Conflict, Coexistence, and the Challenge of Rethinking Human–Elephant Relations

Abstract

This chapter considers the complex ways humans and elephants affect each other socially, historically, and ecologically. Concerned with interspecies coexistence in environments now so transformed by human agency as to warrant the designation of a new geological epoch—the Anthropocene—it argues for a new approach to human–elephant relations that might help us rethink the contemporary challenges of conservation and welfare. This involves rejecting an intellectual tradition that has kept human histories separate from animal ecologies and, instead, embracing the multispecies turn, which recognizes the limiting conceit of sequestering the cultural human from the natural animal. It does so by proposing ‘ethnoelephantology’ as a shared discursive space and an integrated research programme that takes the relationship between humans and elephants as the unit of analysis, seeking to bring together approaches from the natural sciences, social sciences, and humanities. The chapters in this volume represent a step towards such an approach to human–elephant relations.

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