Interspecies Assemblages: Of Attunement and Relationality
Texte intégral
In this interconnection of embodied being and environing world, what happens in the interface is what is important. – Don Ihde, Bodies in Technology, 2002, p.8
1Attempting to practice the anthropologist’s task of thick description, this chapter probes the nuances that govern the human-elephant relationships in Kerala that in my informants’ view are often overlooked by the activism discourse, thus producing a partial, thin description of the relation. This sentiment has been questioned by several scholars but especially Haraway, who, following Hearne (2007), criticises the activistic conviction that training animals is just about simple domination, arguing that it is a rich and subtle conversation between the animal and the trainer (Haraway, 2008). The interspecies literature in anthropology has disrupted the strict human dominator/nonhuman dominated dichotomy and pays attention to the sensorial modes of communication that shape these human-nonhuman interactions (Pollen, 2001; Kohn, 2007; Locke, 2013; Mondeme, 2018), reflecting a general ethical reorientation towards animal engagement in the social science scholarship. The attention Haraway confers to ‘response and regard’ indicates that her approach to human-animal communication is an acknowledgement of the moral entanglements we find ourselves in with the nonhuman (Haraway, 2008; Kulick, 2017).
2Studies that reflect the interspecies moral milieu are primarily addressed through compelling propositions of kinship relations and the role of sacrifice in human-goat sociality (Govindrajan, 2015), how one ought to kill animals (Singh and Dave, 2015), the ethical implications of the scientific awareness of animal intelligence (Singer, 1990; Kulick, 2017; Birch, 2022; Wall and Andrews, 2022), perspectivism (Kohn, 2007), the sensoriality of ‘witnessing’ and locking of eyes between human-nonhuman that enable a sense of responsibility in animal activism (Dave, 2014), etc. While these approaches are insightful for examining the ethical complexities that shape interspecies relations, they fall short of probing the moral experience through a phenomenological take. Naisargi Dave’s work on witnessing (2014) is an interesting entry point into the sensorium of interspecies engagements, however, she uses the political as the major axis of analysing the sensorial nuances, an insightful approach nevertheless. In her later work on moods and modes of killing animals (Singh and Dave, 2015), Dave acknowledges the benefits of the anthropology of ethics approach in interspecies relations but continues to use the political as the primary analytical tool, developing on Agamben’s concept of bare life. I, therefore, argue that incorporating concepts from an anthropology of ethics and morality (Zigon, 2007; Desjarlais and Throop, 2011) can be incisive in filling this gap. What I do, then, is to put the anthropological theories on morality and ethics to test where it has not been used, and show what such integrative approaches can reveal.
3Fassin postulates that his project of moral anthropology requires anthropologists to consider their own and others’ prejudices as objects of scientific investigation (Fassin, 2008), suggesting the need to study the situatedness of morality. Anthropologists of morality argue that this is important not only to interrogate the moral worlds we and our interlocutors occupy but to move beyond the assumed Western philosophical approaches to ethics and attend to local moral frameworks (Zigon, 2010). Although there is an ongoing debate on where anthropologists locate the ethical (Mattingly and Throop, 2018), whether in the ordinary or in particular moments, I will use these approaches complementarily as they seem to have much in common and are pertinent to the human-elephant entanglements. Zigon explains the value of the analytical tool of moral assemblage in studying moral and ethical modalities as it does not assume morality as a top-down, normative approach but goes beyond this, providing a nuanced perspective of the fuzzy, fragmentary, and often contradictory moral milieu, where particular social contexts are defined by unique local moralities (Zigon, 2010). Jason Throop, through his work among the Yap community, shows how the phenomenological – the sentiments and sensibilities that are sensory, emotional and embodied play out in everyday moral experience (Throop, 2012). As Mattingly and Throop argue, humans are intimately intertwined with other beings, including elephants, in significant ways that place ethical demands on us as to how to respond (Mattingly and Throop, 2018), whereas Zigon proposes that the attunement itself becomes an ontological condition for morally being-in-the world (Zigon, 2014).
4Grounding this chapter in the ethical turn in anthropology was imperative because studying human-elephant relations in Kerala required paying attention to the sentiments and emotions (Throop, 2012) that dominate the interspecies realm in Palakkad. Although the chaining of elephants as a general ethical issue was reflected by some of my informants as I show in the second chapter, most people I spoke to did not place the question of captivity in the wider political-ethical context of whether elephants should belong in the wild or with humans, but rather were concerned about their individual elephants and their individual relations. Their moral sentiments were configured by historic, economic, and cultural concerns (Fassin, 2012), but most importantly by phenomenological concerns (although these concerns are all interspersed) that are embedded in these ordinary yet extraordinary relations. For my informants who live with elephants, it is the phenomenological nuances of the relation such as experiences of trust, mutual acknowledgement and the attunement of the relation that shaped their moralscapes (Throop, 2012). This emphasis on the sensorial and moral realms of the relation, I realised, is best explained conceptually by employing attunement, moral assemblage, and sentiments (Zigon and Throop, 2014) to the domain of interspecies. Engaging with these concepts in the ethical turn and incorporating phenomenological approaches that explore the sensorial realm in interspecies companionship (Zahavi, 2011; White, 2013; Ford, 2019; Mondeme, 2020), I ask how the phenomenological relations between humans and elephants shape the moral worlds that my informants construct and construe. In analysing the different sections—the sacredness attached to mahouting, various dimensions of human-elephant attunement, the reversal of ownership, sensorium of touch and recognition of the uniqueness of elephants—I put the ethical turn in anthropology to test to explore what it can tell us about interspecies assemblages.
Gajakesariyogam: A Special Calling
5In Unruly Edges: Mushrooms as Companion Species Anna Tsing writes, ‘human nature is an interspecies relationship’, indicating the embeddedness of the human in the nonhuman (Tsing, 2015). The humans of Kerala are deeply embedded in their years-old relationship with elephants where affecting and being affected, caring for and being cared for shape the interspecies field (Haraway, 2008). Unlike the ubiquitous companion species such as dogs or cats that are part of the human domestic sphere and familiar to immediate family and friends, the captive elephants who grow up as members of a family or temple trust are recognised not just within the immediate human relations but represent the entire village they come from. Embedded in relations of care, pride, and sacredness, they are members of the family, the asset of the village and beings destined to carry the sacred idol during the annual temple festival. This sense of collective appropriation of captive elephants is evident in how everyone in Palakkad had stories to tell about each elephant and its character specificities, although the relation that mahouts and owners build with the elephant is different from the collective relationship with the elephant as a community emblem. In this sense, unlike dogs, goats, cows, etc., elephants are at once private companion species entangled in everyday affective intimacies as well as public symbols of pride, wonderment, fandom, and devotion. This is manifest in the naming practices where the name of the elephant is preceded by the name of the village they come from such as ‘Iritty Krishnan’ or ‘Kinattinkara Devaswom Shekharan’. While such naming practices that include the name of ancestors, clan, and village are common among human communities, this is not usually extended to other nonhuman species, making elephants an integral and recognised part of the village.
6Mahouts in Kerala are addressed as elephant-people (aanakar), where imagining a mahout is impossible without invoking the elephant, where mahouts and elephants become with each other (Haraway, 2008). For my informants, this is not a job that anyone can just take up. To be a mahout or own an elephant is interpreted among my informants as a vocation - that only a few have been called for. Lalita claims that her father who had over three elephants was blessed with gajakesariyogam – a term in Malayalam that indicates the divine calling to be with elephants. The presence of a linguistic concept that is specifically used to denote this vocation further reflects the historical and emotional significance people attach to being a mahout or elephant owner in Kerala. Mahout Rajan substantiated this emotional significance when he said he had ‘a feeling’ in mind that he is destined to be a mahout and despite several injuries involving elephants he does not regret the choice. Such associations of ‘calling’ and ‘destiny’ reflect the affective attachment that mahouts ascribe to the profession (Nath, 2017). Although my informants interpret it as a calling or a feeling, it is not devoid of influences from early childhood exposure to elephants and temple festivals. All my informants saw elephants frequently during their childhood which shaped their ‘feeling’ and ‘calling’ for this profession. This was well explained during a conversation with mahout Satheeshan:
‘While growing up, we had many mango trees near our house. Learning commands from my brother who was a mahout, I would sit on the branch of the mango tree imagining it to be an elephant. Then I would take two leaf clusters and place them on either side of the branch, like elephant ears. I would then take a stick (that mahouts use to discipline the elephant) and begin the vaaythaari1- turn right, turn left…’.
7Aanaye kandu valarnu (grew up seeing elephants) was a common narrative among my informants, suggesting that early childhood exposure influenced the decision to become a mahout, although not all people who are exposed to elephants end up becoming a mahout; calling or destiny was claimed to matter. However, as I mentioned in the first chapter, many mahouts change elephants for better wages or due to disagreements with the owners and hence the vocation is not devoid of the material aspects of a job. Nonetheless, this does not negate the sacred and affective ascriptions my informants associate with the profession, which in itself suggests a way of being with elephants (Zigon, 2014). As Zigon claims, mahouts are essentially relational beings who, by the very nature of their profession, are beings-in-relation with elephants that are not separated from their everyday moralities (Zigon, 2014).
Metaphors of Riding and Attunement
8I was speaking to a mahout at the elephant fort in Guruvayur who was idling away the time as his elephant was in musth. A female tourist who was looking at the famous Punnathur fort behind the mahout casually joined our conversation. For every question I posed, she followed it up with another. Although I was quite confused and amused by her intervention in a dyadic conversation, she was a curious character. Seeing the long stick behind the elephant’s ears, she asked the mahout why the stick was kept there. The mahout said, ‘why do we keep a huge block/brick (katta) behind the vehicle tire on a slope? Then the vehicle stays there as we kept it. It is the same with elephants.’ Statements such as these where mahouts compare elephants to vehicles were common. ‘I put my toes up, and the elephant lifts the palm leaves. If I leave my toes hanging, he will walk slow’, said Rajan. These statements may convey an imagery of elephants as static beings that we humans act upon, like a car. Turn on. Press the brakes. Turn off. These acts can sound mechanical, but the more I hung out with mahouts and elephants, it became evident that the movements emerge from a dynamic pedagogical relation, where the human and the elephant move in rhythms, influencing and influenced by each other through shared meaning – that Nitheesh described as ‘teamwork’. The pressure from the mahout’s toe moves through the rope around the neck to the skin of the elephant who then interprets the cue and takes action. At the same time, mahouts learn how to move or when to pause based on their understanding of the elephants as some elephants are slow, some quick in action. To be a skilled mahout, for my informants, lies in the ability to understand the ways of the elephant. A conversation with mahout Satheeshan demonstrated this:
‘During our walks, Shekharan is usually fed by people on our usual route. It is a habit for them and Shekharan. But there was a particular bakery he was very fond of. He would slow down on reaching the bakery, and until he received something, even a small toffee would suffice, Shekharan wouldn’t leave. The shop was closed a few years ago, but poor Shekharan doesn’t know that bakery is no more. He still slows down and waits for a minute when he reaches the building.’
9Far from being a purely mechanistic relation, using simple commands or prodding, Satheeshan and Shekharan elephant share an understanding of each other. Csordas’ definition of ‘somatic modes of attention’ (1993) is of value here, which he defines as the culturally elaborated ways of attending to each other when the cues by the rider or the elephant become so subtle, and they subconsciously anticipate each other’s action rather than reacting to them. This anticipation became prominent in the Satheeshan-Shekharan relation.
10One day, Shekharan elephant, Satheeshan and I were returning to the temple from Shekharan’s grazing area and, on the way, Satheeshan met his friends and began to chitchat. But Shekharan kept walking. Seeing this, a neighbour lady called out, ‘Satheesha! See Shekeharan is on his own’. Satheeshan reassured her saying that he would stop before the road. I waited to see if Shekharan really would stop or walked ahead. To my surprise, Shekharan stopped right before the road and waited for Satheeshan to join him, swinging his ears. Such intuitive ways of predicting and anticipating an elephant’s actions characterised this relation beyond the fulfilment of an elephant’s immediate needs in exchange for obedience and cooperation (Locke, 2015). Describing his field experience as a mahout, anthropologist Locke writes ‘[a] wiggle of her head would inform me I was misapplying my toes, her insistence on turning left when I was trying to turn right during grazing would be revealed not as disobedience on her part, but rather her way of directing me toward the plant matter she liked for food or medicine’ (Locke, 2015). Intentions become intertwined, and both humans and elephants are cause and effect of each other’s movements. Bruno Latour writes about how there is not a single puppeteer who does not claim that the puppet character makes them do motions in the story and instigates new ways of moving, suggesting that a clear sense of causality becomes difficult to pinpoint in attachments (Latour, 1999). Who influences and who is influenced in this relation has no clear answer (Haraway, 2008), and such unsaid norms where interactants learn to act and interpret the actions of their co-interactants become fundamental to attaining attunement (Young, 2013). The process of becoming a domestic elephant and for a human to become an elephant-person is thus a relational process configured through particular social bonds and life habits where they get attuned over time (Whatmore and Thorne 2000; Throop 2003; Zigon 2014).
11Such forms of knowing also surfaced in how the villagers reacted to Shekharan grazing in the open space. Satheeshan, Shekharan and I walked to drop off Shekharan to graze, accompanied by ‘Shekharaa’ calls from little kids and banana gifts from the families we met on our way (Figure 2). As we reached the grazing area, Shekharan walked off and Satheeshan watched him go like a proud father. Shekharan was not tied to a tree or pole like the cows or goats that are tied when they are sent for grazing. The village and Satheeshan trusted that Shekharan wouldn’t create havoc. Shekharan could go away if he wanted to, but he didn’t; probably because he didn’t know the route to the forest or because he knew that he was here to graze. This extraordinary gesture of trust among the villagers in this giant being and Shekharan’s acknowledgement of the trust are a striking testimony to the bond the elephant has built with them over these years. As these instances show, the relationship between people and Shekharan was not confined by mechanistic defines, but by attuning and knowing.
Figure 2: Shekharan being fed bananas on the way.

Photos taken by the author.
Attunement: Gaining Trust and Giving Trust
12Trust (vishwasam) emerged as a common prerequisite for this attunement between an elephant and a human. In building trust, time emerged as a central category whereby it is only by spending a long time with the elephants that the elephant and the mahout get to know each other. I was constantly told by mahouts that I cannot understand an elephant in a day or two, as one requires at least 1-2 years to understand the elephant and for the elephant to understand you. The value of familiarity in knowing each other and predicting each other’s actions (Demsar, 2016) is highly valued among mahouts, the lack of which, as I mentioned in the first chapter, is attributed to causing human-elephant conflict encounters. Spending time with elephants also involved practices such as a pat on the head, congratulatory talk, or smear of dirt (Locke, 2011) to build trust. Once the trust is gained, mahouts and owners are expected to maintain the trust, like in human relations. As Lalita said, ‘Krishnan will sleep only where there is trust. He feels at home only in his stable near our house. So we don’t let him sleep on temple premises during festivals. We take only nearby temple festivals so he can always come back here to sleep. I go to see him at night before sleep, morning, and afternoon. That is why we have kept him close. We want to see him and he wants to see us’.
13The significance of hierarchy in human-elephant relations is also indicative of this trust-building and attunement. Most elephants can only have one primary mahout (onnam pappan) followed by a second mahout (randam pappan) while some elephants can listen to two or three mahouts at a time. The first mahout controls the elephant while the second mahout is responsible for cleaning the stable and cooking the elephant’s meal although the first mahout too does the job of the second mahout sometimes. The mahouts I spoke to were with elephants who would only allow one mahout at a time. If an outsider needs to touch or feed, the first mahout must be in the vicinity, and he must say ‘you can touch or you can give’. Even the second mahout can only manage the elephant with permission from the first mahout. This privilege of the first mahout is shaped by the elephant’s allegiance and attunement to the first mahout over the second mahout. Mahout Satheeshan says,
‘Since I am the main person, Shekharan follows my ways. My son will follow my way. If different mahouts try different ways, it can be confusing for the elephant. If the second mahout follows my way, then it is okay. But if the second mahout behaves in one way when I am here and in another way when I am away, then the elephant doesn’t trust the second mahout and it leads to conflict.’
14This co-learning that occurs between the mahout and the elephant also shows the intersubjectivity of attunement, the reciprocity of trust, and the responsibility that both the elephant and the mahout take in adapting to the other interactant. I was told stories of how elephants protect the mahouts they are attuned to by any means, suggesting this mutuality of trust. Given this value of allegiance, to be a first mahout is considered a prestigious achievement (Locke, 2011).
15This privileged relation is an experience that apprentice Sriram is yet to experience. For Sriram, the current activities involve getting the palm leaves for the elephant, cleaning the stable and climbing palm trees or peepul trees for fodder. An apprentice cannot go in front of the elephant or touch the elephant in the absence of a mahout. Not just because of the professional hierarchy, but because the elephant will not entertain such approaches. One day when mahout Rajan stepped out for a bit, Sriram tried to command the elephant from a distance, like an excited young student who wants to play with words before learning sentence formation. Sensing that the commands did not work, he turned towards me and said, ‘I need to learn more in terms of voice modulation and loudness to have a commanding voice.’ But it was not just about the voice, it was also about the elephant deciding whom to trust, reflecting the significance of an attuned relation and the privileges it brings.
16This reciprocity of trust meant that, like in human interactions, a single act can breach the contract of trust despite the years taken to build it. Recounting an event when his parent’s elephant killed its second mahout, Nitheesh said,
‘From what we know, the elephant had just finished the musth and the second mahout was recently appointed. We understand that the mahout did not approach the elephant the way a mahout should. Before familiarising much or taking on many responsibilities, one should approach an elephant only in the presence of the first mahout. So, the event could have been a mistake in understanding the elephant and making appropriate judgments.’
17Although it is hard to pinpoint the reason for human-elephant conflicts as the elephant viewpoint can only be accessed through human interpretations, my informants agree that conflict encounters can occur when mahouts change the usual ways and elephants lose trust. Nitheesh’s experience shows that, like in humans, a single failure in interpreting signals from an elephant can cause a breach of trust. As Rajan says, ‘elephants usually check with their trunk and legs for any pits when they walk. But we mahouts need to be careful as well. If they miss a pit and fall, the elephant loses the trust in us’. In analysing the dynamics of trust, Luhmann suggests that, in trusting, the past prevails over the present and future actions, thus helping to manage the social complexity of the world (Luhmann, 1982). Mahouts acknowledge that, like humans, elephants are constantly processing the actions of the mahout to determine the trustworthiness and therefore, they need to be careful and attentive in this relation where a misstep or an ignorant move can easily break the trust. This is further complicated, as unlike in human relationships where people can explain the reasons behind the misstep, the differences in our communication prevent us from offering an explanation to the elephant, leading to a permanent ripple in the relationship. While it is the ability of both humans and elephants to communicate nonverbally amongst themselves that allow us to do so between different species (Ford, 2019), the limitations of communication leave the breach of trust without an opportunity for explanations, causing damage to the human-elephant relation. The mutual responsibility that comes with this attunement, where mahouts need to be on constant lookout to maintain the trust, reflects the moral nuances that shape the elephant-human interactions (Zigon, 2012). Much like an anthropologist, one could say that the mahout therefore continually relies on producing ‘thick description’ (Geertz, 1973) to decipher subtle shifts in the elephant’s semiotic signalling.
The Semantics of Beating in Discipline: Torture and Punishment
18Although humans and elephants need to be attuned to each other for a successful bond, it is important to acknowledge that attunement does not emerge from just spending time with the elephant through a system of rewards. A mahout doesn’t find itself attuned to an elephant but needs to develop the bond where the elephant learns to be a ‘good elephant’ that would listen to the mahout and cause less trouble for the people. This includes not only a system of rewards but physical punishment, given that it is a giant being with a different set of communicative practices. However, the infliction of pain was not a mindless act for my informants:
‘There are specific positions where you can beat the elephant. Just because it is a huge body, you cannot just beat everywhere. You need to avoid soft and delicate places as the sense of shock and pain can be high. The stick must be made with specific metal that does not cause infection. Even if it is a single beat, it can affect the elephant’s behaviour in the future. Even for human children, we don’t beat them just anywhere.’– Nitheesh.
‘Disciplining occurs through both positive reinforcement (sweet food) and punishment. Even if we are beating our kids, if they have the understanding (bodhyam) that we do it out of love, then it will be successful.’– Nitheesh.
‘Torture assumes that the intention is to hurt the elephants. We don’t beat our elephants because we want to hurt them. But because this is the only way to discipline them.’- Anoop
19My informants draw parallels between disciplining elephants and disciplining human children although the strategies for elephants can be harsher given the bodily and communicative differences between human children and elephants. Corporal punishment of children is a technique (although contentious in contemporary human pedagogy and elephant domestication) of disciplining, where hitting, striking, etc. are carried out to punish, discipline or show disapproval (Ember and Ember, 2005). Anoop argues that in the same way that human parents discipline children, the intention behind the infliction of pain is not to hurt elephants but to discipline them. This notion of intention in the action was central to my informants, yet it doesn’t surface in the activist narratives of torture where the visual imageries of beating dominate the popular discourse. What was torture for activists and journalists had different semantics for the mahouts where the infliction of pain was a disciplining strategy.
20Among the Mapuche (Araucanians) of Chile, corporal punishment of children is employed sometimes, but not usually as a first resort (Ember and Ember, 2005). Like the Mapuche of Chile, physical punishment was used by the mahouts only as a last resort. When Shekharan elephant did not follow a command, it was followed by a louder command two to three times and if not successful, it was then followed by a beating. The nuances of beating significantly surfaced when Krishnan elephant was completing his musth. As Krishnan was in musth and therefore away from human engagement, he had to be reminded of the human commands that required disciplinary strategies such as beating. However, the infliction of pain was not a straightforward task but mired in arguments between Lalita and Rajan over what is the right course of action. One morning as I was approaching Krishan’s stable, I saw Lalita standing outside and looking at the elephant. She was hunching as if she was hiding in a children’s game and signalled me to be silent by placing her second finger on her mouth, her lips slightly protruding. Rajan mahout was instructing the elephant through voice commands along with his son who had joined to help, as two mahouts are required during the transition phase. Lalita and I watched Rajan give loud commands and occasional beatings to get the elephant to listen, but Krishnan wasn’t budging much. After a few minutes, Lalita tells me, ‘If I go in, mahout will have no value in front of the elephant’, suggesting that Krishnan preferred Lalita over the mahout. This was not news to me as people who hang out at the Peepul tree had told me about the affection that Lalita and Krishnan had for each other, which didn’t please Rajan very much as, thanks to Lalita, his value in front of the elephant was a bit shaky. Although she acknowledged the need to maintain her distance and give power over to the mahout, Lalita expressed her disapproval of punishment through constant sounds ‘hmms, noooo, don’t beat’ etc. She told me how Rajan doesn’t listen to her. She slowly went inside the stable but hid behind a bush so Krishnan couldn’t see her. Although an elephant identifies a person primarily by the voice and the scent, Lalita seemed to be overwhelmed by the love for her elephant that she had forgotten that the human ways of perception are different from that of the elephant. After a few minutes, Lalita approached Rajan and told him not to beat Krishnan. An argument was brewing. Rajan said that without a beating, Krishnan won’t listen, and we won’t be able to untie him whereby the wound on the elephant’s leg will worsen. But Lalita didn’t want the elephant to be hurt through beating. Krishnan was hurt either way - whether through the growing infection or beating. But to inflict pain or not, as the case of Krishnan elephant tells, was not an easy decision but complicated by the worry over hurting the elephant and the frictions between owners and mahouts.
21The tension between Lalita and Rajan reminded me of a conversation with Rajan that highlighted the similarity of the human-elephant bond to the parent-child relationship in humans. Rajan said, ‘Whatever happens, Krishnan won’t ill behave with his owner Lalita. Even during the musth, she can go in front and give him food in his mouth. It is a relationship of 25 years. No elephant will allow even their own mahout near them during musth.’ Even other informants were filled with wonder when they spoke about Krishnan’s behaviour with Lalita as it is unusual for an elephant to allow a human near him during musth (Figure 3). I was told that even the sweetest elephant will have a different character during musth, but not Krishnan with Lalita. Between them, I saw a privileged form of intimate, interspecies relation. When I suggested that it must be his love for Lalita, Rajan said: ‘She doesn’t beat or scold Krishnan and brings food for him all the time. To love is easy then’. My response with wonder and awe at what I thought was a precious form of interspecies relationship was put off by Rajan’s comment. For Rajan, this is not a magical relation that only Lalita can attain, but possible depending on the length and the nature of the relationship (with more positive reinforcement and less punishment). The similarity of such narratives to human parent-child relations is clear, where parents complain that grandparents spoil the children by meeting all their demands easily.
Figure 3: Lalita talking to Krishnan elephant in musth (the musth period is indicated by the gland secretion behind the eyes).

Photo taken by the author.
22Beyond such nuances that shape the punishment and resemblances to the human parent-child relationship, the cultural connotations of beating required more unpacking. I was told that a well-timed, intuitive beating can work as an effective strategy of distraction among some elephants when they are about to lose their temper, thus avoiding a possible conflict situation. During festivals, mahouts sit under the trunk of the elephant to attend to these small differences in elephant cues. Such intuitive beating as a strategy of distraction is common in human parent-child relations as well. A story from my childhood might be worth telling here. I was three years old then. It was late evening and my grandmother had asked me to turn on the lights in our veranda. As I stepped out, I saw a woman on the veranda with a towel on her head, holding a child. The woman was my aunt and the child she was holding was my nephew. She was trying to put him to sleep but in that moment of faint darkness, she looked unfamiliar - a stranger holding a stranger. I ran back to my grandmother, shivering. Seeing me terrified, she gave me a tight slap following which I had a long crying session. Growing up, I was told that she slapped me to distract me from the shock that might have a long-term effect on me. While my intention is not to uphold the justification of physical violence, the contextual nuances of a slap require revisiting and rethinking through the cultural frameworks. This appropriately timed ‘slap’ is invested with the quality of distraction. But for an outsider who is not familiar with the nuanced meaning of the act, a slap is a slap. The contextuality of slap is an interesting metaphor to think with, an instance of an archetypical ‘thick description moment’ which allows us to see, deeply, in a culturally contingent manner that which stays fuzzy and beyond the obvious. A slap as an interpretation of bodily techniques of power and hierarchy only offers a thin description, whereas, as Gomart and Hennion in drawing from Foucault show, the nuances of the act allow us to see that power not only hides and reduces but produces and enables (Gomart and Hennion, 1999).
Reversal of Ownership
23As I mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, the mahouts I spoke to took up this profession from the love for elephants and to be in their vicinity. Shekharan’s second mahout Jayaraman said, ‘I can never get bored of watching the sea and the elephant’. It is not uncommon for people who grew up in the proximity of elephants to say that elephants are a calm species (except when they lose their temper) and that they could watch an elephant forever. Perhaps the rhythmic swinging of the elephant ears resembles the waves of the sea, the repetitive movement having a calming effect on humans (Bell et al., 2015). As much as the profession emerges from the love for elephants, the love sustains not just from seeing elephants but from being acknowledged by the elephant. Although elephants in captivity are projected as beings just to be looked at (Berger, 2009), that is a reductive and partial perspective that denies other perspectives on human-elephant relations that my informants claim to have with their elephants.
‘An elephant is a giant being and the acknowledgement it gives the human—that this is our person— is an extraordinary feeling. A creature that we look at with wonder is listening to us out of love.’ – Nidheesh.
‘When I approach, Krishnan makes a distinct nasal sound ho ho. If we are at a temple festival, he will especially know if I am near him. He feels a sense of relief – havoo2 my people have come, they have reached. And he doesn’t want anyone else after that. He will keep staring at me. Even if I stand at the back, he will know…What do elephants not know.’– Lalita.
‘Even if I am a kilometre away if a strong wind blows from my side to his, he can take the scent and know that I am there, that his person is there.’– Satheeshan.
24Talking on behalf of the elephant was common among mahouts and elephant owners. Such practices are common in social media where people upload pictures of their dogs or cats with titles such as ‘The dog or cat (name) and his hooman’. Although elephants are owned by humans in terms of the legal and financial semantics of ownership, emotional ownership was interpreted to be mutual. It is not just that it is a human and his/her elephant, but it is an elephant and his human – thus reversing the semantics of ownership. My informants used possessive pronouns such as ‘my people’, ‘my person’, ‘our person’, etc. in expressing the subjectivity of the elephant, indicating how an elephant reacts to seeing its owner or mahout. Anthropologist Piers Lock’s experiences as a mahout during his fieldwork in Nepal is revelatory of this sense of allegiance in elephants. ‘If I dropped my stick, which I carried to discipline her should the need arise, she would pick it up and hand it to me with her trunk’ (Locke, 2015).
25Physical gestures from the elephant were central to people’s interpretation of how the elephant differentiates his person from the rest of the humans. Rajan’s words are striking:
‘When we eat in temple premises during festivals, we fold the banana leaf and put it in its mouth. If we are sitting next to the elephant, we are bound to give food. Our conscience will not allow us to do otherwise. We are elephant-people (aanakar); our food comes from the elephant. Some mahouts even give a drag of smoke. Sometimes, if we eat in the elephant’s presence and don’t share the food, the elephant will not allow us to untie it in the evening.’
26Although Rajan shares the food out of gratitude as Rajan is dependent on the elephant for his income, the sharing of food is not an everyday activity but occurs when the act of eating is witnessed by the elephant. Being seen by the elephant places a responsibility on the mahout to share the food, the failure of which might cause displeasure in the elephant and result in the disruption of usual patterns such as not allowing the mahout to untie the elephant. Social aspects of eating are important where sharing food from one’s plate is not only a gesture of affection from the person who shares the food, but it is demanded by the other person (Hamburg et al., 2014). I once refused my sister a share from my plate, complaining that she always asks for a bite when I eat. Seeing my sister hurt, my mother told me: ‘She asks you for a bite because you are her elder sister. She doesn’t ask any random person on the street. What do you lose in life by giving one?’. Such mundane gestures of affection are central to the maintenance of a social and emotional bond, not just among humans but between humans and elephants. Being a mahout means that the elephant places certain demands (beyond providing food and shelter) on you that must be fulfilled, where the unfulfillment of the demands placed upon each other can have consequences. Psychologist Vincent Despret and anthropologist Jason Throop argue that it is through such practices that beings become available to each other and learn to not only ‘affect’ but be ‘affected’ (Throop, 2003; Despret, 2004; Zigon, 2014). Such events show that elephants are attached to humans as much as humans are to elephants in this entanglement, where one cannot draw a clear line in visualising these attachments which are interlaced in connections (Latour, 1999; Hennion, 2017).
27Anthropologist Piers Locke writes about an interesting encounter as elephant Sitasma’s mahout. Once another elephant Puja Kali lost her temper as Locke approached her. Other mahouts stated that this temperament was natural, given the hostility between Sitasma and Puja Kali. Thus, Locke realised that he was marked as Sitasma’s human not just by the mahouts and Sitasma but by other elephants such as Puja Kali, ‘where being Sitasma’s person raised more questions than Sitasma being his’ (Locke, 2015), thereby making Locke Puja Kali’s enemy, by extension. Such expressions of anger or disapproval show that the emotional nuances of an interspecies relationship are not only available to the human part of the human-elephant pair but also to the elephant (Ford, 2019), whereby elephants extend allegiance to humans through such relations. This attunement, of being engaged and entangled in particular relationships itself makes possible a distinct way of living between humans and elephants, constituting, as Zigon suggests, attuned entanglement as an ontological condition for morally being-in-the-world (Zigon, 2014).
Attunement and Haptic Sociality
28In the ordinary relations between elephant and mahout, touch emerges as a central form of sensing. Scholars use the term haptic sociality to refer to shared experiences through touch (Cekaite and Kvist Holm, 2017). Chloe Mondeme argues that touching and petting sequences are choreographed and mutually accomplished by dogs and human participants where she explores touch as central in domestication practices and as a practice for the pure pleasure of entering into tactile contact with another being (Mondeme, 2020). Unlike human-dog or human-cat relations where touch is extended to several people, the elephants reserve these privileged forms of interactions for the person most attuned, usually the first mahout. This was explicit during the bathing of Shekharan, where Satheeshan was allowed to wash the frontal regions as the elephant only permits the first mahout to touch in places where major sensory organs are present. Satheeshan scrubs Shekharan’s trunk rhythmically, singing Shekharan’s favourite Malayalam song ‘kannadi puzhayude kadavathu nikkana…’ while Jayaraman washes the back of the elephant, simultaneously getting hit by Shekharan’s tail. I was made to stand and scrub in ‘safe places’– places away from his face and back as elephants can easily recognise an unfamiliar touch that will be responded to by gestures such as hitting with the tail or the trunk. Satheeshan made this apparent when his son came over to help with washing Shekharan and sat on the elephant’s back to scrub him. Shekharan was extremely sleepy that day and began to snore within the first ten minutes of the 5-hour long bath, also making me yawn. Satheeshan told his son, ‘Shekharan is letting you sit on him just because he is asleep. If not, you would have gotten one from him by now’, explaining the distinctions that the elephant makes in deciding whose touch is permitted and where one can touch. Such distinctions in Shekharan’s attitude towards a different human touch reflect how elephants protect and privilege sensory parts as these allow them to navigate the complex world and equally complex relationships around them.
Figure 4: Satheeshan and researcher bathing Shekharan, Jayaraman is behind.

Photo taken by Satheeshan’s friend.
29There were specific body movements through which elephants expressed allegiance and affection for the mahout such as swinging the ears, putting the genitals out and urinating. However, having not been acquainted with elephants, these subtle changes in elephant gestures when they see their mahout were new that I puzzled over. In phenomenological studies exploring ‘mind reading’ between humans, scholars argue that we grasp others’ feelings and intentions through perceptions of embodied behaviour (Gallagher, 2008; Zahavi, 2011), suggesting that most events in everyday life are interpreted through direct social perception. But as scholars of phenomenology and my informants show, this knowledge comes only with the practice of inhabiting the same society and reacting to the interspecies dynamics that involve interpretations of postures, gestures, and movements. To paraphrase Clifford Geertz, without the knowledge of context, how can I tell the difference between a blink and a wink? (Geertz, 1973).
30Although the lack of familiarity inhibited these subtle, visceral expressions of affection, I was fortunate to see some of these gestures in elephant Shekharan’s interactions with Satheeshan. As we were returning after dropping off Shekharan to graze, Satheeshan said, ‘I don’t know how to express it. Sometimes, he pees on seeing me, sometimes he makes sounds, sometimes he comes down to hug me and I hug him and kiss him. I do what I feel like then. Sometimes I bite, sometimes I gently slap. That is between us.’ A few hours later, we went to pick up Shekharan. When he sensed Satheeshan’s presence, Shekharan immediately put his penis out and began to pee. A strange form of affection for human ways. Satheeshan walked to Shekharan, removed the fluid in his eyes and said something in Shekharan’s ears (Figure 5). Perhaps sweet talk. Shekharan bent down as if asking for a gentle pat and Satheeshan bit his ears. As much as I was surprised to see that Satheeshan bit Shekharan out of affection, it was riveting to see that Shekharan bent down to seek a bite, as biting or submitting oneself to be bitten intentionally was something I had assumed to be a human gesture. Such petting sequences, as Mondeme argues, show that touching and petting can be initiated by both humans and elephants in these domestic settings and that elephants actively elicit petting and biting (Mondeme, 2020). In line with Merleau-Ponty’s intercorporeality (1945) and Throop’s work on tactility and empathy (2012), I show that some experiences such as touching, petting and biting are jointly experienced (Ciaunica, 2017). In this respect, seeing the animal as the initiator of sequences of actions also allows us to rethink the question of animal agentivity in captive settings.
Figure 5: Satheeshan removing the fluid from Shekharan’s eyes.

Photo taken by the author.
31Another instance of this haptic sociality was in how mahouts learn to overcome the fear of elephants as they are giant beings. To overcome the fear, mahouts are trained to walk in the space between the trunk and mouth of an elephant where the sensory organs are located, and therefore riskier for humans to access. Although not exactly a form of ‘touch’, walking through a primary sensory field such as between the trunk and the mouth involves an intense corporeal process that will not be permitted unless the elephant and his mahout are attuned to each other. Such forms of movement that are specific to human-elephant sociality also suggest what Chloe Mondeme defines as an overlooked dimension in interspecies relations, that some of these specific movements and faculties must have evolved through human-animal contacts in South Asia (Mondeme, 2020). To walk between the mouth and trunk of an elephant is not a mundane, categorised form of experience that is easily available to everyone. Neither is it possible for anyone to understand the perceptual nuances of this experience, including a researcher like me who spends a month studying human-elephant sociality. These are what Jason Throop, drawing from Levy, calls ‘uncanny experiences’ the supramundane feelings and sensations that are often not categorised and conceptually elaborated (Levy, 1973; Throop, 2005), but which exist in different cultures.
32These kinesic and affective dimensions of interspecies sociality are moments that imbue a sense of vital connection with other life forms, and humans find joy in such relational, interactive possibilities (Smith, 2017). Human communal rituals such as music, theatre, sports, etc. often involve collective experiences of emotion and motion, through symbolic movements beyond the defines of speech (Ford, 2019). It is this ability to experience such feelings beyond human speech that has also enabled the human-elephant intracorporeal relation. Further, the relation between Satheeshan and Shekharan shows that animals actively enjoy and seek out such corporeal-affective moments of transcendence (Ford, 2019; Smith, 2017). These are, as Zigon writes, practices of fidelity and allegiance that shape moral commitments of attunement in human-elephant relations (Zigon, 2014).
The Uniqueness of the Elephant-Mahout Relation
33Sensory perception is central to how we experience the world (Husserl, 1962; Csordas, 1994; Desjarlais and Throop, 2011) and as it is abundantly clear, humans and animals experience the world through distinct sensory modalities. Mahout Rajan pointed out the prominence of scent (vaada) in elephants’ phenomenological engagement with the world. He said, ‘Do you see how the elephant body is mostly behind its eyes? That means that the elephant cannot see its back or the space behind it unlike us. That is why they are given big ears. And the gift of scent (vaada). When I come in the morning, it gets my smell. When we are at a festival, we need to be close to the elephant. Drop a mat and lie down next to him. The elephant knows the smell. When I open the gate here, the elephant knows’. Humans perceive the presence of elephants primarily through sight but also through sounds in the forest whereas elephants sense the world primarily through scent and hearing. We hug to display affection. An elephant greets with the trunk or puts the penis out and pees. It is at once strange and magical that each of us has a distinct smell that we humans unfortunately or fortunately cannot distinguish but which elephants are capable of detecting.
34While humans and elephants are identified as similar in terms of emotional and social intelligence, the size of the brain etc. (Poole and Moss, 2008), it is the acknowledgement of sensorial differences that mattered to my informants. An attempt at living with an elephant emerges from the admission that we are different, much as how a person who cannot see studies the perception of a person with eyesight (Birch, 2022). In studying human-cat relationships, Kara White writes that to truly understand the cat from her own perspective, we not only need to ‘see’ the world from less than a foot off the floor, but we would also need to know what it is like to see clearly in the dark, to hear at an extended range, to judge the contours of a space from facial whiskers, etc. (White, 2013). Like a cat with a radically different way of relating to the world with her body, the elephant has a unique set of olfactory, tactile, and sonic perceptions through which it attunes to the environment around it. What does it mean to constantly recognise me and you through distinct scents? This is something we humans will perhaps never know. But as Csordas’ somatic modes of attention go beyond visual attention, these engagements reveal the dominance of other sensorial ways of knowing and engaging with the world, and my informants’ acknowledgment of this.
35Beyond the anatomical and therefore sensorial differences, the uniqueness of each individual elephant was of great value to my informants. Often, when I asked about the nature of elephants or mentioned my interest in human-elephant relations, a common response was that I will not understand the behaviour by looking at one elephant or one elephant-mahout relation as each elephant is unique and so is every relation. Lalita, who had a penchant for responding to my questions with questions, said ‘everyone cannot be the same right?’, sharing the implicit understanding that no two beings can be the same. This recognition of the uniqueness of each elephant is reminiscent of Throop’s work on friendships (Throop, 2014) and his call to move beyond typification, beyond treating examples as illustrative of a broader pattern, but each being as distinct. Although understanding an elephant is not fully possible as we are not elephants, the recognition of this uniqueness and individuality of each elephant was understood to be central to a successful human-elephant relation. This became prominent when Nitheesh said:
‘Each elephant has a reethi (a way of doing a certain thing). The mahout’s skill lies in understanding them. When a mahout who practices on an easily listening elephant starts on a slow elephant and begins to poke and beat, then the trust will be lost, and they don’t develop a good relation. If a teacher is short-tempered and gives imposition and homework every day, students will be stressed at the sight of the teacher.’ – Nitheesh.
36Nitheesh points to the way of doing things (reethi) to signify this individuality which was apparent during the fieldwork. Shekharan came across as a picky and disciplined eater. His eating practices were composed of little rituals including stacking an extra stem between his tusk as an act of saving his food from others whereas Krishnan elephant did not seem to have such strict rituals of eating. It is important how my informants recognise human ways and elephant ways as distinct ways of embodying and experiencing the world rather than as elephants’ limitations of knowing the world. Given these differences, contextual perception and intuitive response become important to being a mahout. The set of linguistic commands, known as vaaytharikal, only provides the basic structure for human-elephant communication. What makes the relation unique according to my informants is the way of practice (reethi/shaili).
37While Jason Throop writes on human friendships as a moral experience, my informants’ acknowledgement of the uniqueness of each elephant, as beyond an example of a category, puts humans and elephants in a unique moral relation (Throop, 2014). This understanding of distinctions between species in terms of gestures, postures, and behaviour is what psychologist Kenneth Shapiro calls a phenomenological method of ‘kinaesthetic empathy’ (Shapiro, 1997).
38Empathy is a multimodal process that not only involves perception and imagination but also the bodily, sensory, and tactile aspects of lived experience (Zahavi, 2002). Throop’s work with the Yap community is significant in emphasising the primacy of other senses in shaping our experiences. For the Yaps, tactile-based empathy was central to discerning the experience of a patient’s pain, given the notion of the opacity of mind (other minds are not knowable) among the Yap community (Throop, 2012). Evoking the primacy of visual and auditory sensory modalities in Western thought, Throop urges us to consider the significant role that other sensory modalities play in non-Western societies. As Throop suggests, such habitual ways of attending to others orient the humans and elephants to particular sensory modalities and to particular ways of being-in-the-world (Throop, 2012), where the recognition of the individuality of the elephant, almost as a human person, in itself allows a certain moral engagement with elephants.
39The various sections in this chapter attempt to redirect the scholarly attention to human-elephant relations through a phenomenological and moral assemblage. The sensory and emotional subtleties of the relation, the maintenance of trust between an elephant and human that requires constant work, the allegiance with the elephant, and the uniqueness of each human-elephant relation point to the multiple ways in which humans and elephants engage in an attuned relationship where the everyday ways of being with elephants themself become an ontological condition for moral experience (Zigon, 2014). These ordinary-extraordinary relations suggest something else too. The epistemology of elephants as conceptualised by animal studies scholars and popular discourse is not very different from how my informants understand the elephant, where their intelligence, memory, social bonding etc., are acknowledged and valued. These narratives do not tell a story of pure torture or human exceptionalism but a story of exceptional humans and exceptional elephants.
Notes de bas de page
Le texte seul est utilisable sous licence Creative Commons - Attribution - Pas d'Utilisation Commerciale - Pas de Modification 4.0 International - CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Les autres éléments (illustrations, fichiers annexes importés) sont « Tous droits réservés », sauf mention contraire.
The Development of International Refugee Protection through the Practice of the UN Security Council
Christiane Ahlborn
2010
The SWIFT Affair
Swiss Banking Secrecy and the Fight against Terrorist Financing
Johannes Köppel
2011
The Evolving Patterns of Lebanese Politics in Post-Syria Lebanon
The Perceptions of Hizballah among Members of the Free Patriotic Movement
Fouad Ilias
2010
La justice internationale à l'épreuve du terrorisme
Défis, enjeux et perspectives concernant la Commission d'enquête internationale indépendante (UNIIIC) et le Tribunal spécial pour le Liban
Sébastien Moretti
2009
Aut Dedere, aut Judicare: The Extradite or Prosecute Clause in International Law
Claire Mitchell
2009
