Circulating Elephants: Unpacking the Geographies of a Cosmopolitan Animal
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Circulating elephants: unpacking the geographies of a cosmopolitan animal Maan Barua Cosmopolitanism has emerged as an important concept in geography and the social sciences. The rise of mobility, circulation and transnational networks has been paralleled by academic scholarship on un-parochial others: diasporas, travellers and itinerant social groups. However, the role of nonhumans as participants in and subjects of cosmopolitanism has received scant attention. This paper seeks to develop a ‘more-than-human’ cosmopolitanism that accounts for the presence of nonhuman animals and entities in stories of circulation and contact. Through a multi-sited ethnography of elephant conservation in India and the UK, the paper illustrates how animals become participants in forging connections across difference. Through their circulation, elephants become cosmopolitan, present in diverse cultures and serving banal global consumption. The paper then illustrates how cosmopolitan elephants may be coercive, giving rise to political frictions and new inequalities when mobilised by powerful, transnational environmental actors. It concludes by discussing the methodological and conceptual implications of a more-than-human cosmopolitanism. Key words Asian elephant; conservation; cosmopolitan; cultural geography; India; more-than-human geography School of Geography and the Environment, University of Oxford, Oxford OX1 3QY Email: [email protected] Revised manuscript received 9 August 2013 — Elephants are contagious Paul Eluard (Peret et al. 2004, 173) these disputes, Beck stresses the need to distinguish cosmopolitanism as a credo from cosmopolitanism as a Introduction process of trans-territorial transformation of the social In a provocative response to Ulrich Beck’s cosmopol- (Beck 2004). Beck provides four examples: the rise of itan approach to handling otherness in times of global an interconnected global public arena resulting from interdependency, Bruno Latour argued that framing side effects of modernisation, a ‘postnational politics’ the cosmos in an exclusively human club was restrictive driven by such novel configurations, a globalisation of because it limited the number of bodies at the inequality as a consequence of entangled national and negotiating table and failed to embrace ‘the vast transnational processes, and finally a ‘banal cosmopol- number of nonhuman entities making humans act’ itanism’ based around cultures of consuming global (Latour 2004, 454). Since this iteration, there has been products and images. These concerns have appealed to a substantial body of work in geography that brings geographical sensibility. Scholars have examined how nonhumans to the table. Scholars have examined how a socio-cultural conditions of cosmopolitanism transform retinue of organisms, things, materials and forces the ways in which the world is inhabited (Jeffrey and influence ‘social’ outcomes and co-produce hybrid McFarlane 2008; Szerszynksi and Urry 2006), and have geographies (Braun and Whatmore 2010; Hinchliffe addressed the ethico-political concerns that arise when et al. 2005; Lorimer 2006). They interrogate the ways in engaging with radical alterity outside Eurocentric which knowledge, skill and expertise cut across human– universalising values and human normativity (Jazeel nonhuman divides (Bear and Eden 2011; Lorimer 2011). However, barring nascent work on the spread of 2008), and have called for a relational ethics and less desired global mobiles (Braun 2007; Clark 2002), politics that is open to nonhuman difference and the this scholarship largely operates through a humanist recalcitrance of life (Bennett 2010; Haraway 2007). lens. The state, corporate interest or political parties What is less explicitly addressed is the notion of remain the prominent actors (Edwards 2008; McFar- cosmopolitanism, how it might be a ‘more-than-human’ lane 2008; Strang 2008), humans largely constitute who endeavour, critical to global interdependency. or what is the other (Jazeel 2011). All that is nonhuman There are a number of cosmopolitanisms on record, melts into thin air. ranging from being a moral philosophy to a method- In this paper, I examine the role of nonhumans as ological approach in the social sciences.1 Undercutting participants in, and subjects of, cosmopolitanism. The information, practices and views in this article are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the opinion of the Royal Geographical Society (with IBG). ISSN 0020-2754 Citation: 2013 doi: 10.1111/tran.12047 © 2013 Royal Geographical Society (with the Institute of British Geographers) 2 Maan Barua While embracing Beck’s enterprise of examining global them together to constitute new connections. These interconnection, consumption and the constitution of connections may be productive or coercive, not dissim- new inequalities, bringing nonhumans into this project ilar to how cosmopolitanisms operate in human con- links to Isabelle Stengers’ concept of cosmopolitics texts (Beck 2004). (Latour 2004; Stengers 2011). In contrast to Beck, Methodologically, this research draws from a multi- Stengers intends her use of cosmopolitics to resist sited ethnography of elephant conservation in India and politics from meaning give-and-take in an exclusive the UK that traces how elephants circulate and forge human club. She opposes restricting the set of entities connections across difference (Marcus 1995). The jour- that are granted entry into the cosmos. Consequently, ney is through three spatially and temporally disparate what it means to belong or to pertain is opened up to events, connected by their shared history and conserva- relations between heterogeneous ways of being. Here, tion purpose. It starts by reanimating the travels of an human practices are crafted ‘in the presence of’ others elephant and her English companion Mark Shand (Stengers 2005a), the things, technologies or organisms through India in the early 1990s to open up postcolonial to whom people submit, are allured by and without histories of human–elephant encounters and the cos- whom they would be unable to achieve pathways or mopolitical sensibilities to which they give rise. This was goals (Stengers 2005b). In purview of this posthumanist through a close reading of a travelogue about the argument, this paper focuses on three interrelated journey, supplemented by interviews with Shand and an questions that offer up potential for developing a examination of visual material of their travels. The ‘more-than-human’ cosmopolitanism. First, do nonhu- second concerns a public art and conservation event in man entities and animals play a role in forging global London organised by a UK-based elephant conservation connections across difference? If so, are animals charity set up by Shand following his India journey. The themselves reconfigured as cosmopolitan, present the event deployed aesthetic representations of elephants to world-over and not just ‘out there’ in the beastly places raise funds for elephant corridors and to generate public traditionally assigned to them (Hinchliffe et al. 2005; support and patronage for conservation. Its objective Jalais 2008)? Cosmopolitanisms are themselves inher- was to understand how elephants draw diverse actors ently political, moulding modes of contemporary envi- into assemblages of conservation. Research involved ronmental governance connected across differential participant observation through volunteering, interviews fields of power. This leads to the third question: what with sponsors, artists, NGO partners and charity staff, as practices and politics of representing nature are such well as joining a group of the London public who had animals used to promote? Whom do they benefit and come together to follow the event.3 The third constituent what do they edit out? of this multi-sited ethnography was to follow Western To address these questions, I turn to practices of configurations of the elephant back to India.4 It sought elephant conservation in India and the UK. The Asian to trace the trajectories through which elephants circu- elephant provides a specific but compelling opportunity late and the connections they forge. Here, elephants for a ‘more-than-human’ analysis of cosmopolitanism.2 ‘return’ in the form of ‘transportable packages’ (Fujim- Elephants, as Whatmore and Thorne in their ground- ura 1992), combining conservation theory, monetary breaking work on wildlife and mobility observe, are capital and GIS-based cartographies to secure wildlife creatures so long caught up in social networks of trade corridors. Travelling the routes prised open by this flow, and transport, ceremony and entertainment, that traces the paper interrogates how elephants are entangled in, of their presence ‘litter the histories and geographies of and constitute, cosmopolitan differences of interest, civilizations and everyday lives’ (2000, 187). Their fields of responsibility and modes of knowledge (Szers- popularity in both Asia and the West allow elephants to zynksi and Urry 2002). be mobilised in the form of flagship species to conserve wildlife habitat and generate public support for con- Travelling with elephants servation (Barua et al. 2010). The creature is a conduit for connectivity: spatially by enabling landscape link- Travel, circulation and contact with itinerant others are ages via elephant corridors, and socially by knitting markers of cosmopolitanism. They forge novel connec- together diverse and far-flung epistemic communities tions, foster sensitivity to difference