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 household and free-roaming Asian elephants. Drawing on two years of fieldwork in Assam, northeast India, this book is an ethnography of human-elephant co-presence that examines how minds, tasks, identities, and places are shared between the two species. Sharing lives and landscapes with such a formidable being is a continuously shifting and negotiated exchange, inherently composed of tensions, asymmetries, and uncertainty, especially in the Anthropocene when breakdowns in communication increasingly have 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.

Book Information
ISBN 9781032494678
Author Paul G. Keil
Format Hardback
Page Count 200
Imprint Routledge
Publisher Taylor & Francis Ltd