The Presence of Elephants
eBook - ePub

The Presence of Elephants

Sharing Lives and Landscapes in Assam

  1. 200 pages
  2. English
  3. ePUB (mobile friendly)
  4. Available on iOS & Android
eBook - ePub

The Presence of Elephants

Sharing Lives and Landscapes in Assam

About this book

How to dwell in a forest alongside giants, avoid disturbing a living god, assist an animal with their manners, and help an elephant cross the road. The Presence of Elephants is an anthropological consideration of coexistence, grounded in people's everyday interactions with Asian elephants. Drawing on two years of ethnographic fieldwork in Assam, Northeast India, this book examines human–elephant copresence and how minds, tasks, identities, and places are shared between the two species. Sharing lives and landscapes with such formidable beings is a continuously shifting and negotiated exchange inherently composed of tensions, asymmetries, and uncertainties – especially in the Anthropocene when breakdowns in communication increasingly have a violent effect.

Developing a multifaceted picture of human–elephant relations in a postcolonial setting, each chapter focuses on a different dimension of encounter, where elephants adapt to human norms, people are subject to elephant projects, and novel interspecies possibilities emerge at the threshold of nature and society. Vulnerability is a common experience intensified in contemporary human–elephant relations, felt through the elephant's power to disrupt and transform human lives, as well as the risks these endangered animals are exposed to. This book will be of interest to scholars of multispecies ethnography and human–animal relations, environmental humanities, conservation, and South Asian studies.

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Yes, you can access The Presence of Elephants by Paul G. Keil in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Social Sciences & Cultural & Social Anthropology. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.

Information

Table of contents

  1. Cover
  2. Half Title
  3. Series
  4. Title
  5. Copyright
  6. Dedication
  7. Contents
  8. Acknowledgements
  9. Introduction
  10. 1 Exclusive landscape, fragmented relations
  11. 2 Exchanges with a hungry god
  12. 3 Scaffolding giants
  13. 4 Corresponding with wild neighbours
  14. 5 Collaborative solidarity and reclaiming the local
  15. 6 Conclusion
  16. Bibliography
  17. Index