Whether you’re a human being, an insect, a microbe, or a stone, this verse is true. All that you touch You Change. All that you Change Changes you. The only lasting truth is Change.
Octavia Butler, Parable of the Sower

Introduction

1This chapter discusses affective traces or lines amidst the meshwork of humans/elephants/plants/land in Sri Lanka. Drawing on the concept of affective ecologies (Singh, 2018), in which humans are one among many types of ecological actors, in this chapter we learn from farmers about their experiences and about elephants through farmers’ perspectives. We also learn from the regions’ ecologies, exploring ways that affect speaks to power and possibilities for mutually-beneficial cohabitation. Affective ecologies provide an aperture to help describe the deeply dialogic and relational processes in which elephants and farmers navigate landscapes; their actions and states are responses to others and to globalized forces, connecting the micro and macro. This lens embraces complexities that mirror the wicked nature and multi-system context for crop loss by elephants and habitat loss for elephants.

2The terms “human-elephant conflict” (HEC) or “habitat loss” do not adequately conjure the daily experiences of farmers and elephants in high-conflict regions, the tense atmospheres and panic in evening encounters for farming families, the loss of traditional access for elephants, and the synergies of intersecting challenges such as economic inequality, climate crisis and faltering soil health. We present farmers’ reports of their experiences to gain insight into the affective ecologies of emplaced human-elephant relations. Each person’s story can be viewed as one of Barua’s (2016) “encounters”, arising and responding to colonial histories, postcolonial policies, and landscape changes. These histories inspire emotions, tensions and alliances across species, and partnerships that speak to power imbalances.

3Affective ecologies are the interstitial tissues of multispecies histories, spaces, social networks and contracts, communities and politics. Affect can be challenging to grasp in the dominant western, individualist epistemology, which tends to place mind and emotion as internal to each being (Casey, 2021). As Casey contends, emotions are extra-subjective, transmissible and often arriving from the outside; how one is affected and affects spans the personal and the societal. Farmers in Sri Lanka are plagued by numerous health issues (high rates of cancer and kidney disease). These issues coincide with economic, political, wildlife and ecological challenges. While sometimes, farmers direct their violence and rage towards elephants in explosives hidden within fruits (hakka pata), many still contend that politicians and economic policies, rather than elephants, are the responsible parties for their crop destruction. Such volatile emotions are also tempered—a tempering mentioned across farmers and witnessed in elephants—through a process that works across internal and external spaces and helps maintain some human-elephant coexistence.

4This approach to emotion and affect as external, as moving and living in edge spaces, suggests a reality in which bodies and minds are intertwined (Abram, 2012; Bennett, 2009; van Mossner, 2017). David Abram writes of freeing the psyche from a confined internal space and thus freeing sentience to return to the visible world (Abram, 2012). Loosening the boundaries of self and mind to outside the physical body corresponds to viewing other animals as social beings and multispecies landscapes as social spaces (Tsing, 2013). With 93% of communication being non-verbal (Mehrabian, 1971) and meaning-making as a feature across social animals (Dautenhahn, 2002, Masson, 2009), states of being communicate across bodies and impact how each views the world, how each structures past and present. Affective ecologies explore how living systems constitute subjectivities across diverse beings (Singh, 2018).

5Beings are deeply entangled, according to scholars of relational ontology. Barad (2007) highlights quantum theory as her entry to this entanglement, while Ingold (2017) speaks of beings as composed of lines, knotted and corresponding within a vast meshwork. These perspectives of social life and the world are foundational to an affective relationality across beings, such that each being’s agency is not an internal affair, but is interstitial, composed of an inherent mutuality in which self and other are not separate.

6There has been a recent surge in the appreciation of affective evolution as a driving force for cognition, communication, and cultural transmission in—and between—humans and other animals (e.g., Asma, 2019; Bekoff, 2000). It is increasingly recognized that cultural preservation in some nonhuman species, including elephants, is vital to their immediate well-being as well as their long-term survival and conservation biology (Brakes et al., 2019). Plotnik & de Waal (2014) concluded that “the directionality of the contacts and their nature strongly suggest attention toward the emotional states of conspecifics. The elephants’ behaviour is therefore best classified with similar consolation responses by apes, possibly based on convergent evolution of empathic capacities.” Hence, the importance of determining and valuing the emotional needs and capacities of elephants to their culture, their survival, and to other beings with whom they cohabitate—especially humans—should not be underestimated. Multidisciplinary approaches, ranging from social sciences and ethnology to ethology and neurology, are needed to decipher evolutionary continuity linking human and nonhuman animals and the forces directing their relationships.

7Perception is primary in the matrices of intra and interspecies’ culture as basic communication within and across species. Perception becomes a means of survival, particularly in restrictive spaces or close proximity in human-elephant relations and the ecologies of affect. Farmers in Sri Lanka speak confidently about their ability to perceive and identify elephants’ emotional states (e.g., sadness, anger, or anxiety); some philosophers may debate the validity of such perceptions. Yet such communication is embodied and real for phenomenologists such as Merleau-Ponty, who stated that “it is by our bodies that we communicate and also with our bodies we express our vulnerability” (Merleau-Ponty, 1968: 135). The field of animal behaviour, notably ethology and cognitive behavioural science, is devoted almost entirely to the study of behaviours via various sensory modalities; elephant researchers having recently created the first exhaustive ethogram of elephant behaviour in a searchable library (Poole & Granli, 2021).

8This chapter presents Oriel’s findings from research in Uda Walawe in southeastern Sri Lanka, with field work during 2018-2019 that included interviews and participant observation (Oriel, 2022; Oriel et al., 2021), synthesized with Frohoff’s ethological research (e.g., Oriel & Frohoff, 2020). Five dynamic themes thread through encounters on the ground—perception, ethics, social networks, land, and subjectivities. These help to identify influences, responses across bodies, and social relations.

Brief history of human-elephant relations

9Over millennia on the island, farmers and elephants developed a choreography of shared terrain and shared plant foods with traditional rain-fed slash-and-burn cultivation practices (called chena in Sri Lanka). As elephants accessed plants after harvests (Fernando et al., 2015), and engineered ecosystems in part through seed dispersal (Campos-Arceiz & Blake, 2011) and trail creation (Keil, 2020), humans created water tanks that elephants accessed in dry seasons and grew crops—these can be viewed as reciprocally-practised social contracts. Human settlement areas were organized around the logic of multiple species access, with water, field, and forest areas set aside for wildlife (Handawela, 2016). This net of relationality remains in memory, as Bergson (1988) attests that past co-exists with present, despite the radical changes in physicalities, practices and relationalities.

10The territorial conflict (HEC) in Sri Lanka has led to approximately 260 elephant and 80 human deaths annually in the last decade (Prakash et al., 2020). Elephants inhabit 59.9% of the island, and humans dwell in 69.4% of elephant-ranging areas (Fernando et al., 2021), with human-elephant spaces as the dominant geographic pattern. Elephant population estimates are achieved through Department of Wildlife Conservation counts using direct counts and signs of presence (amounting to 5,825 elephants in 2013), though these numbers are questioned (Jathanna et al., 2015). Fernando’s research reveals elephant loss of their range by 16% since 1960 (Fernando et al., 2021). Landscapes around Uda Walawe National Park (UWNP) in the last fifty years have transformed from subsistence to economic spaces. Similar to what Münster (2019) describes in Wayanad, India, farmers in this southeastern dry zone contend with the overwhelming issues connected to cash-crop capitalism or “neoliberal crops”—depleted soils, overuse of agrochemicals, farming families’ health issues, poor water quality, cycles of debt, and changing monsoon cycles. So much so, that farmers see no future. This suite of socio-ecological relations is not uncommon in Global South countries, which helps explain the despair that drives farmer’s suicide rates. While farmers are often the ones who shoot or harm an elephant intruding in their crops, the conflict’s roots trace back to colonial times (Sukumar, 2011), and in the present day, to landscape designs of the last fifty years, changing cultivation practices, invasive species, lack of coherent governmental department activities, development agency’s agendas and economic deregulation which all play intersecting roles in escalating interspecies tensions (Benadusi, 2015; Fernando et al., 2005; Oriel, 2021).

11While Asian elephants (Elephas maximus maximus) in Sri Lanka historically have faced continual exile due to changing human land uses, and benefited from human practices in water storage and ancient shifting cultivation (Fernando, 2000), they now, in some areas, are forced to inhabit small forest fragments with reduced palatable vegetation and are starving when restricted by fences to protected areas (Fernando, 2015). These tight spaces are physical, social, and psychological; movements are restricted, emotions and socialities are strained.

12Small-scale farmers have first-hand experiences of cohabitation amidst strained shared spaces and form an important body of socio-ecological knowledge. However, since these actors often have little political voice in Sri Lanka, many farmers claim they are ignored in Colombo’s government offices and international development agencies (supported by Benadusi, 2015). Farmers I (Oriel) interviewed often lose one-third or more of their crops to elephants. They speak about the emotional states they are in, elephants feel, and what passes between the two species, and the development of a more strained atmosphere in the last twenty years (Oriel, 2022). For example, elephants are routinely driven away from villages and crops and also translocated to new areas where they have no history of habitation. Farmers say drives do not improve the conflict but make it worse. The elephants returned and became more aggressive (October, 2018¹), which is echoed by Fernando et al. (2012). Many report that the more violent or aggressive measures to protect crops from elephants lead to more violent responses, while subtler methods do not. Yet, even with the high number of conflict-related human deaths, farmers and park rangers also report incidents of individual elephants quelling potential conflict and de-escalating violence (October, 2018; September, 2019).

13Park rangers, farmers, and elephant researchers in southeastern Sri Lanka agree that elephants during certain times of the year lack palatable vegetation, with over 50% of elephant calves dying of starvation in Yala National Park, southeast of UWNP (Daily FT, 2 August, 2018). Large areas of guinea grass (an African grass that elephants favour) have died in UWNP from what is described by locals as a suite of causes, including illegal buffalo grazing, fires set by encroachers, and invasive species crowding out palatable plants (September 2019). Explaining the trajectory of change, one local researcher claimed, “everything changed with the Uda Walawe reservoir,” which was built in the 1960s (October, 2018). The dam expanded cultivation and irrigation footprints and the park’s boundaries are now developed spaces, with 35,000 families growing sugarcane on the southern border and 82 villages lining the Park’s edge. This region is a microcosm, and the farmer-elephant encounters are examples along a continuum of traditional interspecies negotiations and violent confrontations, as each navigates densely developed and enclosed spaces.

Farmers and affect

14I (Oriel) am visiting a farmer east of UWNP. He is an “outgrower” for a state-owned sugarcane plantation, which was sited here by World Bank advisors (Dissanayake, 2019). The amount the company pays him for sugarcane is often less than what he owes them for seeds, chemicals, etc. Farmers protest these conditions though change is evasive; he says the Forest Department plants trees that do not support pollinators, among other grievances. He also grows vegetables using a modernized version of the ancient chena cultivation. While speaking with him, he points out tree crops damaged by elephants (September 2019). Human-elephant conflict in this southeastern dry zone region is relatively high; of the five acres he grows, two are eaten by elephants.

15A very close meeting with an elephant left this farmer’s close friend with injuries that led to his death. They were riding bikes on the road at dusk and an elephant approached them quietly, unseen until the last minute. Collapsed under the elephant, the farmer grabbed hold of the giant’s leg, pleading with him, and then blamed him for any future harm. His attempt to appeal to the elephant’s moral sense seemed to effective; the farmer had a prosthetic leg from a previous incident related to human-wildlife conflict, and the elephant destroyed only that one, so saving his natural leg and his life. His friend, however, suffered a broken back in the encounter. Conflict takes a cumulative mental health and physical toll, with damaged crops and bodies being only some of the terrible outcomes. In this case, his friend’s marriage also broke up due to stress from guarding crops all night, every night. Marriage troubles are common in this region. The farmer’s friend ultimately ended his life by drinking agrochemicals.

16Farmers dialogue with elephants, whether protecting their crops or pleading for their lives during an attack. Their utterances towards elephants are composed of daily grievances and are affective responses embedded in a wider realm of landscape-level inequalities. Some farmers report that elephants can understand them, and that if they feel angry or resistant, elephants sense their feelings and will be aggressive. Alternatively, if the farmers are more tolerant, the encounter goes better. Yet, it seems like a balance between resistance or tolerance is best struck when negotiating with elephants, especially when crops are at stake; total passivity can lead to farmers losing everything, as is the case with one woman on the village edge. These same farmers say that elephants don’t have enough to eat. This observation is spoken so often, it forms a collective shared history and interspecies awareness of suffering.

17Temporality shapes these affective encounters. Elephants enter crops at night-time to avoid human presence, which means that light and lack of light and sound and lack of sound play significant roles. Elephants travel so quietly at night, it can be difficult to hear them coming. Shining flashlights into elephants’ eyes backfires, one tells me, causing them to be more aggressive. Another explains the flash into the eyes is always followed by a gunshot, a thundercracker or some other aggressive sound. Just keeping the light on a tree and not on the elephant’s body is a strategy that eases their aggression. Anger across humans and elephants shapes and informs encounters. Each learns of the others’ methods and adapts to them in a dance of advanced adaptation.

18Small-scale farmers do not view the territorial issues as “human-elephant conflict” but as “development vs farmers/elephants” (Srinivasan, 2021). In 2021, farmers were staging large multi-site satyagraha protests in favour of larger elephant reserves, fences and corridors that they assert will mitigate the conflict. In the Hambantota area adjacent to UW—where the Rajapaksa ruling family built the Mattala airport, Hambantota port, and a cricket stadium—farmers and elephants have been pushed out. The joining of human and nonhuman animal struggles is a form of multispecies solidarity (Nijhuis, 2021), pushing against development and politics in which more-than-humans have little voice. Multispecies justice is gaining traction, especially in light of the climate emergency, that joins politics, ethics, and ecologies, through embodied encounters towards solidarity across beings (Tschakert, 2020).

Elephants’ affective Encounters

19Affect is part of sociability and etiquette; elephants, in their restraint and destructive power, navigate encounters along emotive axes that leave giant wakes. As mentioned earlier, farmers say that elephants can sense humans’ inner states, which is not surprising given the sophisticated perceptual and communicative capacities exhibited by elephants (Soltis, 2013) combined with frequently close and intense proximity between elephants and farmers. Elephants are extremely adept at expressing, perceiving, and communicating internal states (physiological, psychological, and emotional) with other elephants (Poole and Moss, 2008); this capacity has also been observed in their interspecies interactions with other species, including humans (to the degree that an article in Nature was titled, “Elephants have Learned to ‘Understand Human’” (Morell, 2014). Elephants have even demonstrated an ability to differentiate between ethnicities, ages, genders—and the degree of threat that individual humans pose to them—solely from the sound of human voices (McComb et al., 2014, Plotnik & de Waal, 2014).

20As landscapes and culture for humans and elephants have become fragmented, so has the psychology of impacted individuals within and across species. Elephant psychology and physiology are affected in Africa and Asia by habitat loss and systemic issues, leaving farmers and elephants competing in increasingly tight spaces. For the elephants, these at times violent encounters result in elevated stress hormone levels (Gobush et al., 2008; Vijayakrishnan et al., 2018) and psychobiological trauma, including post-traumatic stress disorder (Bradshaw et al., 2005). In some populations, this traumatization from fragmented habitat and, in particular, disintegrated family and social groups, has been related to a dramatic rise in elephant intraspecific and interspecific hyper-aggression (Slotow et al., 2000; Bradshaw et al., 2005). Traumatized elephants sometimes direct excessive aggression toward humans. Concurrently, human aggression and retaliation become more of a threat to elephants, and the multi-dimensional circle of violence and blaming is self-perpetuating (Oriel & Frohoff, 2020).

21As described above, spatial relationships on both the micro (e.g., farm scale) and macro (landscape scale) have changed in the UW area in the last fifty years; loss of land and greater interspecies proximity leading to changing affect and responses. Despite varying degrees of acclimation, elephant suffering from loss of terrain quality, quantity (Figure 1), and forced physical proximity to humans in cropped fields, towns, and roads has ethical implications (Bekoff, 2000; Poole & Moss, 2008). The following anecdotes illustrate how loss of terrain leads to different emotions, affective responses, and loss of autonomy, though also to some enterprising responses in which elephants utilize social networks.

Figure 1. Browsing in Uda Walawe National Park, September 2018.

22In Uda Walawe, jungle was cut for a sugarcane plantation that is a total exclusion zone for elephants, which expanded the local population by 35,000 humans to work in the plantation, eliminating access to elephants’ historic routes. According to an older local man, elephants in UW protested the bulldozers ripping out the jungle by storming them. He drove jeeps in the newly established park and witnessed elephants’ responses to the changes. One male, Rambo, started coming to the national park gate in 1991 when he was eight years old (September 2019). He would play a game of storming tourist jeeps and enticed other young males to join in—a male social network. The jeep drivers and guides gave them buckets of water at the Park entrance, and a rapport began. Eventually, Rambo grew comfortable around people, standing by the road and begging for food during certain times of the year. Eventually, other males followed; at times there could be 50 males begging for fruit on the roadway (Fernando et al., 2020). Nearby in the region of Kataragama temple, where elephants have lost immense tracts through the Hambantota developments and other projects, they stop cars on the road and won’t let them pass until they offer fruit—an elephant tollbooth and another social network, adapting to human land alterations (Figure 2).

Figure 2. Male elephant begging.

23In Panemura, a spring with high salt levels was a site where locals reported elephants would gather and go into a kind of frenzy, stomping the ground to bring up water to the surface. Access to minerals in soil and water is significant to elephants’ well-being. This unique site was where the Dutch had built an elephant kraal, a facility to capture wild elephants. In 1950, while capturing a female herd, one male was also captured while mating (Katugaha, 2008). When the matriarch of the herd was tied to a tree, the male broke his ropes, knocking over the tame elephants that were enlisted to keep the wild ones in order. At the request of the kraal’s owner, the elephant was shot and died quickly. The event sparked outrage and led to a ban on kraals, capturing and killing elephants (Katugaha, 2008). The affective response of the male protesting the capture carried across to humans as they rose up and demanded an end to kraals.

24The feelings that prompt bulls to protest and storm bulldozers travel. The feelings are relational and ecological, connected and akin to the affect embodied in human social movements. Elephants and humans are both responding to injustice, often resulting from disrupted land relations. The conflict has led to solidarity between farmers and elephants in the satyagraha protests. The farmers en masse are calling for elephant-friendly management as these two species are linked on the land and across shared traumas. Affect is like a glue or thread that holds beings together on the land, and the shapes of affective threads are informed by ethics, perception, reciprocity, and stress. These threads conduct feelings, shared histories, sense of trust and lack of trust; these co-generate anatomies of multispecies communities.

Discussion

25The relationship between individually experienced and socially transmitted emotional states can be examined through affective interactions, communication, and ecologies. Especially given the long-overlooked capacity for emotion and affective ecologies in elephants as drivers in elephant relations, we recommend that ethnozoological and other explorations of human-elephant relations bring elephant affective ecologies into the forefront of consideration, evaluation, and policy and management. We agree with Mumby & Plotnik (2018) that critical attention to the complexity of the emotional capacities and needs of elephants—as well as humans—must be prioritized in management action plans. Further, our evaluation and research also support the importance of affective ecologies in the development of comprehensive conservation strategies that intersect social and economic justice projects, particularly human-elephant conflict prevention and mitigation plans. Managed elephant ranges, universal basic income to support farmers’ subsistence and ease land pressures and local/regional consultancy for HEC policies are examples of equalizing land access and addressing the farmer and elephant versus development paradigm.