Mediating a Caring Environment: Escorting elephants through a fragmented world

Tue Jan 07 11:26:30 CET 2025

Seminar with Paul Keil on Thursday January 30th

The 2025 Ecological Anthropology Seminar Series will begin with a lecture by Paul Keil titled "Mediating a Caring Environment: Escorting elephants through a fragmented world". The talk will take place on Thursday 30.1.2025 at 14:00 (CET) in the seminar room of the Institute of Ethnology CAS, Na Florenci 3, Prague 1. To attend in person or online please register here.

The option to only sign up for updates about the seminar series is also available here: this year’s topics include environmental care and conservation, ecological imaginaries, bioethnography, discard practices, and cleanliness.

Mediating a Caring Environment: Escorting elephants through a fragmented world
Paul G. Keil

Abstract

Maintaining landscape connectivity is considered vital for coexistence with wildlife. Yet conservation strategies - such as habitat corridors that bypass fragmenting infrastructure - do not always align with more-than-human place making and can reproduce exclusive nature/society orders.

Deepor Beel wetland in Assam is an alternative and integrative solution to sharing landscapes. Teams are deployed nightly to escort herds across a hazardous intersection and make trains more susceptible to nonhuman presence. This paper will analyse how an anthropocentric environment can become caring: how local labour and mediation enables a space to be more fluid, response-able, and supportive of the histories, bodies, and desires of these exceptional beings. This mundane act of collaboration with ways of wildlife is not primarily motivated by conservation concerns, but by a shared sense of place and vulnerability in relation to colonising infrastructures.