Sayan BANERJEE, National Institute of Advanced Studies, Bangalore, India
Anindya SINHA, National Institute of Advanced Studies, Bangalore, India
Recent traction with the ‘animal turn’ in geography and an ongoing dialogue between more-than-human geography, political ecology, and animal ecology is inspiring to rethink the scholarship on human-wildlife interaction at the forest-agriculture interface. Situated within this interdisciplinarity and with combined methods of ethnography and animal ecology, this paper attempts to examine the co-construction of lives and landscapes among people and wild Asian elephants in Assam, India who are often engaged in negative interactions. Spatio-temporal analysis and behavioural observations of wild elephants’ foraging on paddy crops showed specific usage and preference of season, landscape elements, and time to navigate the landscape. This is developed through socio-ecological changes that happened over time and more drastically in the last thirty years. People’s lives around elephants and changing ecology and society have also been dynamic, leading to emotional and material coping and adaptation strategies. People develop intimate knowledge about elephants often leading to anthropomorphisation of elephants with a sense of shared marginalisation. Livelihood shifts to reduce loss due to elephants such as paddy to small-scale tea cultivation have led to changing economies, dependencies, ecologies, and even elephant movement patterns. Thus, within the webs of power and relations, both species maintain a pulsating balance of survival by attuning to each other’s rhythms, leading to a place-making that is neither completely human nor beastly.
Mots clés : Asian Elephant|More-than human geography|India|Place-making|Interdiscplinary
A104220SB