Conflict, Negotiation, and Coexistence: Rethinking Human-Elephant Relations in South Asia

As formidable instruments of war, they have changed the destinies of empires.
As marauding crop raiders, they are despised.
As an endangered species, they are cherished.

Numerous and often contrasting are the ways in which elephants have been regarded by humans across millennia. Today, with reduced forest cover, human population expansion, and increasing industrialization, interaction between the two species is unavoidable and conflict is not mere happenstance. What, then, is the future of this relationship?

In South Asia, human-elephant relationships resonate with cultural significance. From the importance of elephants in ancient texts to the role of mahouts over centuries, from discussions on de-extinction to accounts of intimate companionship, the essays in this book eveal the various dynamics of the relationship between two intelligent social mammals. Eschewing such binaries as human and animal or nature and culture, the essays present elephants as subjective agents who think, feel, and emote.

Conflict, Negotiation, and Coexistence underscores the fact that we cannot understand elephant habitat and behaviour in isolation from the humans that help configure it. Significantly, nor can we understand human political, economic, and social life without the elephants that shape and share the world with them. ŠSHCOP The interconnections between humans and elephants in South Asia are remarkably complex both naturally and culturally, yet our understandings are typically framed in terms of animal ecologies or human histories. This tends to produce understandings that sideline one or the other species. In this book however, social scientists, natural scientists, and humanities scholars come together to develop an integrated approach to understanding the often-problematic ways that humans and elephants exist together and influence each other.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0199467226
• ISBN13: 9780199467228
• Release Date: September 2016
• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Length: 384 Pages
• Weight: 1.20 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.4" x 5.8" x 8.8"