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Paper short abstract:

In examining the care practices of human-elephant relations in South India, this paper presents how mahouts (elephant handlers) attend to uniqueness of each elephant and how such practices that involves a reversal of ownership make elephants part of home and family.

Paper long abstract:

Elephants have been an integral part of social life in India as war elephants, divine beings, laborers, and now as cosmopolitan figures of conservation. However, such intimate and complex relations have come under scrutiny with the growing studies on elephant intelligence and debates in animal rights discourse, all of which delve into the ethicality of elephant captivity and training practices (Kulick, 2017). While the moral concerns made by the activistic and scientific discourse are grounded in concrete experiences, ethnographic evidences from South India show that such totalizing perceptions shadow the ways through which elephant handlers (known as mahouts) and elephants are attuned, and how humans and elephants care for each other. Accomplishing a successful relationship with the elephant involves attentive care that acknowledge the uniqueness of each elephant and working according to the elephant's reethi – a way of doing things and engaging with the world. Such care and attention to elephant ways also reflect a reversal of ownership in human-elephant interactions. In presenting these ethnographic evidences of care practices from Kerala, South India, where elephants are treated as children and become part of the conceptual defines of home, the paper posits that an ethnographic inquiry into the ordinary yet extraordinary interactions between caretakers and elephants offers an alternate interpretation of moral experience - grounded in phenomenological concerns of care, beyond the defines of torture.