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Paper Short Abstract:

Our paper explores mutually co-evolved sensory geographies of wild Asian elephants and local human communities at the forest–farm–plantation interface in Assam, northeastern India. This turns into sensible geographies, wherein people and elephants mould their personal space and time to co-habit.

Paper Abstract:

A continuum of interactions, ranging from positive to negative, between wild Asian elephants and local human communities have been well documented across their now-shared forest–farm–plantation habitat matrix in Assam, northeastern India. These often-nuanced interactions, which have arisen from the long-term, close-range cohabitation between the two species, appear to have led to mutually co-evolved sensory geographies that involve actively experienced, vernacular knowledge and ideations of other-than-elephant and other-than-human lives respectively. Applying approaches, concepts, and methods from etho-ethnography, our paper attempts to comprehend the experiential methodologies that elephants and humans employ to generate sensory visuo-audio-tactile-smellscapes through which they make sense of one another’s in/direct presence at various spaces and times. Such personalised sensorial geographies, created experientially, however, tend to be specific and localised, and even then, uncertain, tentative, and often fallible. The variability and the often-troubling inconsistency in these knowledge systems automatically result from the nature of the interspecies encounters, whether momentary or prolonged in their range, or when a protagonist may be entirely absent or may have left the space without a physical meeting but leaving behind semiotic, occasionally difficult-to-sense, evidence of their presence. Importantly, the active making of such vernacular knowledge of one another’s agency also invokes, in its turn, sensible geographies, wherein elephants and farmers act to mould their personal space and time to become uneasy neighbours, sharing mutually forced and mutually agreed-upon lives, as they both become increasingly marginalised in the synurbising world of the Indian Anthropocene.