Becoming Elephant: The Relational Personalities of Arikomban, Kalloor Komban, and Soorya in South India

Ursula Frank; Suma T.R.

doi:10.52537/humanimalia.23831

Author(s)

Ursula Frank University of Oslo Author
Suma T.R. Hume Centre for Ecology and Wildlife Biology, Wayanad, India Author

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.52537/humanimalia.23831

Keywords:

elephant personalities, Human-elephant conflict, animal individuals, Human wildlife conflict, interspecies communication

Abstract

This paper presents the stories of three Asian elephants — Arikomban, Kalloor Komban, and Soorya—who live in a landscape of conflict, coexistence, survival, and captivity in the Western Ghats of South India. The stories of the three elephants give insights into what it means to “become” an elephant in different anthropogenic settings: in a mosaic forest landscape, in captivity at the elephant camp, and as a trained kumki (working) elephant who serves the forest department fighting against his conspecifics and mitigating so-called Human-Elephant Conflict (HEC). Our paper engages with what we call “relational personalities”, the individual and personal characteristics of elephants acquired throughout their life in contact and in close relationship to people. The article aims to acknowledge the personal histories of elephants in interaction with people and the knowledge and skills they have developed to survive in a mosaic forest landscape. Elephants have changed as individuals and as a species in the Anthropocene, and they endure hardships and violence when living close to people. Living near people and in human lifeworlds as well as among other elephants in a dynamic environment has shaped their habits, ways of being, and emotions — what they love, desire, dislike, fear, feel angry or joyful about. Arikomban, Kalloor Komban, and Soorya teach us that in order to better understand contemporary elephants, and facilitate their survival in non-captive settings, we need to recognize them as individuals with personalities situated in spatial and temporal history, politics, and trauma. Although shaped by interactions with people, elephants actively create their lifeworlds and respond to their environments and human contact in a variety of ways.

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Author Biographies

Ursula Frank, University of Oslo

Ursula Frank Koy is Associate Professor of Environmental Humanities at the University of Oslo, Norway and the founding director of the Oslo School of Environmental Humanities (OSEH). Her research combines approaches from multispecies studies, political ecology and feminist STS to study how multispecies relationships change in the Anthropocene. Her long-term collaborative ethnographic work in South India has focused on conservation governance and human-wildlife relationships at the forest frontier. Her monograph, Encountering Wildlife: Conflicts, Care and Coexistence in a South Indian Forest, is currently under revision. Since August 2022, she has been leading the multidisciplinary project “Anthropogenic Soils”, funded by the Research Council of Norway until 2028.
Suma T.R., Hume Centre for Ecology and Wildlife Biology, Wayanad, India

Dr. Suma. T. R. is a Social Anthropologist and cofounder of Hume Centre for Ecology and Wildlife Biology, a research organisation working towards human nature coexistence in south India. Her larger research interest is the dynamics of human nature relations from a political ecology perspective. Her research for more than fifteen years, with different cultural groups in western Ghats, Kerala spans areas such as human-animal relations, land governance, biodiversity governance, social organisation of agrobiodiversity and local food systems. She has published research papers, reports and ethnographic films. Currently she is also acting as the research collaborator from south India of the project ‘Anthropogenic Soils’ at the University of Oslo.

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