Presentation short abstract

Elephant translocation in Peninsular Malaysia becomes a bordering apparatus whose effects exceed state conservation’s intent. As the “government’s elephants” disturb Jahai multispecies ecologies, they act as rogue infrastructures that reveal the volatility of governing wildness.

Presentation long abstract

When state conservation attempts to territorialize wildness, what bordering practices emerge—and how do more-than-human actors unsettle the very ecologies these practices aim to stabilize? In Peninsular Malaysia, elephants and other “rogue” megafauna that stray into human-designated zones are tranquilized and moved to protected habitat where they ostensibly “belong”–territories also home to the Jahai indigenous people of the Thai-Malaysian borderland. In the wake of these translocations, Jahai report being increasingly menaced by gajah kerajaan—“the government’s elephants”—which raid gardens and unsettle village life. Some speculate these elephants come from zoos, noting their strange ease around humans, unlike familiar local herds that can be spoken to and warded off. This boundary-making distinction frames translocated elephants as extensions of the state whose actions render them careless intrusions into enduring multispecies relations.

Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork with Jahai communities, I approach wildlife translocation as a bordering apparatus aimed at enclosing and mediating wildness. Trucks, tranquilizers, GPS collars, and bureaucratic classifications redistribute animal bodies to render landscapes legible and manageable through distinctions between nature and culture, human and animal. In the process, the government’s elephants animate the forest in unsettling ways for the Jahai. Yet their movements continually transgress the political-ecological boundaries conservation seeks to secure. In this unpredictable mobility, they become “rogue infrastructures” (Kim 2016)—animate extensions of a state apparatus whose effects exceed its design. Wildness thus emerges not as a condition to be stabilized but as a volatile effect of the apparatuses meant to govern it, exposing the ecological limits of conservation’s border regimes.