The Elephant in the Room
Histories of Place, Memory and Conflict with Wildlife Along a Southern Indian Forest Fringe
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 12304577 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Meera Anna Oommen (0000-0002-3670-5323, Dakshin Foundation, Bangalore; University of Technology, Sydney, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2018 |
| Volume | 25 |
| Issue | 2 |
| Pages | 269-300 |
| Publication date | 2018-04-18 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Environment and History (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0967-3407 • E-ISSN: 1752-7023 |
| Publisher | Liverpool University Press (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.3197/096734018x15217309861559 |
| OpenAlex | W2800709264 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 5 |
This paper traces past and present entanglements between people and elephants along a forest-agriculture fringe in Kerala's Western Ghats. In doing so, it explores the evolution of conservation-linked conflict and its problematic impacts. Over the centuries, the region's elephants have played a dominant role in its mountain landscapes: as antagonists to cultivators; as sources of ivory, labour and revenue to forest traders, local rulers and imperial administrators; and as cultural and religious icons straddling forests and countryside. Environmental protection arrangements in recent years ushered in a new elephant, a charismatic flagship beloved of conservationists, but also a key actor involved in fluctuating tensions along the forest edge. In this study, I explore long-term engagements between people and elephants by interrogating three critical phases in history, each incorporating a changing identity for the place in question: as a bountiful, ivory-rich forest at the turn of the Christian Era; as a site of capitalist production during the colonial period; and eventually as a contested conservation landscape. I show that these identities are predicated as much by extra-local processes such as migration and capitalist enterprises, as by embedded engagements with non-human agency. Contemporary conflict is, therefore, a complex ongoing narrative fuelled by a dynamic interaction between the persistence of human and animal memories as well as by multi-scale socio-political catalysts with long histories of influence. By ignoring historical contingencies and diverse discourses, contemporary conservation interventions may overlook the proverbial and sometimes literal elephant in the room
Agency (philosophy · Archaeology · Colonialism · Environmental ethics · Escarpment · Ethnology · Geography · Narrative · Political science · Politics · Social science · Sociology · Wildlife · Cambodian History and Society · History · Law · Social and Economic Development in India · Southeast Asian Sociopolitical Studies · Ecology
Vers une histoire socio-environnementale des empires contemporains
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| Unique citing works | 5 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 1 |
| Citation span | 2021 - 2025 (5) |
| Citation velocity | recent |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 5 |