Presentation short abstract

This is a study of people's everyday engagements with wild elephants in northeast India. It argues that sensory engagement is central to their knowledge of elephants and their sense of place amidst rapid ecological transformations.

Presentation long abstract

Sensory engagement is indispensable for people who must constantly interpret wild elephants’ behaviour and intentions, respond to their movements, and maintain distance from the potentially dangerous megafauna. The study draws on fieldwork in an agrarian village in Assam, Northeastern India, with people who are predominantly farmers. While elephants have long inhabited these landscapes, their presence outside the protected forests and into the adjacent villages has intensified over time. This has led to inventive ways in which people negotiate the uncertainty and precarity of living alongside elephants, which primarily includes routinely protecting their farmlands from crop-devouring elephants.

In this paper, I look at the repertoire of sensory practices through which my interlocutors not only protect their farmlands but also carry out other everyday activities, amidst the looming prospect of encountering elephants. I focus on heightened forms of sensory attunement, such as waiting for the arrival of elephants every evening, as well as more mundane embodied alertness, such as during walking through alleys that are also elephant pathways or sleeping at night. Based on the analysis of these practices, I foreground the centrality of the ‘sensory’ to how people claim to communicate with and know elephants, and how they describe their sense of place as being shaped by animals’ presence.