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Paper short abstract:

This paper examines the division of shared, interspecies landscapes into exclusive spaces under colonisation, and asks whether an elephant’s utilisation of anthropocentric space is more than “conflict” but a proposal for a more-than-human future.

Paper long abstract:

The British colonial administration in India enforced an environmental order and land-use regime that excluded people from areas notified as "forest", and, in turn, wildlife would eventually be excluded from places not reserved as forest. Along the foothills of Guwahati, Assam, few socio-ecologies remain which have not only conserved a wild and endangered Asian elephant population, but also conserved a convivial mode of co-inhabitance where human and elephant communities continue to share both forest and non-forest spaces. This paper will explore how both species historically shared a landscape prior to its exclusionary reconfiguration. Understanding the past in correspondence with current ethnographic examples of co-existence can help us to imagine the possibility and future of human-elephant worlds.

Elephants who enter anthropocentric space are not representative of human-wildlife conflict or the need to reinforce nature-society boundaries; rather they are a result of a failed modernist, environmental order. And instead of characterising elephant agency in this context as a reactive response to lack of resources, this paper will understand elephants as weaving together unprecedented hybrid ranges, and respond to their project as a more-than-human proposal for a new kind of shared world with people. Scientists have been listening to wildlife, and nonhumans have significantly shaped their conception of conservation landscapes. Still, greater attention must be given to lived, local examples of co-inhabitance. And greater acknowledgement that the worlds which elephants are trying to advance can evade anthropogenic logic and design.

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Paper short abstract:

This explores the role of historians in conservation. It looks at the relationship between two fellow primates whose lives are entangled at the southern tip of Africa. In essence, I argue that animal cultures and shared human-animal cultures need to be considered in conservation.

Paper long abstract:

This paper asks what historians can do in the global crises of the Anthropocene, with its attendant multi-species calamity: the sixth extinction.It adopts the lens of the relationship between the two fellow primates who live closely with each other – baboons and humans. In examining how this relationship changed over millennia, it tries to reconstruct a ‘more than human history’ as ‘useable past’, . Environmental histories of southern Africa have neglected the longue durée, so this chapter tries to suggest possible new approaches to draw on cognate disciplines like ethnoprimatology, palaeontology, palaeoecology, archaeology and the study of rock art, hitherto largely overlooked by historians. In using these new sources it does two things: it offers a sample-card of possibilities for other environmental histories of human-animal relations, especially over long time periods, and it argues that history can be useful in conservation efforts in the Anthropocene. It In presenting a synthesis of human socio-cultural history and baboon ethology/ecology, it builds a conceptual bridge between conservation biologists and environmental historians, crossing disciplinary boundaries. In essence, it argues that animal cultures and shared human-animal cultures need to be considered in conservation.

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Paper short abstract:

This paper explores how Sundarban islanders express their historical convivialness with the landscape and its multispecies engagement in the form of folklore, myths and Jatran. It focuses on legitimizing these culturally imbibed conservation practices of locals in decolonising the landscape

Paper long abstract:

This paper explores how Sundarban islanders express their historical convivialness with the landscape and its non-human species, such as the tigers, the mangrove forest or the snakes. It will focus on how this interdependence has maintained an equilibrium between the human and non-human with a 'strained' coexistence, keeping out the spectatorship of the capitalists(stakeholders) on the landscape but focusing on the everyday environmentalism of the locals (Busher & fletcher). I shall emphasise the 'strained' relationship present in this diverse landscape that embodies the naturalness and realness of the Sundarbans conservation politics and the everyday struggle over an outsider's gaze, which is exotics and reductionist. This convivialness have evidence from the past in their local practices of folklore, myths and Jatran (folk theatre). The Bonbibir Johurnama have elements of stewardship on how the forest is a shared space between humans and tigers, and each should obey the rules to accommodate and appreciate the other.

Similarly, there are myths of venomous snakes annotating similar priorities in the landscape. The tale of Maa Manasa is weaved to acknowledge the significance of snakes such that the balance of nature is sustained. The paper further critiques the applicability of classical conservation practices, which has often demarcated the distinction between humans and non-humans and is a misfit in a marginal space like Sundarbans because these frameworks do not harken the indigenous/local knowledge and its practices associated with conservation. In contemporary times, these practices comprehend how the Sundarban islanders have ideated and have been practising equivalent convivial conservation for a long time. Hence, localizing governance of conservation practices will help give the decision-making power in the hands of the locals and decolonise the landscape for conservation research and practices.

It is still debatable who has the upper hand in claiming the territorial ownership: ‘the humans or the tigers' but certainly not a hegemonic stakeholder in making these exclusionary decisions.

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Paper short abstract:

An ethnographic analysis of fisherfolk's care for waterbodies and their other inhabitants, juxtaposed with multi-scalar political-economic and ecological challenges and aspirations, to probe multi-species approaches for how they intersect with amphibious omens of environmental justice.

Paper long abstract:

In North Bihar, India, a place ridden by water disasters and caste-based violence, care about the wellbeing of the river, plants, animals, of nature in general is labor socialized through caste. Yet, the embodied ways in which fisherfolk interact with waterbodies, its banks, plants, fish, is constantly redefined by the social-political aspirations of their caste as well as by the political-economic challenges from the state and its tangled ways about social justice. Unfortunately, such challenges and aspirations seem to dangerously intersect with poverty, disasters, lack of access to health care, and other socio-environmental difficulties to counterproductively influence fisherpeople’s practices of environmental care and wellbeing. Yet, such practices also reveal a finely grained political awareness and ecological imagination, and could be read as stunning examples of class consciousness against all odds: weapons of the weak, and even an attempt to counter processes of hegemony. This ethnographic analysis is juxtaposed with other stories written in the water—omens of wastelands and harmful algae blooms—to probe multi-species approaches for how they intersect with environmental justice.