The question isn’t “What other animals are really like us?”,
It’s “What are other animals really like?”
The question is, “Who are they?”
Carl Safina, Beyond Words

Introduction

1How do you prepare to meet wild elephants? I grew up in a part of India where Asian elephants have become ghosts in the landscape. Nothing truly prepares a city-dwelling academic like me for everyday encounters with elephants in the field. Elephant encounters are complex, based on where, how, and by whom they are encountered. These encounters may take the form of startling face-to-face meetings on the road or squinting to see them blending into the rocks of distant hillsides. Often it may be the traces they leave behind in huge plops of dung along firewood-collecting trails or hearing them crossing streams in the silence of the night. Sometimes, it may be witnessing their running bodies, illuminated in the torches used by farmers to chase them away. This is quite different from being an excited spectator of elephant families moving across protected areas devoid of humans barring the ones in the safari jeeps, or being a consumer of “lively commodities” or the traumatised elephants at a zoo (Barua, 2016), or indulging in fantasies of pristine elephant lives unhampered by humans in wildlife documentaries. Entering the field as an academic with a desire to know elephant inner and outer lives, their ecologies, and their entanglements in anthropogenic landscapes, requires a very different kind of preparation. How can academic training prepare me to find out, as author Carl Safina would like me to ask of elephants, “who are you?” (Safina, 2015).

2The moving bodies of elephants navigate and shape ecological, historical, cultural, political, and economic webs of relations and processes. Asian elephant and human lives are entangled. In a world where Asia’s elephant populations have declined by 95% from their historical size (Sukumar, 2006) and share shrinking habitats with expanding human populations (Menon & Tiwari, 2019), can humans and elephants coexist? Human-Elephant Conflicts (HECs) in Asia and Africa are taking place within a “…complex nexus of ecological, subjective, and social relations that inform and emerge from one another…” (Oriel & Frohoff, 2020: 131). There are many studies on human-wildlife conflict, but most of these studies have focused on producing quantitative data on damage and intervention to mitigate elephant and human deaths (Pooley et al., 2021). Studies focusing on conflict alone, that are grounded in quantitative data production, cannot address the complexity of entangled lives and examples of coexistence that may also be simultaneously occurring in conflict zones.

3Amidst escalating interspecies conflicts in South-East Asia, there are stories of farmers and elephants who have negotiated ways of coexisting with each other. As a doctoral student, I am in the process of studying these examples in eastern Thailand, where some farmers have transformed antagonistic relationships with local and migrating elephants by practising wanakaset or forest gardening systems (Figure 1). I often heard this small group of farmers describe their attitude towards the elephants as, “we cannot live together, but we have to survive together.” These attitudes and diversified farming practices exist along with large-scale monocropped farms, increasing local elephant populations and rising elephant presence on farms. I refer to these multispecies agentic interactions and relationships as “elephant-farmer coexistence assemblages”. I borrow Elaine Gan and Anna Tsing’s conception of “assemblage” to mean a dynamic, precarious, and complex collection of material and non-material multispecies entities and actors in temporal and spatial relationship to one another, coming together and becoming in knots of cohesion and force (Gan & Tsing, 2018). To study assemblages of multispecies coexistence, we need methods that go beyond quantitative analysis and conflict narratives. We need methods that can attune to dynamic and complex multispecies entanglements, multi-temporal and multi-spatial histories, and farmer and elephant well-being.

Figure 1. Mature wanakaset (forest gardening) farm: a safe zone for elephants.

4In this chapter, I survey a few different methods for studying nonhuman and human interactions. These methods draw from various disciplines such as anthropology, history, geography, and biology. The three methods explored here include historical ecology, listening, and drawing/diagramming. At different points in its academic history, anthropo-logy has combined social and natural sciences to study human societies. In more recent years, the discipline has expanded its scope of study to nonhumans and multispecies ethnography (Swanson, 2019). As an anthropologist, I plan to collaborate with biologists, historians, agronomists, and sound scientists working in Southeast Asia to employ the aforementioned methods. I argue that no single method is adequate for studying complex multispecies assemblages, such as Asian elephant-farmer coexistence in eastern Thailand. When combined through collaborative and transdisciplinary fieldwork, multiple methods that encourage attunement could be the most meaningful way to study elephant-farmer coexistence assemblages.

5I begin by expanding on the concept of assemblage and briefly elaborate on how the situatedness of coexistence assemblages within the Anthropocene helps blur ideological binaries widely upheld in HEC portrayals and policies. I then look at why attunement is a meaningful measuring stick to evaluate fieldwork methodologies. Attunement to assemblages is followed by a survey of the three methods and how they add to the recent scholarship on human-elephant studies by geographers and anthropologists. I end by emphasising that the Anthropocene, elephants, and marginalised farmers inspire academics to practice multiple methods and transdisciplinary collaboration.

Asian elephant and farmer assemblages

6Assemblages can be understood as a collection of human and nonhuman entities and material and non-material processes that hold together with a certain cohesiveness. Instead of looking for a cause or theory that explains the “why” of an assemblage, I am focusing on the “who” and “how” of assemblages: Who is a part of this assemblage, what can be observed with the senses about the human-nonhuman and nonhuman-nonhuman relations, and what are the patterns of enactments that allow assemblages to hold together. I choose to use the concept of assemblage when analysing farmer-elephant relationships because it helps problematise oppositional binaries such as encroaching farmers versus non-agentic elephants, wildlife conservation versus capitalist development, wild national parks versus anthropogenic landscapes, and nature before humans versus an apocalyptic future. These problematic dualisms often underlie media narratives of interspecies conflict (for example, there are news articles with titles such as, “In Thailand, A War Between Humans and Elephants Is Brewing”, Augustman 17 August 2019), as well as scientific studies on development and conservation (Kitratporn & Takeuchi, 2020), and equally State policies where landscapes are divided into reserves for animals and spaces for humans (Barua, 2014). Even though conflict situations are made up of many different perspectives and enactments coexisting together, they are coordinated into a singular voice and perspective (Oriel & Frohoff, 2020). The singular narrative of conflict made up of the oppositional binary of humans versus elephants is the generally accepted narrative in scientific and conservation studies of human-elephant interactions (Keil, 2016). However, these binaries are destabilised by many historical and current examples of human-nonhuman cohabitation and co-worldmaking, which have been elaborated upon by geographers, anthropologists, as well as post-humanist, indigenous, Science and Technology Studies, feminist science, and Anthropocene scholars (see Barua, 2014; Keil, 2016; Mathews, 2020; Münster 2016; Oriel & Frohoff, 2020). Assemblages help us partially visualise blurry boundaries and uncertainties of cohabitation by bringing together multiple patterns of human-nonhuman entanglements and enactments of agency.

7Elephant-farmer assemblages are made up of historical, ecological, political, and social forces and actors such as forest policies and State control, colonisation and plantation agriculture, degraded elephant habitat and fragmented corridors, mining and the displacement of ethnic minorities, global capitalism and climate change, nonsecular worldviews and swidden agriculture, traumatised elephants and poor farmers, elephant and human hierarchies and much more. The ways in which these entities become together (coordinate into patterns) to form assemblages can be traced to some key large-scale processes. One such process within which elephant-farmer assemblages are embedded is the Anthropocene. The term Anthropocene is now being used beyond its original geological definition to refer to “the increasing role of human action in influencing the environment” (Tsing et al., 2021). According to the authors of The Feral Atlas, the Anthropocene is driven by four landscape-transforming, historical, and infrastructural programmes: human invasion and conquest, colonialism and empire building, capitalism, and acceleration (Tsing et al., 2021). These four “detonators” of the Anthropocene encompass the complex historical and present circumstances of increasing precarity that throws humans and nonhumans together into tighter shared spaces. These shared multispecies and multi-use spaces house a complex range of partially overlapping assemblages where boundaries between conflict and coexistence become blurred.

8The Anthropocene undoes the nature/culture separation, which has been foundational to Western culture (Mathews, 2020). This undoing of binaries, along with the emergence and evolution of multispecies assemblages, forces academics to bridge interdisciplinary divides. For academics studying HECs, this may mean going beyond narratives of conflict to noticing multiplicities of assemblages of conflict, negotiation, coexistence, tolerance, violence, acceptance, reciprocity etc., co-occurring, in partial connection with each other. Assemblages reveal patterns of temporal rhythms and scales in elephant-farmer relationships. Attunement to patterns uncovers which relations are most important when studying particular assemblages. Attunement enhances our capacity to foreground the agency of assemblage actors such as elephants, marginalised farmers, plants, and soil which are often misrepresented or missing in mainstream discourse. As active participants in shared landscapes, elephants are powerful forces who shape ecosystems and policies through the movement of their bodies. Their complex and multidimensional worlds are deeply and historically entangled with ours at multiple levels, as has been elaborated by anthropologists, historians, and comparative psychologists (see Bradshaw, 2009; Keil, 2017; Lowe & Münster, 2016). In the words of Celia Lowe and Ursula Münster, “…Nowadays, elephants learn to live their complex psychological, social, cultural, and gendered lives in close proximity to humans” (Lowe & Münster, 2016: 124). Attunement to elephant complexity, multidimensionality, and agency reveals the material, psychological, political, spiritual, and ecological entanglements of multispecies assemblages.

Attunement

9In the introduction to the book, The Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet, the authors write, “To survive, we need to relearn multiple forms of curiosity. Curiosity is an attunement to multispecies entanglement, complexity, and the shimmer all around us” (Gan et al., 2017: 11). Curiosity, paying attention, noticing, embodied engagement, wonder, and reading landscapes are different ways of attuning to complex worlds. I think of attunement as a mode or state of being that academics do and can cultivate by practising methods chosen with care. When regarding work on corncrake population census tracking, Jamie Lorimer described attunement as an embodied skill. Being able to tune in to these birds takes time, skill, dedication, and what he calls “…a re-organisation of the surveyor’s body…” (Lorimer, 2008: 396). This realignment of the body gained through several years of practising attunement helps surveyors get close to the birds and follow their traces.

10In his book, Beyond Words, ecologist Carl Safina’s narration of the work of wildlife scientists he follows reveals their profound attunement with animals. Cynthia Moss, who has spent more than 40 years with elephants; Ken Balcomb, who has spent over four decades listening to whales and dolphins; and Rick McIntyre, who has followed Yellowstone wolves every single day for the last thirteen years, have developed long-term and deep attunement with the animals they study. An exchange Safina had with Katito Sayialel, a Masai conservationist studying elephants in Amboseli National Park in Kenya for over twenty years, disclosed that she could identify a thousand female elephants by sight.

11“Some she knows by marks: the position of a hole in an ear, for instance. But many, she just glances at. They’re that familiar, like your friends are. When you’re studying social relationships as they’re all mingling, you can’t afford to say, ‘Wait a minute; who was that?’ You have to know them. Knowing hundreds of individuals is necessary because elephants themselves recognise hundreds of individuals.” (Safina, 2015: 13)

12For these natural scientists, attunement through long-term fieldwork with nonhumans is the basis of knowledge generation about other species. Similarly, many social scientists of various disciplines, such as history, anthropology, and sociology, have immersed themselves in examining human history, politics, and cultures through the long-term study of specific societies and individuals. However, academic publications do not always convey the complexity that researchers may have experienced in the field. Natural science publications tend to foreground populations and species over individuals, and the social sciences may not adequately foreground nonhuman experiences. For example, in the corncrakes census study, the surveyors were bodily attuned to individual birds. However, the particularities of individuals were lost when the encounters were ultimately compiled into a national database (Lorimer, 2008). Similarly, within the social sciences, critical analysis of the impact of political structures on human-wildlife relations teaches us “…little about elephant lives and what landscapes mean to them…” (Barua, 2014: 7). Social science scholarship can leave the reader guessing about the agency of nonhumans as shapers of human lives. To study elephant-farmer relations, we need methods that can foreground both human and nonhuman worlds and how the two are entangled within dynamic multiscale, multitemporal, and multidimensional assemblages of individuals and ecologies.

13Over recent years, anthropological research has widened to include nonhumans as agents who co-create shared worlds with humans (see multi-species ethnography in Kirksey & Helmreich, 2010). An example is the study of industrial ruins of a coal mine in Denmark (Gan et al., 2018). The authors collaborated with anthropologists, ecologists, botanists, mycologists, and artists to understand how multispecies interactions are intertwined with anthropogenic landscapes. The methods they trained themselves in allowed them to gather knowledge of and from local human and nonhuman long-term residents of those areas, learn about histories of development and social dynamics, and gain insight into plant and fungi landscape dynamics. In this study, acknowledgement of human-nonhuman entanglements is coupled with collaborative, multidisciplinary research and new knowledge-gathering methodologies. From such examples of anthropological studies on human-nonhuman entanglements, I highlight four premises of attuned methods: 1. There are multiple (temporal and spatial) partially overlapping histories; 2. Mundane interactions and movements foster connections between humans and nonhumans and between nonhumans and other nonhumans; 3. Human-nonhuman entanglements co-create landscapes; and 4. Unknowability and uncertainty are an integral part of multispecies entanglements. In the remaining portion of the chapter, I examine three methods that embody these premises of attunement to multispecies assemblages.

A survey of methods

14The three methods that I survey are historical ecology, listening, and drawing. While this is by no means an exhaustive list of methods, I chose to focus on these three because of their growing relevance to elephant-human relations, commitment to deep attunement, and potential for multidisciplinary collaborative research.

Historical ecology

15Historical methods generally offer us an imagination of the past and its connection with the present and future. Historical ecology as a research method provides us with tools to envision three main aspects of human-environmental relationships: longue durée histories of landscapes, humans, and nonhumans, partially overlapping histories and complexities, and multiscale, multitemporal dimensions of human-nonhumans enmeshments. One definition is as follows: “…historical ecology is a cluster of concepts in a practical framework for studying the past and future of the human-environment relationship…” (Crumley, 2017: S65). Inherent in this definition is the inclusion of humans as part of the environment rather than outside it. Thus, historical ecology is interested in understanding how humans and nature coevolved and transformed over multiple temporal frames and scales. Historical ecology treats landscape evolution and transformation as a complex system grounded in places and histories, going beyond written records into the material and physical evidence of human interactions with biophysical systems.

16Elephants inhabit different temporalities than humans. Individual and collective humans, plants, and animals act on various scales. These multiple scales and temporalities are interwoven and linked through multiple histories. Different communities of elephants, plants, and humans have different histories that partially overlap with each other rather than a single historical and humanist narrative. “Multiple histories and rhythms… can help us escape from thinking of nature or history as singular” (Matthews, 2018: 387). Historical ecology methods help us address these historic, present, and future elephant-farmer relations that are part of a complex assemblage. Historical ecology also adds to existing methods that approach HECs as complex systems that take us beyond binary thinking. Some of these approaches include “ethnoelephantology”, an interdisciplinary and integrated research programme that takes elephants seriously as subjective agents (Locke, 2016) and “bio-geo-graphy” methods that combine history, politics and ecology to study human-elephant-landscape entanglements (Barua, 2014). Maan Barua makes a case for a methodology that goes beyond typical social sciences approaches to render visible the “…material lives and spaces of animals, (and) how the latter too participate in processes of knowledge production…” (Barua, 2014: 17). Historical ecology offers us a multi-disciplinary approach through its attention to intertwined histories, theories, and materiality. It draws upon theories, concepts, methods, and evidence from the biological and physical sciences as well as the social sciences (Crumley, 2017: S65) to come to more complete understandings of complex systems. Historical ecology values scientific evidence as well as traditional or local environmental knowledge, combining social and political change with biogeophysical processes. In particular, historical ecology fosters attunement to longue durée elephant-farmer entanglements and how these entanglements alter landscapes. In light of the Anthropocene as a time of real and potential catastrophe, historical ecology offers methods to bridge gaps between disciplines and answer the call for academic collaboration.

Listening

17“…silence. Watch. Simply listen. They will not speak to us, but to each other they say much. Some of it, we hear. The rest is beyond words” (Safina, 2015: 8). Safina reminds us that attuning to other species is an art and practice perfected over many years. In a visual culture-based scientific world, most conservation biologists are well-versed in describing and differentiating landscapes and animals by sight. However, differentiating sounds and acoustic communication in animals remains challenging, confusing, and understudied (Lorimer, 2008). Tuning in to traces of elephant presence has focused chiefly on visual methods of tracking presence and absence. Tracking of elephants involves following traces of pathways, droppings, broken branches, destroyed fields, etc. Since elephants are large animals threatened by extinction, tracking and counting their bodies is an obvious research choice. However, elephants live complex social, emotional, ecological, and cultural lives, and they inspire us to attune to more than just their biological and reproductive well-being (Lowe & Münster, 2016). Since we cannot interview elephants verbally, we need to find “…other ways of listening to their experiences of life on an unevenly changing planet…” (Swanson, 2019: S272). In his study on dandis (pathways), Paul Keil followed elephant traces on pathways to uncover how human-elephant entanglements emerged from everyday acts of meaningful cohabitation (Keil, 2016). Trying to know elephants on their own terms through non-visual traces such as elephant communication, in addition to visual noticing, adds another dimension to attuning to traces.

18Elephants are highly vocal and rely on acoustic and seismic communication in addition to visual, tactile, and olfactory cues (Stoeger & de Silva, 2013). Elephant acoustic communication often occurs at low frequencies or infrasonic aural range (Stoeger & de Silva, 2013). This frequency is below what humans can hear. Calls and vocalisations are connected to specific behaviours, and certain acoustic signals may be connected to individuals or dialects of isolated groups of elephants (de Silva, 2010). Learning elephant languages and how they intersect with other processes in the landscape may require long hours of listening and watching. Indeed, de Silva spent approximately 3,840 hours in the field listening to and watching elephants. In another study on elephant acoustics, 700,000 hours of recordings from 14 study sites spanning seven years were acquired (Keen et al., 2017). This kind of long-term attunement focuses on everyday aspects of elephants life as they traverse anthropogenic landscapes rather than just violent encounters.

19Listening to elephants and entire landscapes as a methodology is closely aligned with the growing field of ecoacoustics. An emerging interdisciplinary science, ecoacoustics “…investigates natural and anthropogenic sounds and their relationships with the environment over multiple scales of time and space…” (Farina & Gage, 2017: 1). Ecoacoustics provide a framework where analysis of environmental recordings leads to a deeper understanding of ecological processes (Keen et al., 2017). In other words, paying attention to sounds can reveal the state and well-being of the biosphere. Listening to elephants can tell us about them as individuals, as a community, as shapers of ecosystems, about multispecies entanglements, and the effects of human activity through time and space. However, listening is an open-ended process, and elephant acoustic researchers are wary about coming to objective conclusions. Most concur on how much more there is to know about Asian elephant communication. The fact that most of their communication is inaudible to human hearing tells us that we can only have partial knowledge of elephant worlds. Staying with unknowability and uncertainty attunes us to the limits of human attention and the ability to connect with what is outside the parameters of human observation and understanding. Listening as a method of attunement encourages researchers to inhabit “…positions of radical uncertainty.” (Keil, 2017: 206).

Drawing and diagramming patterns and traces

20As anthropogenic landscapes expand into more remote areas and elephant habitats and migratory corridors become fragmented, humans and elephants find themselves sharing many of the same spaces. Apart from the political and historical dimensions of elephant-farmer coexistence assemblages, I am also interested in tracing current and material patterns of land use to understand how human-elephant encounters occur locally within larger contexts such as the Anthropocene. One specific situation that I am studying is of a farmer in Chanthaburi, Thailand, who grows favourite elephant foods, such as bananas, wild bamboo, and fishtail palm, for the local elephants in her area on the edges of her farm to mitigate crop damage. These elephants have responded to that by eating what she grows and leaving her main crops alone. My interlocutors say that the elephants are co-stewarding the land with the farmer through joint acts of growing, eating, and protecting. The same elephants also damage mono-crop fields of rice and sugarcane and young palm and rubber plantations. Thus, plants, too, are part of the human-elephant dynamic. Which plants (rubber trees, oil palms, wild bananas) are growing where (private farms, protected areas, edges of fields) and in what manner (swidden, mono-crop plantations, forest gardens) also determines how elephants move in the village (Figure 2, Figure 3). Drawing and diagramming may be one way to attune to these multiway material movements and interactions.

Figure 2. Industrial rubber farm: an actor in the elephant-farmer assemblage.

Figure 3. Eucalyptus plantations provide no food, but they help elephants hide.

21Elephant conservationists have long employed visual tools like photo-graphy to observe elephants because individual adult elephants can be identified based on their morphological features (e.g., ear lobe shape, tusk orientation, tail length) (Goswami et al., 2019). However, evidence of elephant movements cannot be adequately captured by photographs alone. In his work on the entanglements of peasants, pine and chestnut forests, ink disease, and forest fires in Italy, Andrew Mathews uses drawing as a method of noticing. He traces “…forms that result from encounters between people and nonhumans (people, sheep, trees), and between nonhumans and other nonhumans (trees, soils, disease, fire)…” (Mathews, 2018: 387). Listening to local people’s stories about trees and their relationships with them, seeing the markings on trees that tell stories of past human-tree interactions, and using drawing as a way of noticing these patterns more deeply permanently changed Mathews’ sensorial capacity. Drawing provides a perception shift that can go beyond what words can provide. In their article on Satoyama (village-managed) forests in Japan, the authors use diagramming to “illuminate worlds in motion” and to foreground assemblages rather than autonomous individuals (Gan & Tsing, 2018). They argue that diagrammes can represent temporal and spatial multispecies encounters as well as possible ways in which these assemblages hold together.

22Mapping, as a form of drawing patterns, tells us larger stories of time and scale. However, maps come with legacies of State power. Cartographies entrench divisions between nature and society (Barua, 2014). Drawing and diagramming are opportunities to problematise these divisions by depicting material entanglements of elephants, plants, soil, fungi, and marginalised farmers. Drawing elephant-human coexistence assemblage allows us to try to grasp something too large but still empirical. Visual anthropologist Victoria Baskin Coffey writes about her work on mapping the Anthropocene as zooming in and out of patterns, processes, and rhythms in continuous motion while at the same time situating herself through the act of diagramming. Coffey describes mapping the Anthropocene as “…a process of navigation—of finding out, of looking, listening, feeling, and expressing…” (Tsing et al., 2021).

Conclusion

23The Anthropocene, with its extinctions and unknown ripple effects, inspires collaborations among natural scientists, social scientists, humanities scholars, and artists. Elephants encourage agriculturalists, geographers, biologists, psychologists, and anthropologists to collaborate because of how they weave our worlds together through the complexity of their inner and outer lives. Marginalised farmers who have asymmetrical encounters with elephants and continue to find ways to coexist in precarious conditions motivate academics to work together to find new methods to study their worlds that go beyond conflict narratives and quantitative data. Lessons learned from elephants, farmers, and the Anthropocene teach us that no single method can provide a well-rounded approach to learning about elephants and farmers and the complex assemblages within which their relations are embedded.

24What would collaborative, interdisciplinary research of elephant-farmer coexistence assemblages look like? Historical ecology methods can help us determine large-scale and deep time patterns and events of when and how human-biogeophysical complex systems transform. However, it does not adequately allow us to tune into individual elephant communication and the everyday nature of interactions between farmers, plants, and elephants. Listening and drawing are better suited for getting a sense of the intimacies that emerge from mundane interactions and multispecies entanglements. Historical ecology allows us to imagine farmer, elephant, plant, and geological histories as multiple and partially overlapping across temporalities and scales. Listening reveals how these histories and large-scale processes are co-created by humans and nonhumans through material engagements. Drawing helps us see the ways in which elephants shape us, and we shape elephant lives.

25This survey has inspired me to think about the kinds of questions multiple methods allow us to ask about elephant-farmer coexistence assemblages. How do the moving bodies of elephants tie multispecies, multitemporal, and multi-spatial worlds together? How have farmers and elephant negotiations shaped biogeophysical landscapes and socio-political systems? How do farmer-elephant coexistence assemblages resist global capital, conservation politics, and State control? And finally, how do we live together? Armed with these questions, methods, and collaborators (hopefully), I feel more ready to encounter elephants in the field.