Anu Karippal: Back Then It was Culture, Now It is Animal Torture : Shifting Moralities in Human-Elephant Sociality in South India
Abstract
Interrogating responses and reactions and the atmosphere of fear that my presence instigated, this paper critically examines human-elephant relations in Kerala, India, amidst the bigger debates on animal rights, the emergence of elephants as a flagship species of conservation, and concerns regarding elephant captivity. The paper delves into how elephant handlers and owners reposition themselves and respond to activistic claims that portray human-elephant relations as torturous.
Further, the study calls into question the strict nature-culture/wild-domesticated binaries posed by the activism discourse by probing the fuzzy naturecultures through which elephants and humans navigate their mundane lives. Moving forward, the research proposes that humans and elephants are attuned and entangled through nuanced phenomenological alignments that the normative moral frameworks on elephant captivity seem to overlook.
Deploying various disciplinary and theoretical frameworks, this paper argues that incorporating the ethical turn in anthropology can yield incisive perspectives in interspecies studies. Anu Karippal is a PhD student in Linguistic Anthropology at the University of Virginia.
In her doctoral research, Anu Karippal examines the human-elephant communication in South India through a multimodal analysis, and studies how humans learn to read elephant minds. In 2022, her master's thesis on human-elephant sociality won the Department of Anthropology and Sociology prize at the Geneva Graduate Institute.