Paper short abstract:

What happens if we consider relations of intimacy between human and animal individuals for understanding projects of environmental statecraft? This paper explores this question by applying a multispecies perspective to captive elephant management in Nepal and its role in biodiversity conservation.

Paper long abstract:

A posthumanist critique has emerged which challenges the concern of the Western intellectual tradition with treating the human in conceptual isolation. This critique informs the multispecies turn in anthropology, which considers social life the generative outcome of not-just-human interactions. Producing more-than-human, material-semiotic accounts of both multispecies networks and interspecies relations, this is allowing us to rethink interspecies sociality and to reconsider the ways that other species are implicated in human lives, landscapes, projects, and technologies. Drawing on fieldwork in and around Nepal's lowland Chitwan National Park, I seek to integrate these emerging strands in order to theorize intimate relations of affection between humans and elephants as a form of interspecies labour integral to state projects of biodiversity conservation. I do so by combining auto-ethnographic reflection on my affective apprenticeship with an elephant named Sitasma Kali, with analysis of the assemblage of people, places, things, and ideas through which Nepal's projects of protected area management are enacted. In so doing, I argue that enduring, reciprocally affectionate relations between humans and elephants represent key components of a social technology vital for understanding South Asian civilization. Comprising the kinaesthetic union of human and elephant, this technology is important not only for contemporary utilitarian functions, which include vehicular transport for biodiversity fieldwork and anti-poaching patrols, but also for understanding histories of state power that produced the lives, landscapes, and scenarios upon which today's lowland conservation regime is predicated.