Presentation short abstract

Participatory more-than-human ethnographic work on understanding relationality between people and wild Asian elephants in rural India provide multidimensional provocations to rethink conservation interventions, beyond the dominant techno-managerial paradigms.

Presentation long abstract

Asian elephant conservation is a major challenge in Indian conservation sector, and it is primarily done through managing human-elephant interactions with techno-managerial interventions. Different kinds of technical barriers that separate human and elephant spaces, outreach and awareness sessions targeted towards people who live alongside elephants, developing livelihood strategies to reduce costs of losing property to elephants dot the strategic landscape where ‘turning conflict into coexistence’ becomes the motto of the conservation sector. While conflict and coexistence become buzzword in the elite conservation space, our participatory more-than-human ethnographic work in rural Assam, India showed that such tech-centricity either neither acknowledge historical trajectories through which current human-elephant encounters have emerged, nor addresses relational, politico-affective ecologies that people develop with elephants due to long term co-occurrence and habitation. Through a more-than-human political ecology framework, we developed an understanding of the relational ecology which merged ecological history of the place, class-gender-ethnicity differences, elephants’ mobility in the landscape, and afterlives of conservation artefacts, such as solar electric fences. Such long-term, in-depth, participatory understanding provide provocations towards thinking conservation interventions differently, such as catering to peacebuilding, reducing ethnic differences, addressing gendered emotional and material needs, understanding history better in order to reach root causes of negative human-elephant interactions, and finally developing more-than-human justice-based actions that takes care of elephants’ needs as well.