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ABSTRACT
This paper explores the collaboration of humans and elephants in South Indian wildlife conservation. Drawing on ethnography within the Indian forest department and among elephant handlers in Wayanad, Kerala, it highlights the largely invisible work relationship between indigenous forest labourers and captive elephants, and their essential contribution to wildlife management. Extending ethnographic attention beyond an exclusively human realm, I show that human and elephant relations have been co-constituted while working together for the forest department. Their working partnership, situated in the historical nature-cultures of logging, teak extraction, and conservation, has created ambivalent intimacies between humans and elephants, containing both mutual violence and affect. By highlighting the importance of work relationships, history, and questions of power for multi-species studies, this article argues that human–animal relations are not only shaped by individual intimacies, but also by danger, risk, and aggression, situated within a region's larger political ecology.
Acknowledgements
This research was supported by the German Research Foundation. I am grateful to my interlocutors in Wayanad for letting me witness the arduous more-than-human work that goes into wildlife conservation. I would like to thank Suma Vishnudas and C.K. Vishnudas for their friendship, hospitality, and research assistance. I am indebted to Michael Hathaway, Fred Kurt, Eben Kirksey, Piers Locke, Celia Lowe, Daniel Münster, Genese Sodikoff, and Thom Van Dooren for their generous thoughts, feedback, and constructive comments on earlier versions of this paper. Thanks also to the journal's editor and the two anonymous reviewers for their helpful suggestions.
Notes
1. Adivasi is a Hindi word meaning ‘original inhabitant'. I prefer using the expression ‘adivasi', rather than ‘tribal', as it points towards the movement of India's indigenous groups to attain political self-determination. However, Wayanad's heterogeneous indigenous communities usually refer to themselves as ‘tribals', which in scholarly contexts evokes discriminatory connotations. In official contexts (census data, government institutions, etc.), India's indigenous groups are termed ‘Scheduled Tribes', as declared in the country's constitution for purposes of positive discrimination (see http://ncst.nic.in). In this paper, I use the three terms interchangeably.
2. Mar is the Malayalam word for ‘men'. The workers usually refer to Forest Department officials as ‘forest mar' (forest people).
3. All names are pseudonyms.
4. In 2012, mahouts received a daily wage of 334 INR. However, though they worked all days of a month, their wage was only calculated for 20 days. Non-permanent fire watchers earned 290 INR a day, which is more risky, but better paid than agricultural labour, where the average wage for men is around 150–200 INR.
5. Kurumba is a generic expression that is used in the census reports, manuals, and working plans of the Indian Forest Department (Innes & Evans Citation1908) and covers all of Wayanad's heterogeneous tribal groups.
6. The Hindi word mahāut comes from the Sanskrit mahātmya, meaning ‘great in measure'. http://dsal.uchicago.edu/dictionaries/macdonell/ (Accessed 10 March 2013).
7. See, for example, the People for Animals India homepage: http://www.petaindia.com/ (Accessed 9 June 2014).
8. Until 1977, elephants were listed under Schedule II (Part I) of the Wildlife Protection Act, which meant that they were ‘special game' and could be killed, captured, or traded commercially by the forest department and individuals with a license. In 1977, elephants were brought under Schedule I of the Act, which made their capture illegal.
9. Numbers according to Ministry of Environment and Forests (2011), Status of Tigers in India, National Tiger Conservation Authority, New Delhi.