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.


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List of speakers, with abstracts and papers

[in order of principal presenters]

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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]

 

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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]

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List of abstracts

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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]

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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]

 

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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]


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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]

 

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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]

 

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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]

 

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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]

 

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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]

 

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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]

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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]

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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.

 

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Last updated :: 19 July 2020