Table des matières
Introduction
On elephants and humans in contemporary anthropology
- Elephants and the Khamti in Northeast India
- Asian elephants (Elephas maximus) in the Northeast and beyond
- The Khamti: a population who daily live and work with elephants
- Tai Buddhist people inhabiting low lands of South and Southeast Asia
- Agency, Elephants, and labour
- Animals and the ontological turn
- Do elephants work?
- Apprehending interspecies labour
- From work to working with: collective and individual dimensions of labour
- Conduct rather than behaviour as an interpretive frame
- Understanding interspecies communication
- A desanthropocentric anthropology
- Producing a Multispecies Ethnography
- Towards multiperspectivism
- Fieldwork and informants
- Overview of the study
Part 1. Catching forest elephants
Mela shikar
A perilous venture
Spirits and Divinations
- Preparing the expedition
- Khanan mogsue, the capturer’s almanac
- Pak chang, the elephant’s mouth
- Personal Protection
- Phi huen: the spirit of the house
- Phi hai: the bad spirits
- Leaving the village, entering the forest
- The practice of pang lao
- Feeding the phi muang - tutelary soil spirit
- Specific deities linked with elephant catching operations.
- Making a ritual exchange with Chao Pling Chang, the wild elephant mahout
- Being associated with Utingna, the lord of wild forest elephants
- Other practices and beliefs
- Sai taiket: the suicide rope
- Warding off the evil eye - hoo mulung
Human-Konkie Collaboration
- Current framework of a capture operation
- Harnessing the konkie
- Tools and specific items related to a capture operation
- Supplies and necessities for kani (opium) consumption
- Tales of a capture
- Stalking: a silent operation
- The race for the capture
- A rapid camp stop and return to the village
- Between phandi and konkie: an intimate relationship
- Konkie intuition
- The complicity between an owner and his elephant
Part 2. Socialising forest elephants
Music to create bonds
- Singing to socialise elephants
- Contents of the chants
- Chants used during the first training step
- Chant sung during the second step
- Chants: constitutive element of Khamti-elephant relationships
- Oral poetry and shared knowledge in Northeast India
- The songs: a media to support attention support between men and elephants
Part 3. Working with timber elephants
From the forest to the factory
The timber industry
Human-elephant collaboration in timber operations
- A work of strength for the animals?
- Dragging the logs
- Loading the truck: strength, precision and clumsiness all in one.
- Helping the truck
- Interspecies cooperation in timber operations
- A communication based on animal intelligence
- The question of authority
- An adaptation of the animal’s conduct to his partners
Conclusion
Interspecies labour as an ecosophy
- Becoming a konkie: From capturing operations to labour collectives
- An elephantine culture at the village?
- Revisiting the (non-) domestication of Asian elephants
- The shared life of the Khamti and elephants
- Labour: the condition of living with elephants
- The Khamti as elephant protectors
- Implications of interspecies Labour in the Anthropocene
- Ecological neo-colonialism
- Maintaining the meaning and presence of elephants in villages
- Interspecies labour as an ecosophy: humans, elephants, and ecosystems