Paul G. Keil, "The Presence of Elephants: Shared Lives and Landscapes in Assam" (Routledge, 2024)

Mar 2, 2025

Paul G. Keil, a human-animal anthropologist from the Czech Academy of Sciences, dives into the delicate interplay of human-elephant coexistence in Assam. He shares insights from his two years of ethnographic research, exploring how humans and elephants navigate shared landscapes and cultural significances. The conversation highlights the challenges of urban development, the vulnerabilities of both species, and critiques conventional conservation approaches. Keil emphasizes the need for nuanced understanding amidst the cultural and environmental intricacies of this human-elephant relationship.

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Intro

00:00 • 3min

Humans and Elephants: A Complex Coexistence

03:09 • 10min

Understanding Human-Elephant Interactions in Assam

13:00 • 7min

Understanding Human-Elephant Coexistence

19:46 • 13min

The Elephant's Struggle in Assam

33:13 • 9min

Humans and Elephants: A Delicate Coexistence

42:11 • 12min

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: Sharing Lives and Landscapes in Assam (Routledge, 2024) 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.

Rituparna Patgiri is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Guwahati. Her research interests lie in the areas of food, media, gender and public. She is also one of the co-founders of Doing Sociology. Patgiri can be reached at @Rituparna37 on Twitter.

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