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.