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 30

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.

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.

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.