness and polyvocality. As a result of which, marginal voices are being continuously suppressed. Despite this limitation, this study proposes ethnographic insights into the visual storyboard by using participatory and co-producing method with the help of enhancing the participation of Adivasis voices and visual storyboards (Bank and Morphy 1997; Pink 2006; Daehnhardt 2020). The study conceives to reimagine the dearth of such approach in anthropology of development.