Living in Elephants’ Places: a study of human-elephant engagement in rural Assam, India

Tuesday, July 30 | 8AM | remotly on Zoom

Abstract:
This study of an agrarian community’s relationship with free-roaming elephants in north-eastern India argues that intrinsic aspects of people’s lives such as their sense of belongingness to places are relationally co-constituted by their enigmatic and potentially dangerous neighbours: the wild elephants. The Anthropocene is characterised by rapidly shrinking elephant habitats in northeast India and other parts of the world. Elephants, by inhabiting and shaping these shifting landscapes, thoughtfully and indeterminably, are delineating their habitats in ways not necessarily commensurate with notions of animal habitats as fixed and bounded forest enclosures. The mobile and expansive dwelling practices of elephants impact the lives of marginalized communities living near reserve forests, like my interlocutors, who routinely encounter and thereby possess knowledge of elephants. The thesis explores how for people in rural Assam proximity to elephants implies a shared recognition that elephants’ are social actors who routinely incorporate the villages and other human-inhabited areas within their fluid habitats, which in turn profoundly shape people’s experience of these places. Following an unremarkable but often repeated phrase by my interlocutors–“We live in an elephants’ place - haathir Jega”, I explore the provisional map of the 'elephants' place’ that emerge as my interlocutors as they follow the habitual pathways of elephants, interrupting the boundaries of forest and village and stitching together disparate locations into a fluid spatial constellation. I further examine people’s cultivated sensorial attunement towards the elephants that permeate into their embodied experience of these places. Finally, I examine people’s intense practices of protecting their farmlands from crop-devouring elephants as an indispensable part of people’s relationship to their land which is central to their belongingness to the place. Based on these explorations the thesis rethinks the social categories of place and place-making as grounds for more–than–human engagements, and concomitantly contributes to ongoing conversations about humans co-sharing landscapes with various life forms amidst rapid ecological transformations.

Keywords: human-elephant relationship, Assam, India, placemaking, multispecies ethnography

Examining Committee:
Chair: Dr. Lindsey Freeman, Associate Professor, Sociology & Anthropology, SFU
Supervisor: Dr. Cristina Moretti, Assistant Professor, Sociology & Anthropology, SFU
Committee Member: Dr. Dara Culhane, Professor Emeritus,  Sociology & Anthropology, SFU
Committee Member: Dr. Michael Hathaway, Professor,  Sociology & Anthropology, SFU
Examiner: Dr. Zoe Todd,  Associate Professor, Department of Indigenous Studies, SFU

Please note that the defence will be held remotely on Zoom. If you'd like to be added to the Zoom attendee list, please contact samgr@sfu.ca no later than 8:00AM on Thursday July 25th, 2024.