Paper Short Abstract:

This paper explores the possibility and potential of two methods in linguistic anthropology—language socialization and multimodality—to understand human-elephant co-socialization in Kerala, India.

Paper Abstract:

Asian elephants have been integral to social life in India for centuries—in wars, heavy labor, temple rituals, and as status symbols. Unlike most other animals that live and work with humans however, elephants are not biologically domesticated. Rather, they are wild animals, captured and socially tamed to co-habit with people. In the south Indian state of Kerala, this process is understood to transform forest elephants (kattana) into a ‘Kerala elephant’ – nadan aana, signifying something or someone native to Kerala. Here, not only are elephants socialized to become Kerala elephants, but handlers are socialized to become elephant-people (aanakar).

I examine these co-socialization interactions, where humans and elephants learn to navigate the uncertainties of interspecies field and attune to each other through multiple modes including speech, touch, gesture, gaze, voice modulation, and body posture. The paper draws on two methods—language socialization and multimodality—to explore their possibility and potential in understanding human-elephant co-socialization. Language socialization studies how human individuals come to acquire local subjectivity through everyday communication (Kulick and Schieffelin 2004). The multimodal turn (Stivers and Sidnell 2005) that attends to more-than-verbal forms of communication (such as posture, gesture, gaze, voice modulation) make this approach well-fitting to examine interspecies socialization.