volatile ecologies: towards a material politics of human–animal relations

Environment and Planning A 2013, volume 45, pages 000 – 000

doi:10.1068/a46138

Volatile ecologies: towards a material politics of human–animal relations

Maan BaruaSchool of Geography and the Environment, University of Oxford, Dysons Perrins Building, South Parks Road, Oxford OX1 3QY, England; e-mail: [email protected] 14 March 2012; in revised form 18 September 2013

Abstract. Political ecology has had a long connection with materials, going back to some of its canonical concerns. Yet materials are rendered inert with no capacity to mobilize political action. Further, the influence of matter in wider ecologies of human–animal cohabitation is poorly acknowledged. This paper examines the role of materials in mediating people’s relationships with elephants in rural northeast India. Drawing upon ethnographic research and ethological studies of elephants, the paper shows that human–elephant conflict is not simply a linear outcome of interactions between elephants and people. Materials, in this case alcohol, play a vital role. Alcohol binds people and elephants in unforeseen ways. The sociopolitical outcomes alcohol generates have deep impacts on the livelihoods of the rural poor and the well-being of elephants. This examination of social and political life through concerted interactions between humans, animals, and materials ecologizes politics, making it more attuned to the more-than-human collectivities within which material lives are lived. The paper strives towards a political ecology that is symmetrical and challenges the discipline’s humanist focus. It concludes with a discussion of the future implications and potential of this approach.

Keywords: political ecology, Asian elephant, alcohol, more-than-human geography, matter, materialism, animal geography

1 IntroductionCertain events during the course of fieldwork unsettle the researcher’s assumptions of the world. Two such events took place when I arrived in Sundarpur, a village in rural India, to study human–elephant relationships. One evening, whilst guarding crops in paddy fields, we heard firecrackers in the distance, an indication of elephants coming our way. My companion Bogai (1) insisted that we took preemptive action. With flashlights in hand, I followed him down a dark, undulating road. Shortly, the torch beam illuminated the body of a large elephant. I shouted out to Bogai, now fifteen feet ahead, to come back. He remained adamant, shining his flashlight at an animal ready to charge. My fear of witnessing a man being trampled was stalled in the nick of time. A group of villagers threw burning torches at the bull, making him stop. Bogai was safe. I was relieved. He came back, mumbling that he was not afraid of elephants. Later on that evening another farmer, Budhu, told me “Bogai acted that way because he was inebriated.” Unknowingly, I had put our lives at risk by confronting elephants in the dark, unarmed and accompanied by a man under the influence of alcohol.

A few weeks later, on the wall of a villager’s house, I came across a poster printed by the conservation nongovernmental organization World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF), advising people to stop brewing alcohol at home. The poster depicted a man distilling sulāi or country spirits (figure 1). A large earthen pot, potentially containing fermenting molasses, stood on the side; beside lay a jerrycan, a utensil in which the intoxicant is usually stored. The most startling aspect of the poster was the two elephants. With accentuated and anthropomorphized

(1) All names are pseudonyms.

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eyes, they were shown breaking into the walls of the distillery, reaching out for the brew with their trunks. The caption in Assamese alerted people to stop constructing liquor distilleries as they would be susceptible to elephant attacks. Upon asking the villager what he made of this message, he told me “Elephants are attracted to alcohol. You saw Sutu’s house that was damaged. That was because he was brewing sulāi at home. The animals got the scent of the brew and broke in.”

I was still a novice when I arrived in Sundarpur to conduct research on the political ecology of human–elephant relationships. The village, adjacent to the Doigurung Reserve Forest in the Golaghat district of Assam (figure 2), was where people and elephants regularly interfaced. Crop raiding and house damage by elephants, phenomena termed ‘human–elephant conflict’ (Barua, 2010), was on the rise. Conflict was attributed to be an outcome of deforestation of elephant habitat, escalated through development projects, expanding agriculture, and illegal encroachment (Sarma et al, 2008; Sukumar, 2006). I initially sought to unpack the political drivers of deforestation to investigate how asymmetric social relationships structured and reproduced conflicts. However, the two events above startlingly opened up other possibilities. What if there were hidden actors, besides the state, institutions, and people, which influenced human–elephant relationships? How would political ecologies unfold if we seriously considered the role of materials, in this case alcohol, in mediating social and ecological outcomes? What bearings would this have on understanding how humans and animals cohabit and act in the world?

Matter is largely absent from scholarship on the geographies of human–animal relations (Hobson, 2007; Lorimer and Srinivasan, 2013). An overarching term, ‘matter’ can imply both living substances and nonliving materials, although strict divisions between the two are eschewed. Matter features more prominently in political ecology, paging back to some of the field’s canonical work (Blaikie, 1985; Blaikie and Brookfield, 1987). However, political ecology renders matter inert, reducing it to an inanimate substrate moulded and

Figure 1. [In colour online.] Poster printed by WWF warning people to stop brewing alcohol in their homes. The caption in Assamese states: “If you brew liquor any and every where, then for elephant harassment do prepare.”

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acted upon by social collectives from without. The analytical repertoire for interrogating whether substances have political potential, or how materials intervene to mediate human–animal encounters, remains impoverished. In contrast, cultural geographers have recently called for a different engagement with materials and their relationship to the political (Braun and Whatmore, 2010). New materialist geographies, inspired by philosophies affirming the vitality of matter (Bennett, 2010), emphasize how materials might pose questions on their own terms. They argue that matter may add to or subtract from the very relations that compose social and political life (Braun and Whatmore, 2010). Materials are vibrant: they are not infinitely malleable, they retain certain independence from humans, and they influence outcomes through connections, disruptions, and flows (Bennett, 2010). Geographers thus reconceptualize matter as a contingent source of becoming (Clark, 2011). Materials are important precisely because they are active and coconstitutive of their sites, geographies, and spaces (Tolia-Kelly, 2012). This new materialism situates the human in the middle of things, but relations beyond the human (for instance, between inanimate materials and nonhuman animals), are given scant attention. Politics risks falling short of becoming ecological, because a range of other, more-than-human, relations that generate meaning or forge outcomes are glossed over.

Working through the questions raised by the above vignettes, in this paper I seek to develop a more symmetrical political ecology. I build upon new materialist geographies (Braun and Whatmore, 2010; Clark, 2011) to foreground the vibrancy of materials, their manifold relations with people and animals, and to interrogate how sociopolitical outcomes emerge from ecologies of relations between the animate and inanimate. The paper is divided into three parts. First, through an ethnographic enquiry into practices of cohabiting with elephants, it examines how alcohol enters local political ecologies and mediates human–elephant encounters. Second, the paper explores the vibrant potential of alcohol itself and interrogates the way its micropolitical affects might orchestrate conflict. Third, the paper investigates how alcohol might affect elephant bodies and ethologies, thereby influencing

Figure 2. Study area showing location of Sundarpur, Golaghat district, Assam.

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sociopolitical events in ways that exceed human design or control. The ethnographic and ethological lenses deployed place animals and materials at the centre of the action, thereby going beyond the humanist frameworks of political ecology. The paper concludes with a discussion of the broader implications of this work for engaging with material politics and the ecologies of human–animal relations.

2 Crop guardingBogai, whom we encountered in the opening vignette, is a temporary day-labourer in a tea plantation close to Sundarpur. A member of the Adivasi community,(2) Bogai lives in a kucca (mud) hut with his wife and three children. The rice Bogai gets from the few bighas (3) of paddy land he owns is barely sufficient to last the entire year. Yet, it is a substantial part of the family income. Sundarpur, being a ‘conflict-affected’ village, had high rates of elephant depredation. A single herd of thirty-five to forty elephants, and four lone bulls regularly forayed into paddy fields during the crop season between late August and November. To protect his source of livelihood, Bogai had to guard his fields from elephants every night. Together with his neighbours, Budhu and Mangla, Bogai had set up a tongi, or crop-guarding shelter, at the edge of the village. Over the course of the six months I spent in Sundarpur, I regularly frequented their tongi at night, conducting participant observations to understand how human–elephant relationships unfolded on the ground.

Crop guarding is an intense activity. The farmers stay up in their fields every night for almost four months of the year, from the time the paddy is sown and until the grain is harvested. Sleep is erratic as people have to be on constant vigil. Elephants are surprisingly silent animals. They often go undetected at night, leaving traces of trampled paddy and uprooted stalks to the dismay of farmers the next morning. My informants would get worried if elephants did not show up in the first hours of nightfall, as this meant having to be alert until the early hours. The labours of staying up were acutely felt the next day. A feeling of tiredness would pervade our bodies. Whilst I had the luxury of resting in the afternoons, Bogai did intense labour in a nearby tea plantation during the day. Like other villagers who shared his predicament, Bogai would go to a local distillery in the evening to grab “a quarter”, a small bottle of distilled country liquor locally called sulāi. “It kills the tiredness. I am able to cope with the fatigue. The stuff helps me stay up and face the elephants.”

Both Bogai and Mangla said that drinking alcohol enabled them to confront elephants at night: “Elephants are very quick in moving through the paddy fields. In fact, when alarmed, they move like a bullet. You need courage when you are face-to-face with such large and powerful creatures. Having a drink or two gives you that courage.” People got very close to elephants, armed only with firecrackers and burning torches. They would drive the animals out of their fields, into the nearby Doigurung reserve. Initially I thought these confrontations to be frivolous, but soon began to respect the risk villagers took to protect their livelihoods. Incidents of retaliation by elephants were not infrequent. Under stressful circumstances where forage is diminished, crops can become an important constituent of the diet of elephant herds that otherwise raid only opportunistically (Fernando et al, 2005). The district in which Sundarpur was located had lost more than 80% of its forest cover in recent years (Sarma et al, 2008). As a consequence, crop raiding had increased. Villagers’ perceptions of elephants were laden with ambiguity. Mangla once told me that he would want to get rid of elephants if he lost a substantial portion of his crops that year. At other times he would refer to their value, even stating that village life would be “boring if there were no elephants (2) Adivasis or the ‘tea-tribe’ community was brought to Assam as indentured labour from central India during colonial rule in the 19th century. It consists of various ethnic groups for which Adivasi is an umbrella term. A majority continue to work in tea plantations, although several have become farmers.(3) The bigha is a unit of land measurement in Assam, equivalent to 1337 m2.


to keep us entertained”. Another farmer framed the situation as an issue of sustenance: “The elephants come here because they can’t get anything else to eat.” He revered elephants, a common cultural practice amongst Hindus, and even ‘offered’ a small plot of paddy land to the creatures to forage. Yet, he would suspend reverential views when raiding was rampant, but refrained from taking retributive action as he would be liable for prosecution by the state.

Encounters between people and elephants could even be fatal. The slippery and uneven paddy fields were difficult to run through in the dark. Unlike the villagers, my body and feet were out of tune with the landscape. I would run a short distance, slip and fall. Budhu would often counterpose my precarious urban identity with his competence: “You are from a place that has electricity. We on the other hand have dealt with elephants for ages. We don’t fall, even when the ground is uneven.” Yet, high contents of alcohol can induce physiological effects that alter this skilful, corporeal negotiation of the nocturnal landscape. Alcohol changes the viscosity of the endolymph in the semicircular canals of the human ear, leading to exaggerated and overcompensated movements of the body (Stockley and Saunders, 2011). Alcohol affects the human body, prising open new trajectories of what the body can or cannot do. It can impair judgment, for in such circumstances judgment is more of a bodily craft enacted and performed through immersion in the landscape than a technology of practice dependent on vision. During the course of my fieldwork, a farmer under the influence of alcohol was unable to escape in time. He was fatally trampled by a charging elephant.

Crop guarding was not the sole cause of alcohol intake in the landscape. As scholars have argued, a number of factors, including social rites and ceremonies, emotional reasons or leisure, dealing with poverty or as a coping strategy, play a role (Jayne et al, 2008). However, this ethnography shows that there are links between crop guarding and alcohol consumption, and that alcohol heightens vulnerability to elephant attacks. The social impacts of fatal events penetrate far deeper than the immediacy of threats from elephants, as illustrated by the following vignette of a person I befriended in Sundarpur. Kanu was a young man in his mid-twenties, who had lost both his father and brother-in-law to elephant attacks. He lived with his wife, small child, widowed sister, and mother in a small kucca hut, right beside a track that elephants used when entering the village. Kanu was only sixteen when his father was trampled by an elephant whilst guarding crops in a tongi ten years ago. Kanu dropped out of school and began working as a day labourer in a sand collection depot. His education and potential for getting a better-paid job were severely compromised. Two years ago, Kanu’s brother-in-law, drunk on country liquor, picked a quarrel with him over the purchase of kerosene. The man rushed off alone in the dark to obtain kerosene from a store on the outskirts of the village. A while later, news reached Kanu that he had had a fatal encounter with elephants en route. The entire burden of looking after the family, keeping them safe from elephants, now rested on Kanu. To repay debts, Kanu sold 2.5 bighas of land inherited from his father to a nearby tea plantation owner. The deaths not only disrupted education and income, but their farming practices as well. Kanu’s mother narrated their predicament: “With my son-in-law and husband gone, Kanu has to do daily labour in the depot. There is no one to cultivate the few bighas of land we have left.” When I asked her why they did not give their land out for share-cropping, she said this was not feasible as there were no men left to guard their fields: “Even if we give it out for share-cropping, Baba [elephant] comes and takes it all. I have grandchildren and a widowed daughter … . What will we eat?” Her use of the reverential term ‘Baba’ when referring to crop-raiding elephants reflected their despair. Cohabitation with elephants generated deep ruptures in everyday life, but the family had little in terms of alternatives.

In summary, this ethnographic enquiry into the practices of crop guarding illustrates how alcohol can become an agent influencing relations within a social assemblage coconstituted

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by both people and elephants. It is a hidden actor in local political ecologies of human–elephant conflict. Recurrent elephant presence and crop raiding make the rural poor strive hard to protect what is their most important source of livelihood. Crop guarding, conducted for almost four months of the year, involves risk taking and results in poor sleep. When coupled with intensive physical labour the following day, crop guarding generates considerable fatigue and morbidity. The role alcohol plays in this ecology of relations is twofold. First, it gives people the courage to brave elephants at night. Second, it enables people to cope with bodily fatigue. As a consequence, vulnerability to elephant attacks is increased. Whilst guarding is not the sole cause of alcohol consumption, this ethnography shows that certain components of alcohol intake are intrinsically linked to local ecologies. Alcohol consumption exceeds the envelope of purely human causality, as cause and action are deflected to a wider ecology of relations. In this case the fraught labour of cohabiting with elephants plays a role. This ‘drinkscape’ is not constituted by autonomous selves, but through modes of becoming that are more-than-human (Whatmore, 1999). To further develop this political ecology in a symmetrical direction, I now turn to the vibrant and political potentials of alcohol and its relations with other nonhuman bodies.

3 AlcoholThe second vignette at the beginning of this paper gives us a foretaste of another trajectory through which human–elephant relationships unfold: the actions of alcohol as it affects elephant bodies. Both the poster and incident of house damage, startling as they are, generated a different awareness of this local political ecology. It provoked a shift in emphasis from a view of alcohol as a coping mechanism to a view of it as an active agent that binds people and elephants in novel and unforeseen ways. The event prompted one to take seriously the affordances of alcohol: that is, the properties of the material that render it apt for the purposes of a subject (Gibson, 1986; Ingold, 1994)—in this case a creature such as the elephant, with its specific physiology and sensory apparatus. In the months that ensued, I began to explore how one might approach the practice of brewing and the geographies of intoxication as a symmetrical ecology, where elephants and alcohol too play a vital, if not volatile, role.

Sulāi, the most commonly consumed local spirit, is a clear colourless alcohol brewed from molasses, or, occasionally, rice. Molasses, usually unrefined treacle obtained at low cost, are first fermented in a large vessel under anaerobic conditions. Distillation then commences by heating the molasses in a cylindrical vessel or pot over a fire. A rectified spirit that does not undergo multiple distillations, sulāi has a high content of untreated alcohol, giving a person what my informant Budhu called a “jhatka”, an instant kick. Furthermore, the strong, pungent odour emanating from the distilling process was distinctive, carrying a long way. Ethological studies suggest that Asian elephants rely strongly on their sense of smell, especially whilst foraging (Rasmussen and Krishnamurthy, 2000; Sukumar, 2003). Olfaction may in fact regulate elephant behaviour (Rizvanovic et al, 2013). Elephants develop large cranial sinuses on maturity, placing them amongst the most macrosmatic mammals in the world (Rasmussen, 2006). Their olfactory discrimination skills are more acute than those of humans (Rizvanovic et al, 2013). Elephants discern odours between structurally similar odorants—a process that is learnt quickly and retained as part of their excellent long-term odour memory (Arvidsson et al, 2012). Olfaction is also closely linked to taste. Elephants have a sweet tooth and relish saccharides or carbohydrates (Rasmussen, 2006). Thus, the strong, pungent, and far-reaching odour of fermenting molasses affords detection by a macrosmatic creature like the elephant. Its high content of saccharide resonates wtih Proboscidean gustation. The brew produced for human consumption is thus potentially open to elephants as well. As creatures with a high capacity for social learning and a powerful ability to remember effects and sources of food


(Sukumar, 2003), the raiding of distilleries could indeed become a part of the skills elephants acquire when cohabiting landscapes with humans.

Whilst in Sundarpur, I became cognizant of how the local political economy of alcohol was intricately linked to this wider ecology of cohabitation. My informant Budhu sold sulāi at home in order to beef up the family income. Losing a substantial proportion of crops to elephants each year made it difficult to make ends meet. Budhu bought alcohol in bulk from a distillery at the outskirts of the village, which he would then retail in used commercial beverage bottles in measures of a ‘quarter’ or a ‘half’. Brewing and retailing sulāi without an excise permit were illegal. Villagers were thus cautious about what they disclosed or whom they sold alcohol to. It was only during the latter half of my stay in Sundarpur that I became privy to such activities. My partial enrolment into the local drinking culture and involvement in crop-guarding activities were integral to this access. Precautionary measures, however, were not just to avoid an excise or police raid: elephants too were a concern. Budhu stored the alcohol in a small room behind his house so that his family was not directly vulnerable, lest elephants broke in. A trench dug around the periphery of his compound was to thwart the animals from entering. The distillery from which Budhu purchased sulāi conducted the process of fermentation and distillation in a small kucca shed in the garden, a fair distance from the owner’s house. When I asked the owner why he did so, he replied “Brewing sulāi in the house is a recipe for trouble. Elephants are attracted to the scent and will break into the house.”

The illicit status of sulāi brewed and retailed without a permit had political consequences for this more-than-human assemblage, as elephant attacks prompted government raids on illicit stills. Processes of making locally brewed alcohol illicit are rooted in colonial history. In the early 19th century, the imperial administration levied an excise tax or abkaree against the sale of liquor brewed by indigenous communities (Goswami, 1987). Introduced to increase revenue, the tax was rationalized on the grounds that intoxication “had become prevalent among many of the lower orders of people owing to the inconsiderable price at which they were manufactured and sold” (page 84). In 1856 the colonial government introduced the term “country spirits” to define liquor brewed by “the native process of distillation” as opposed to the “English method” (page 95). Three interrelated logics were deployed to govern the political economy of indigenous brewing. First, manufacture was regulated by the state. Liquor stills could only be set up by obtaining a licence. They had to operate within designated spaces and supply specified quantities of spirits. Second, alcohol itself was subjected to scrutiny and measurement. The state determined what content of ethanol in spirits was acceptable. Prior to retail, a district-level excise establishment had to test spirit levels with a hydrometer. Third, brewing was subjected to regular surveillance. The excise establishment kept daily accounts of quantities manufactured and retailed from licensed distilleries. Stills had to be open at all times for inspection. Contemporary patterns of state governance of spirit production and distribution are a living inheritance of these earlier logics of rule (Chatterjee, 2003). By acting upon alcohol, and through the surveillance of brewing, the state enters local political ecologies. Sulāi manufactured outside of its purview is deemed illicit, liable to be seized and the distiller prosecuted.

Illicit distilleries have become new sites through which human–elephant conflicts unfold. Reports of elephants entering villages in search of alcohol are pervasive throughout landscapes where they cohabit with people in India.(4) Accounts state that elephants have developed a “dangerous drinking habit” when they “get the taste of liquor from the huts of the locals” (4) A search in online elephant news databases (http://www.elephant-news.com/; http://www.savetheelephants.org/elephant-news-service.html) retrieved fifty-two news articles mentioning links between human–elephant conflict and alcohol from India in the past ten years. This large number of articles partially reflects the countrywide prevalence and significance of the issue.

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(Sen, 2001). Liquor has been named the main cause of elephants entering human habitation in some parts of the country (Anon, 2011), the animals being attracted to a food source that is “tastier, stronger-smelling and more nutritious” than what they eat in the wild (Burke, 2010). Residents of a village not far from Sundarpur reported that a particular bull elephant had become “an addict of country liquor”, straying into habitation, especially tea estate labour lines, in search of spirits (Anon, 2008a). This potential of alcohol goes to show how materials spatialize: new topologies of human–elephant cohabitation are actualized when alcohol affects elephant bodies.

The agency of alcohol becomes evident in the ways in which it binds people and elephants. News reports, perhaps unwittingly, allude to the agentic potential of alcohol: “the elephant was … drawn to illicit alcohol stored in the victim’s hut!” (Sen, 2001), “liquor from nearby huts … attracts them here” (Sen, 2001), “the sudden spate of elephant attacks is attributed to the local brew” (Anon, 2008b), “beer has been blamed for previous attacks” (Anon, 1999). If we alter the emphasis of these statements, then alcohol is indeed an actant that draws elephants. Its pungent odour and sweet taste attract the animals deep into human habitation. Whilst I did not encounter intoxicated elephants during fieldwork in Sundarpur, several accounts from across the country describe drunkenness in elephants, where they “fall asleep hither and thither, throwing life completely haywire” (Burke, 2010). After intoxication, elephants have been reported to run amok, damaging rows of houses, injuring or even killing people (Anon, 2009a; 2011). Alcohol is thus attributed powers to elicit elephant attacks, becoming the agent to blame in amplifying conflict.

By acting through elephant bodies, alcohol is not only vibrant, but eventful. The relations composed between alcohol and elephants, in excess of the technocratic faith of knowing and controlling what is to come, have sociopolitical effects. First, vulnerability to elephant attacks is heightened, as incursions occur after dark, coinciding with people’s visits to local breweries (Anon, 2008b). The magnitude of this vulnerability in fact made WWF distribute a second

Figure 3. [In colour online.] WWF poster warning people not to venture alone in the dark after consuming alcohol. The caption in Assamese states: “After a few drinks the drunkard in the dark roams alone, Elephants trample and crush his bones.”


poster cautioning people not to roam alone in the dark when drunk as they were susceptible to elephant attacks (figure 3). Second, small-scale distillation units in remote villages that often escape detection are brought to the attention of the state. Elephant incursions trigger public outcries and foster government initiatives to carry out eviction drives on illicit liquor dens (Anon, 2009b; 2011). This need to regulate and govern distillation is more often a contingent outcome of elephant attacks than a concerted effort to curb bootlegging. Alcohol thus becomes a force, and the material bonds it forms within the assemblage influence community and political practices.

4 EthologiesTwo further questions arise once alcohol emerges as an actant in the political and ecological assemblage. First, what physiological effects does alcohol have on elephants? And, more radically, if we suspend quibbles about anthropomorphism, do elephants actively seek intoxication? These questions have generated interest amongst ethologists. In the wild, elephants are attracted to ethyl alcohol from ripened fruit of the marula tree in Africa and the Durian in Asia (Fowler, 2006). Elephants travel long distances to consume fermenting fruit, a practice that can become integral to the life histories of certain herds and individuals. Video footage, although anthropomorphized, shows elephants inebriated after consuming marula.(5) Certain ethologists contend that the alcohol content produced through these nonhuman assemblages is not sufficient to lead to intoxication (Morris et al, 2006). They suggest that overt effects are generated not by alcohol, but by nicotinic acid and poisonous beetle pupae present in the fruit (Morris et al, 2006). Debates aside, there is consensus that elephants like the taste of alcohol. Frugivory amongst elephants may be the evolutionary outcome of a predilection for ethanol in overripe fruit (Fowler, 2006; Morris et al, 2006). However, alcohol stored in distilleries is produced through a different assemblage. This ecology of brewing, controlled by people, creates highly anaerobic conditions for molasses to ferment. The alcohol content generated is far greater than that of assemblages involving wild fruit. Distillation further intensifies the quantity of ethanol, creating a brew that could potentially intoxicate elephants.

My attempts to comprehend media reports on intoxication and the stories of villagers in Sundarpur took a different turn when I came across two studies by the ethologist Ronald Siegel, in which he examined the physiological effects of alcohol on captive elephants (Siegel, 2005; Siegel and Brodie, 1984). In his first experiment Siegel posed the question whether elephants drink alcohol even if they are not hungry. Alcohol, varying in strength from 0% to 50% ethanol solution, was provided to three Asian elephants raised in captivity (Siegel and Brodie, 1984). All three animals preferred the 7% solution, equivalent to the alcohol content of strong ale. The elephants would not drink anything stronger than a 10% solution. The elephants appeared inebriated and the effects they displayed hinged on the dramatic. They started growling, a vocalization associated with arousal, and flapped their ears more than usual to regulate body heat. The animals responded poorly to the commands of their handler. One individual even slipped and fell. These physiological effects mirror media reports of wild elephants intoxicated after drinking sulāi or consuming fermented molasses.

Siegel then posed a further question: do intelligent animals such as elephants, under the stress of competition for food in the wild, intentionally seek intoxication? Intoxication from fermented fruit may be an accidental side effect, but will elephants with access to undisguised alcohol desire inebriation? Siegel’s second experiment was with a herd of seven African elephants who ranged freely in a spacious California game park (Siegel, 2005). (5) Two popular renderings on the video-sharing site YouTube are: “Drunk animals—marula fruit party!!” (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Le9ufN5uEc) and “Elephant party in ADDO Park” (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EyWd7ozjwbA).

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The herd spent most time in a tightly compacted grouping. Pushing, shoving, and aggressive vocalizations were almost nonexistent. Alcohol was provided to the elephants in drums, and each individual was allowed to drink all it wanted over a thirty-five minute period. Some individuals consumed as much as 75 litres. Intoxication led to a reversal of normal behaviour: feeding, drinking, and physical contact with others decreased. Alcohol had a major disruptive effect: animals were unable to regroup. The dominant bull and cow became more domineering, displaying marked aggression toward other herd members, as well as toward the ethologists. Submissive individuals became meek, avoiding physical encounters. To induce a proxy for environmental stress, Siegel later confined the elephants to a smaller area (< 1ha) in the park, which they shared with other animals. Alcohol intake increased when they were ‘crammed’ into this space (Siegel, 2005). Consumption returned to ‘normal’ levels once the preserve was enlarged and ‘bothersome’ animals such as rhinos moved out. The animals were denied continuous exposure to alcohol in case it led to alcoholism. However, months later when a construction crew was working in the game park, the elephants congregated in the area where alcohol was once available. Whilst undertaken in captivity, Siegel’s experiments unsettle deterministic explanations of elephants’ alcohol-seeking behaviour as opportunistic foraging. He contends that, under circumstances of environmental stress, a creature as intelligent as the elephant may indeed seek the comforts of intoxication (Siegel, 2005).

The elephants in Sundarpur, comprising of a herd of thirty-five to forty elephants and four lone bulls, inhabited an environment that generated considerable stress. The landscape they traversed had lost over 80% of its forest cover in the last twenty years, precipitated by violent ethnic and political conflicts in the late 1980s. The construction of an oil refinery and several stone quarries in the midst of the herd’s range disrupted movement routes. The landscape was fissured by the struggles of modernity, and foraging habitat for the herd was severely depleted. Consequently, elephants had to rely on resources within human settlements. In the three years between 2009 and 2011, overlapping with my fieldwork that commenced in late 2010, 179 incidents of crop and house damage by elephants were reported from the vicinity (Das et al, 2012). The forest department, which regularly intervened by driving the animals into the Doigurung reserve, described the situation as a “land war” where “even bullets failed to deter … elephants [from] destroying houses, crops and killing people in search of food” (Anon, 2007).

This stress was reflected in the herd’s ethology. The animals were nervous when they entered villages, maintaining a compact grouping to keep calves secure. The herd would often fragment into small groups when confronted by farmers at night. Regrouping proved difficult, sometimes occurring days later. The body condition of most elephants appeared emaciated, suggesting a corporealization of stress. Subadults in the herd had learnt to become bold, unafraid to charge even people armed with firecrackers and torches. Lone bulls were particularly aggressive. A tuskless animal, named ‘Bulldejaar’ (bulldozer) by farmers in Sundarpur, had gained the reputation of attacking people and breaking houses. Bulldejaar’s body bore scars of retributive action by farmers. His aggression at times typified what ethologists have termed ‘retaliatory cunning’: that is, calculated and directed attacks on humans who had harmed him in the past (Bradshaw, 2009). The subjective worlds of these animals, and the collective culture of the Sundarpur herd, were shaped by the trauma of a landscape fissured by modernity.

The paucity of ethological observations on the life histories of these individuals and their reasons for consuming alcohol remains a shortcoming of this study. However, one cannot rule out the possibility that the quest for intoxication is in itself a reason why elephants break into village distilleries. Bull elephants, who foray into habitation even in the absence of landscape stressors (Sukumar, 2003), were known to seek alcohol. However, family-led herds, which


raid with less frequency when resources are not depleted (Fernando et al, 2005), were also reported to break into distilleries. One might speculate that the latter is an emerging elephant culture in response to the trauma generated in the landscape. In the past decade over twenty-five elephants have been killed by people in the district (Sarma et al, 2008). For Assam this statistic has doubled in the last ten years (Talukdar, 2010). Since elephants are sentient creatures with strong kinship bonds, violent death can induce depression, asocial behavior, and hyperaggression in other herd members (Bradshaw et al, 2005). Hyperaggression was exhibited by some animals in the Sundarpur herd. Evoking Fanon, ethologists have described this situation of “the native elephant” as “a nervous condition” (Bradshaw, 2009; page 69). It is plausible that for the Sundarpur elephants, whose life histories are littered with violent interactions with humans, alcohol could well be a sedative that helps them cope with the pain of postcolonial consciousness.

5 DiscussionBy relocating the focus of enquiry to a vital assemblage, rather than subjects in isolation, this paper presents a novel political ecology of human–animal relations. Contrary to the tendencies of animal geography and political ecology, the paper shows that human–elephant conflict is not a simple linear outcome of encounters between people and elephants or solely structured by asymmetric social relations. Materials, in this case alcohol, play a vital role. It makes its way into political ecologies and its volatile choreographies trouble routine explanations of who or what generates and mediates conflicts. The ecologies of relations foregrounded here offer up new perspectives on the politics of conservation. Furthermore, it reorients understandings of both politics and ecology in political ecology, bringing the latter into conversation with the new materialist and nonrepresentational concerns of human geography. The implications of this ethnographic and ethological argument are manifold.

Causes of human–elephant conflict are attributed to escalating deforestation, disruption of elephant corridors, and encroachment into protected areas reserved for elephants (Barua, 2010; Sukumar, 2006). Scholars rightly argue that elephants are running out of space, resulting in increased conflict with humans as they have to move through habitation or rely on cultivated crops to subsist. However, they fall short in explaining the countrywide incursions of elephants into breweries and alcohol distillation sites. Such events force us to consider alternatives. Landscapes riven with conflict, as ethological studies (Bradshaw, 2009; Bradshaw et al, 2005), and observations of the Sundarpur herd show, induce considerable stress in elephants. The tranquilizing and sedating effects of alcohol could indeed be what the creatures seek to cope with trauma. Foregrounding nonhuman rhythms and lifeworlds radically alters explanations of the causes and consequences of conflict. The latter can be generated from the flows of nonhuman desire, the assemblages that result when elephants and alcohol recorporealize in response to one another. There is thus a micropolitics of conflict in operation, where molecular affects dovetail with macrovariables such as habitat loss to produce a particular set of human–elephant interactions.

Micropercepts such as the strong, pungent odour of alcohol, its detectability by a highly macrosmatic creature like the elephant, or Proboscidean desire for the sedative properties of spirits, are imperceptible from the macropolitical tendencies of animal geography and political ecology. These perspectives focus on environmental conflict as a product of uneven social relations, such as race, gender, or class struggles (McGregor, 2005; Philo and Wilbert, 2000; Robbins, 2011). Examples of how asymmetric social relations reproduce human–wildlife conflict include the role of race and masculinity in the extermination of wolves in the US (Emel, 1995), the marginalization of ‘natives’ through protection afforded to animals under the project of colonialism (McGregor, 2005; Wilbert, 2006), and the disproportionate impacts cohabiting with wildlife has on women in societies fissured by patriarchy (Ogra, 2008).

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They provide considerable purchase in terms of understanding how conflict is politicized structurally, but leave us with an impoverished analytical repertoire for engaging with the ecologies of human–animal cohabitation. The retinue of materials that act and pose situations in their own terms, which condition the vitality of human and nonhuman animals, and avail both to political calculability, remain unaccounted for.

In contrast, this paper builds upon new materialist geographies, their emphasis on materials as a contingent source of becoming (Clark, 2011), and as active agents that compose and contest the social fabric (Bennett, 2010; Braun and Whatmore, 2010), to ecologize political ecology. The eth(n)ological perspective offered up here illustrates how social life in landscapes such as Sundarpur is never cleaved from the lifeworlds of elephants. The ethology of a crop-raiding herd imposes immense burdens on the poor, rupturing farming practices and day-to-day life. Alcohol enters the local political ecology when farmers consume liquor to cope with fatigue and the risks of crop guarding. It affects human bodies, and the new corporeal relations consequently composed impair judgment, heightening vulnerability to elephant attacks. The deep social impact a resultant fatality has on the lives of the bereaved is illustrated by the narratives of Kanu and his family. In extreme cases conflict-related mortality can even lead to a rupture in kinship bonds, mental health morbidity, and an aggravation of preexisting poverty (Jadhav and Barua, 2012). Inhabiting such landscapes fissured by modernity, being caught up in a situation labelled a ‘land war’, has equally fraught effects on elephants. Coping with such stress and trauma is perhaps what fuels the Proboscidean desire for alcohol. It prises open yet another trajectory through which alcohol becomes part of this more-than-human assemblage. Intoxication is an ecology of relations, a becoming-alcohol of elephants and a becoming-elephant of alcohol. The material connections brought about are events not derivations, for alcohol alters elephant bodies, and its own effects are amplified. Rather than an inert material upon which any form of organization can be inscribed, alcohol is a mediator of conflict whose ability to surprise rings in social and political force fields. Its molecular effects give rise to a micropolitics of human–animal cohabitation. As this paper shows, rendering this politics visible requires ecologizing political ecology, of grappling with nonhuman lifeworlds and material relations that are composed in excess of the human.

Attending to the material and micropolitical dimensions of human–animal relations also leads to alternative formulations of what constitutes politics in political ecology. Politics, broadly understood in the discipline as “the practices and processes through which power is wielded and negotiated” (Walker, 2007, page 363), remains centred on the human subject. By front-staging the volatile relations between people, elephants, and alcohol, this paper shows that the human subject is no longer the sole source of political agency in the world. In Sundarpur, elephant incursions into village distilleries render illicit practices visible to the state, prompting public outcries and excise raids. Alcohol, by virtue of its entanglement with district authorities, the excise, and police departments, becomes a charged substance that catalyzes political events. The power to wield and negotiate is thus constituted by a retinue of more-than-human beings. This reorientation not only throws open the question of who or what participates in political life, but also the question of how the political may be perceived by heterogeneous actants. For the Sundarpur farmers the conflict was political as actions they could take against elephants were constrained by the protection afforded to these animals by the state. Consequently, anger toward elephants was deflected upon the forest department, an extreme example being a demonstration held when a man was fatally trampled. The state proliferates through elephant incursions, for it is inseparable from the molecular forces of interaction (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987).

A more difficult proposition, with implications for moving beyond humanist frameworks, is whether elephants perceive their relations with humans as ‘political’. Like their “vengeful,


premeditative killing” of Maasai cattle in Africa, “a stress-charged execution of a careful, calculated plan aimed at preempting further attacks by villagers” (Bradshaw, 2009, pages 144–145), one might consider the killing of people by elephants in Assam as ‘politically’ charged. Elephants are able to classify and distinguish between ethnic communities that hurt them and those that do not (Bates et al, 2007). In Sundarpur I learnt from villagers how Bulldejaar would retaliate when they tried to drive him out of paddy fields, but would leave in haste when forest personnel, carrying firearms, arrived in their vehicle. A certain ‘political awareness’ is at work here, a process of negotiation and wielding power. Informants in Sundarpur attributed elephants’ awareness and responses to the situation to what they called ‘elephant wisdom’. This articulation of Proboscidean knowledge is part anthropomorphic and part recognition of what is other, a position that is not necessarily problematic as several ways of making sense of the world are shared by both people and elephants. Unpinning politics from its association with exclusive human company redistributes the capacity to act and influence to an entourage of entities. The ecological politics articulated in this paper shows how it is difficult to separate and pigeonhole the lifeworlds of elephants, responses of people, and the mediating affects of alcohol. Their abilities to act are of course different and uneven, but the difference is of degree not distinction. One might extend this further to state that cohabitation gives rise to a shared political ontology, in some sense meaningful for both people and elephants.

This reorientation of politics and ecology has a number of wider implications that go beyond the specificities of the case. First, it productively works with the ‘tension’ between political ecology and nonrepresentational, posthuman, and vitalist geographies (Neumann, 2011). Although this paper is not overtly positioned in a nonrepresentational frame, its ethological and phenomenological analysis is shared with tendencies of the latter. For instance, the political ecology of conflict in Sundarpur is aromatic as much as it is about asymmetric social relations. Elucidating the political events triggered by the aromatic properties of alcohol requires an affective and performative mode of engagement that is central to the nonrepresentational project (Thrift, 2003). As a digression, it might be pertinent to remark that this study’s engagement with nonhuman olfaction and gustation opens up new avenues for nonrepresentational research. Similarly, crop guarding is not just about the political economies of labour, a cost for the disenfranchised cohabiting with elephants, but also a bodily practice performed through uneven ground where elephants have the upper hand. Nonrepresentational concerns with the technologies and registers of vision (Wylie, 2006) matter in terms of political economy. Aberrations in sensibilities can result in fatality, triggering socioeconomic downturns in the families of the bereaved. The micropolitics traced by nonrepresentational and posthumanist geographies interdigitate with the macropolitical and structural concerns of political ecology. This paper illustrates how the two can inform one another.

Second, by examining human–animal relations and the vibrancy of matter in conjunction, as part of an ecology of relations, the paper adds to the methodological repertoire of animal geography. One might deploy the label ‘more-than-human’ ethnography to describe this work (Whatmore, 2003), as it goes beyond the restrictive focus on living organisms of ‘multispecies’ (Kirksey and Helmreich, 2010) and ‘ethno-ethological’ alternatives (Lestel et al, 2006). Unlike the latter which conduct ethnography along a human–animal axis, this paper opens up analysis to an ontologically heterogeneous collective within which human, animal, or material lives are lived. As one cannot know in advance what bodies or materials are eventful, ethnographic enquiry must remain open to the world and mindful of the opportunities or constraints diverse beings impose upon situations or research design. One shortcoming of this paper is its lack of observations of alcohol-seeking behaviour amongst individual elephants at the local level. Inferences are gleaned from ethological observations

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of stressed animals and research at a species level. Achieving symmetry in political ecology remains a challenge, and perhaps will continue to be one. Nonetheless, the paper offers up ways in which advances in elephant ethology and psychology, particularly on the emotional lives of these animals (Bradshaw, 2009), can be harnessed by geographical methods to account for the lived spaces and experiences of animals. Central to this endeavour is the meaning materials have in animal umwelts, a concern harking back to the very definition of ecology as relations between organisms and their dwelt environment (Haeckel, 1866).

Deflecting agency to a wider ecology of relations has implications for thinking about interventions to curtail conflict. Conservation studies shrink their gaze to a set of ecological variables and to visible impacts of conflict (Davies et al, 2011; Gubbi, 2012). As a consequence, the mediating role of alcohol and the hidden impacts of conflict on the well-being of the rural poor (Barua et al, 2012), or for that matter elephants, are overlooked. Conflict-related fatality may partly be due to intoxication. Thus curtailing conflict could mean managing a host of other relations, such as substance abuse and regulation of alcohol distillation, that traditionally lie outside the ambit of conservation practice. The ground-level insights of WWF are an exception. Their interventions highlighting the role of alcohol reflect the value of proximal engagement, and in fact show how the selectively ecologized gaze of wildlife conservation management can be opened up to the concerns that materials and animals impose upon us. A more difficult endeavour would be altering human–elephant interactions to make them less harmful to both parties involved. The ‘nervous condition’ of the elephant is shaped by the effects of postcolonial conflict and forest degradation. Reorienting such forces requires structural and epistemic changes. At a community level, it could entail shifting from current management approaches of governing species and landscapes to governing relations between diverse animate and inanimate actants.

South Asian environmental historians have described India as a ‘fissured land’, torn by uneven and extractive political economies of resource use (Gadgil and Guha, 1992). The discontent and trauma inflicted by such fissures have led to subaltern, sometimes violent, political struggles against the state. The concomitant depletion of elephant habitat, fragmentation and ruptures in herds, and prolonged conflict are similarly traumatic for elephants. If intoxication is one way through which elephants seek to salve this condition, then the meaning of postcolonial struggles gets altered from being a subaltern resistance to a coercive modernity, to that of a milieu inhabiting fissured ecologies. A dialogue between postcolonial and posthumanist thought is wanting. The material politics of human–animal relations elucidated here paves ways through which one might be initiated, for politics and ecology can come together in many different ways, and sometimes in a fashion that unsettles one’s assumptions of the world.

Acknowledgements. This research was supported by the University of Oxford Clarendon Fund, Felix and Wingate Scholarships. I am grateful to David Demeritt and the three anonymous reviewers of Environment and Planning A for their insightful comments and constructive suggestions. I wish to thank Paul Jepson and Sarah Whatmore for their help and advice. Thomas Jellis commented on an interim draft of the paper; discussions with Gail Davies, Jamie Lorimer, and Sushrut Jadhav have been most enriching. Manju Barua pointed me to some important texts on alcohol in colonial Assam, and Kamini Barua shared insights on indigenous modes of distillation. This work would not have come to fruition without the kindness and camaraderie of my informants in the field in Assam.


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volatile ecologies: towards a material politics of human–animal relations

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