THE SECOND
SOAS ELEPHANT CONFERENCE
DATE: Saturday 22 June 2019
VENUE: School of Oriental and African Studies, Thornhaugh Street,
London WC1H 0XG
Conference
organised as part of the Interdisciplinary Animal Studies
Initiative [IASI]
at SOAS, University
of London.
_____________________________________________________________
List
of speakers, with abstracts and papers
[in order of principal
presenters]
_____________________________________________________________
1.
The elephant and its ivory in the sculpture of Western
Europe
Charles Avery [Independent researcher] [Abstract] [Sound
recording]
2. The regal elephant in medieval Cairo
Doris Behrens-Abouseif [SOAS, University of London]
[Abstract] [Sound recording]
3. Elephants under the Rising Sun
Martha Chaiklin [Historian] [Abstract] [Sound
recording]
4. Elephants in
Mongol history: from military obstacles to symbols of Buddhist power
William G. Clarence-Smith [SOAS, University
of London] [Abstract] [Sound
recording]
5. Cultural syncretism in
Hispanic-Philippine ivories
Ana Ruiz Gutiérrez [University of Granada]
[Abstract] [Sound recording]
6. Elephants in the Illustrated London News, with a postscript on
elephants in Afghanistan
Shah Mahmoud
Hanifi [James Madison University, USA] [Abstract] [Sound recording]
7. Scaffolding the
elephant: becoming domestic and living by the norms of the human world
Paul G. Keil [Czech Academy of Sciences, Institute of Ethnology]
[Abstract] [Sound
recording]
8. Humans, elephants and
plants in Laos
Nicolas
Lainé [IRASEC, Bangkok] [Abstract]
[Sound recording]
9. The politics of negotiating human/elephant terrain: How elephants and humans adapt to one another in tight spaces
Elizabeth Oriel [SOAS, London] and Deepani Jayantha [Elemotion Foundation,
Sri Lanka] [Abstract] [Sound recording]
10. Elephant hunting and poaching in Botswana
Keith Somerville [University of Kent] [Abstract]
[Sound
recording]
_________________________
Prospectus: The conference is designed to address all aspects of elephant
culture, past, present and future and in all continents. It deals with both
material and cultural concerns, and covers both the Indian and the African
elephant.
This conference builds on previous conferencing activities mobilised at the School of Oriental
and African Studies [SOAS, University of London].
We have built a "stable" of quadruped conferences, including mules,
donkeys, camels, and war horses, and notably our very successful 2016 elephant
conference in Bangalore.
The outcome of this work has been the establishment of vibrant international
research networks, with programmes of ongoing work. This year those activities
will be taking shape as the "Interdisciplinary Animal
Studies Initiative at SOAS" [IASI].
Conference
chair: William Clarence-Smith [SOAS, University
of London]
Conference
organiser: Ed Emery [SOAS, University
of London]
For all
enquiries, write to [email protected]
_____________________________________________________________
List of abstracts
_____________________________________________________________
The
regal elephant in medieval Cairo
Doris Behrens-Abouseif [SOAS, University of London] [Sound recording]
ABSTRACT: The elephant is well represented in medieval Egyptian sources both in
visual as well as textual sources between the Fatimid and the Mamluk periods. It is represented on ceramics and metal
vessels and the chronicles present accounts and anecdotes about the presence of
the elephant in royal menageries and its use in parades and as a diplomatic
gift. It is also mentioned in bestiaries and other literature.
CV: Doris Behrens-Abouseif is Emerita Professor
at SOAS, University
of London
From
2000 to 2014: Professor of Islamic Art and Archaeology (Nasser D Khalili chair) at SOAS, University of London. Visiting professor in several
universities: Bamberg, Berlin
(Freie Universität), Harvard University,
American University
in Cairo and the University of Virginia.
Has published over a wide range of subjects from the
early period to the 19th century focussing especially on Egypt and Syria: Islamic architecture,
urbanism, waqf , decorative arts, Islamic cultural history and concepts of
aesthetics.
E-mail: [email protected]
______________
The elephant and its ivory in the sculpture of Western Europe
Charles Avery [Independent
researcher] [Sound recording]
ABSTRACT: The elephant has always been considered a royal beast,
on account of its sheer size, might and impressive tusks. The enormous size of
the males and their latent aggression, encouraged
their use as weapons of war – famously by Hannibal.
With training the animal could serve mankind’s needs for beasts of burden too,
while its intelligence, normal docility and memory enabled it to perform varied
feats of entertainment.
From 1492 the Portuguese pioneered the
importation of individual elephants – often with their original trainers and
given evocative names – by ship round the Cape of Good Hope to Lisbon. Accordingly rare and very valuable,
elephants were often used for diplomatic gifts. As exotic curiosities they also
naturally attracted the attention of artists, either at court, or when on view
or passing by.
Owing to the distance from Europe of the native
habitats of the elephant in Africa and India, ivory was always extremely
rare and accordingly was highly prized. Tusks could be adapted into hunting or
battle-horns, or, despite their curving shape, be used as an ideal material for
carving and polishing, particularly into the appearance of human flesh.
CV: A graduate from Cambridge and the Courtauld Institute, Charles Avery is a specialist in
European sculpture. Having been Deputy Keeper of Sculpture at the Victoria and Albert
Museum and a Director of
Christie's, since 1990 he has been an independent historian, consultant, and
writer. His books include Florentine Renaissance Sculpture (1970); Donatello:
an Introduction (1994); Giambologna,
the Complete Sculpture (1987); Bernini, Genius of the Baroque
(1997/2006); and A School of Dolphins (2009). He is currently preparing The
Distinguish’d Elephant – a wide-ranging study of
the animals that have been brought to Europe. and the ideas and imagery that they evoked in the minds of
artists.
E-mail: [email protected]
______________
Elephants under the
Rising Sun
Martha Chaiklin [Historian] [Sound
recording]
ABSTRACT:
Japan
has a long and complicated history with elephants. Humans and proboscidea co-existed only briefly but pachyderms have
left a large footprint on the history of Japan. From food to medicine
to personal ornamentation, a relationship with elephants impacted the lives of
all segments of society. This paper will trace the importance of elephants to
Edo period (1603-1868) Japan
when Japan
was theoretically “closed” to the outside world and when its citizens were
forbidden from travelling abroad. During the Edo period commercial arrangements
with the Dutch East India Company and the later involvement of Chinese traders
brought ivory to Japan
in larger quantities than ever before. Over the the
same period, live elephants were brought to Japan, which combined with ideas
and beliefs imported from the Asian continent populated the Japanese mental
landscape with elephants. East India Company documents will be supplemented by
primary source and visual documents to show how elephants connected a
geographically and politically isolated Japan to a much wider world.
CV:
Martha Chaiklin received her PhD at Leiden University.
She specialises in material culture, the East India Companies, and Edo and
Meiji Japan.
She authored Ivory and the Aesthetics of Modernity in Meiji Japan
(2014) and Cultural Commerce and Dutch Commercial Culture: The Impact of European Material Culture on Japan (2003)
as well as numerous shorter works, only one of which is on elephants: “Elephants
in the Making of Early Modern India” in Pius Malekandathil,
ed. The Indian Ocean in the Making of Early Modern India (2016).
She is currently working on a book on ivory in the early modern world.
E-mail: [email protected]
______________
Elephants in Mongol
history: from military obstacles to symbols of Buddhist power
William G. Clarence-Smith [SOAS,
University of London] [Sound
recording]
ABSTRACT: Elephants emerged in Mongol
history as potential barriers to military expansion from the thirteenth century
CE. Historians are divided in their appreciations as to how effective hostile elephantries were in slowing or halting the Mongol military
machine, partly because of major regional differences. Elephants were few and
far between in Inner Asia and the Middle East, whereas they were numerous in South Asia and Mainland Southeast Asia, where they may
have been effective against the Mongols in the long term. The Mongols
themselves at first made little use of elephants, but they slowly came to
appreciate them more as they adopted aspects of the cultures of conquered
areas. From the late sixteenth century CE, the Mongol heartlands went over to
Tibetan Buddhism, for which the elephant was a symbol of religious and
political potency.
CV: William
Gervase Clarence-Smith is Professor of the Economic
History of Asia and Africa at SOAS University of London, and edits the Journal of
Global History (Cambridge University Press). He has published on the
history of equids, camels, elephants, and bovids in various parts of the world, and is currently
researching a global history of mules.
E-mail: [email protected]
______________
Elephants in the Illustrated
London News, with a postscript on elephants in Afghanistan
Shah Mahmoud
Hanifi [James Madison University, USA] [Sound
recording]
ABSTRACT:
This
presentation will begin with a brief update to Hanifi’s
Elephants in Afghanistan
paper that appears as part of the Bangalore
conference proceedings. The updates involve an important correction about the
last “Afghan” elephant that led to information about the history of the Kabul Zoo
and Kabul University
which now figure into a larger history of intellectual exchange between Afghanistan and
the outside world. The body of the talk uses an image of an elephant battery in
the second Anglo-Afghan war to locate the Illustrated London News (ILN) as a vast repository of elephant images and
information from a variety of imperial locations and in a variety of military,
commercial, ritual and natural contexts. The ILN
was a primary vehicle for the circulation of imperial data in and far beyond
the metropole of London, but the publication had a
particularly important impact on popular culture in the imperial capital city.
The ILN helped generate an elephant
consciousness that historically merged into mammological
sciences, which in turn assumed institutional articulation in various locations
including the Zoological Society of London (ZSL)
where the new Whipsnade Zoo Centre for Elephant Care
(CEC) was ritually opened by the Queen in 2017.
CV: Shah Mahmoud Hanifi is Professor of Middle Eastern and South Asian
History at James Madison University.
He is the author of Connecting Histories in Afghanistan (Stanford
University Press, 2011), editor of Mountstuart
Elphinstone in South Asia (Hurst/Oxford
University Press, 2019), and he has published a number of essays on the
history, culture and politics of Afghanistan.
http://www.jmu.edu/history/people/all-people/Hanifi.shtml
E-mail: [email protected]
______________
Scaffolding the
elephant: becoming domestic and living by the norms of the human world
Paul G. Keil
[Czech Academy of Sciences, Institute
of Ethnology] [Sound recording]
ABSTRACT:
Historically, elephants have been caught from the forest and trained into
working relationships, becoming skilled in communicating with mahouts,
conducting tasks, and living in a human-governed environment. By this process
they are socially transformed, from the status of a “wild” animal to a
“domestic” one. This paper will analyse how this status is performed with the
complementary support of their human handler, who serves as a form of
“cognitive scaffolding”. The mahout can integrate knowledge
and cognitive skills that the elephant does not have access to and are
necessary to the completion of shared tasks. Conducting labour, the actions of
the two individuals are coordinated and interdependent, constituting an
integrated, interspecies mahout-elephant team. This scaffolding role extends to
everyday contexts. Ethnographic examples demonstrate how the human augments the
nonhuman to acceptably live by the anthropocentric norms of society, whether
that is navigating space, respecting social boundaries, performing as a god, or
recognising symbolic aspects of the environment. By successfully coordinating
as part of an interspecies team the elephant becomes and maintains its domestic
status.
CV: Paul Keil is a postdoctoral researcher
at the Institute
of Ethnology, Czech
Academy of Sciences and part of the Bewildering Boars project: a team of
anthropologists conducting research on human and wild pig relationships. Keil received his PhD from the Department of Anthropology, Macquarie University
for a thesis on human-elephant relations in northeast India. He
maintains an Honorary Postdoctoral Fellow position at the university.
E-mail: [email protected]
______________
Humans, elephants and
plants in Laos
Nicolas
Lainé [IRASEC, Bangkok] [Sound recording]
ABSTRACT: My paper will report the
first results of a research project investigating the links between animal
self-medication and local pharmacopoeia. It is based on a field survey in Laos aimed at
studying the medical knowledge possessed by mahouts, viewed within the
perspective of self-medication practices observed among pachyderms. Considered
as objects and research subjects, located at the interface between humans and
plants, elephants are not considered as a source of diseases, but potentially
as holders and producers of knowledge shared with humans. Such an approach and its
results stress the importance of the interweaving of ecological and social systems.
CV:
Nicolas Lainé holds a PhD in Ethnology from Paris West
University (2014). He is
a research affiliate at the Laboratoire d’anthropologie sociale (Paris), and a postdoctoral associate at IRASEC, Bangkok
(2018-2020). Specialising in human-animal relations, his research sits at the
crossroads of the anthropology of nature and conservation. He teaches ‘Ethnozoology’ and ‘Ethnoscience approaches: from natural to supernatural
environments’ at the University
of Strasbourg. He is also
currently a member of the International Multidisciplinary Thematic Network
"Biodiversity, Health and Societies in Southeast Asia, Thailand
supported by CNRS, InEE
(National Institute of Ecology and Environment, France), and serves as an
expert member of the IUCN SSC
Asian Elephant Specialist Group.
E-mail: [email protected]
______________
The
politics of negotiating human/elephant terrain. How elephants and humans
adapt to each other in tight spaces
Elizabeth Oriel
[SOAS, London] and Deepani Jayantha [Elemotion Foundation, Sri Lanka] [Sound recording]
ABSTRACT:
Humans and elephants living in densely human-settled spaces
require challenging multispecies negotiation skills, knowledge, sensitivities,
and highly attuned perceptual abilities amidst high tensions and conflict.
Farmers and elephants adjust to one another with certain spatial and temporal
adaptations in lifestyles, and farmers report beliefs, knowledge, and certain
inner states, such as tolerance, submission, and resistance related to sharing
space. In certain villages in Sri
Lanka, Asian elephants move through farmers’
fields daily during certain seasons causing huge economic losses due to
crop damage. Our
fieldwork site is a village between two protected areas and adjacent to a
wildlife corridor in south eastern Sri Lanka.
Elephants
follow historic movement patterns in this region, despite enormous land use
changes due to various irrigation development schemes. Farmers’ knowledge of
elephant behavior emerges from felt experience,
distinct from scientists’ studies, and often more nuanced. For example, one
farmer reported that elephants distinguish between human voices coming from a
radio and human voices coming from inside a house. This correlates with
research findings that remote, automated systems or structural barriers to
exclude elephants, such as lights and fencing are not as effective as human presence
with crop guarding and watch huts. Elephants learn quickly, adapt and outwit
systems and barriers.
Human-elephant interaction proves the best negotiating tactic in
territorial conflicts. In the face of anthropogenic climate disruption,
farmers’ biocultural skills at coexisting with
elephants will take on new status and become the new politics, as human
societies’ structures meet the pressures of an unstable and warming climate. We
present our preliminary research findings on human and elephant adaptation
patterns, knowledge of the other, and skills that allow for a tense
cohabitation.
E-mail: [email protected]
[email protected]
______________
Cultural syncretism in Hispanic-Philippine
ivories
Ana
Ruiz Gutiérrez [University Of Granada] [Sound recording]
ABSTRACT:
As part of the commemorations in 2019 of the quincentenary of the first circumnavigation of the globe
under Magellan and Elcano, which stimulated a global
traffic in goods, persons, etc, it is necessary to think about the cultural
impact on both sides of the Pacific of these maritime routes, and their complementary
terrestrial routes. This study considers goods arriving from Asia in Acapulco on the Manila
Galleon between the late sixteenth and the early nineteenth century. The
galleons carried a full range of oriental products: ivories, screens, Japanese
lacquers, fans, porcelain, Chinese silks, furniture (chairs, chests), and
Philippine raw materials, such as the cinnamon of Mindanao.
The focus here is on Hispanic-Philippine ivory
sculptures, one of the most important artistic expressions brought to the Americas by the “Nao
de China”, through an analysis of collections in Spain,
Mexico, and the Philippines.
CV: Ana Ruiz Gutiérrez, is Professor in
the Department of History of Art, University
of Granada. Her research career
is linked to these main lines of research: artistic relations between Spain and the Philippines
(XVI-XX) through the route of the Manila Galleon; historical-artistic heritage
and cultural relations between Andalusia and the Americas. Emerging research lines
are Hispanic Philippine ivory sculpture, art routes (sea and land routes)
between Europe and Asia, and Asian slavery.
Most recent specialized
publication: The Galleon of Manila, 1565-1815: Cultural Exchange. Granada: Alhulia; University of Granada, 2016.
E-mail: [email protected]
______________
Elephant hunting and
poaching in Botswana
Keith Somerville [University of Kent] [Sound
recording]
ABSTRACT: Botswana is home to the largest population of elephants
in the world and is a safe haven for the 204-260,000 elephants in the wider Kavango-Zambezi Transfrontier
region spanning Botswana, Namibia, Angola,
Zambia and Zimbabwe. It
suffers environmental degradation and serious human wildlife conflict
(resulting in deaths of people and loss of crops). From independence in 1966 to
2014 it had a conservation system mixing national parks, photographic
safari areas and hunting concessions. This protected wildlife while bringing
revenue for people to compensate for losses to wildlife, and to
provide income, funds for schools, clinics and water pumps for communities
living alongside wildlife. Elephant numbers rocketed from 50,000 in 1990 to
between 130,0000-160,000 in 2014.
The 2014
hunting ban, introduced by President Ian Khama, urged
by anti-hunting lobbyists in Botswana
some of whom were Khama's tourism business
partners, did not work. Local communities were impoverished, elephants
expanded their range in Botswana
into farming areas and human-elephant conflict became serious. At the same time poaching increased, as local people helped foreign
poachers. Now the ban has been lifted and hunting – with a quota of
400 elephants a year – will resume, amid huge controversy.
CV: Keith
Somerville is a member of the Durrell Institute of Conservation and Ecology, University of Kent. In January 2019, he was appointed
as a member of the IUCN (International Union for the
Conservation of Nature) Specialist Group on Sustainable Livelihoods.
He is also a fellow of the Zoological Society of London and is a Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of Commonwealth
Studies, University
of London. A former news
programme editor and head of news training for the BBC World Service,
he now researches media coverage of wildlife and conservation issues, the
uses and abuses of propaganda and political, social and economic aspects of
human-wildlife conflict. His last book – Ivory.
Power and Poaching in Africa (copies
will be available at conference) – was published in December 2016 and his next
book, on human lion coexistence and conflict, is published in July.
E-mail: [email protected]
______________
Conference chair: William Clarence-Smith [SOAS]
Conference organiser: Ed Emery [SOAS]
Website for the 2016 SOAS Elephant Conference
in Bangalore:
https://www.soas.ac.uk/elephant-conference-2016/
Facebook page:
www.facebook.com/pages/category/Community/Soas-Elephant-Conference-498958913596711/
Note:
For reasons of
storage capacity, some of the sound files have been shortened. Full versions of
the recordings are available upon request.
______________
Last updated :: 19 July 2020