Une ethnographie des relations de travail entre hommes et éléphants au sein de la population Khamti, qui vit au nord-est de l'Inde. De la capture de l'animal à sa domestication, cette approche multidisciplinaire montre la dynamique qui se crée entre les humains et les pachydermes, les engagements réciproques qui sont naturellement pris et les modalités bénéfiques pour les deux espèces. ©Electre 2024
Living and working with giants a multispecies ethnography of the Khamti and elephants in Northeast India
This book proposes a multispecies ethnography of human-elephant working relationships in Northeast India, in the local context of the Khamti population. Based on an extended research fieldwork, it analyses not only people's action but also animal involvement in establishing and maintaining trusting relationships at the workplace. Thanks to Nicolas Lainé rich descriptions, the reader can follow the capture of a juvenile forest elephant, and understand its transformation into a village elephant as a reciprocal process. Both cognitive capacities and corporeal capabilities of humans and elephants are taken into consideration, as well as their mutual influences and the representations that arise from the specific contexts of interspecies communication and collaboration. The adopted multidisciplinary approach allows thinking the human-animal working unit in terms of cooperative interaction, and even intersubjective engagement - opening to reflexions on the mutually beneficial modalities of existence of humans and animals in a shared environment.
« Living and Working with Giants is a critical intervention in thinking about the Anthropocene - and I use the term Plantationocene to mark the significance of Lainé's work - for it shows how various forms of forestry and the capture and taming of wildlife were contingent on both human and elephant labour. [...] Tracking surviving modes of elephant capture among the Khamti community in Arunachal Pradesh and adjacent Assam in northeast India, Lainé's scholarship is multispecies ethnography in its best sense. [...] [He] prompts us to rethink the forms of discipline and the subjectivities that colonial and postcolonial regimes produced » (Maan Barua, University of Cambridge).
Paru le : 19/11/2020
Thématique : Ethnologie Asie du Sud-Est et Méridionale
Auteur(s) : Auteur : Nicolas Lainé
Éditeur(s) :
Publications scientifiques du Muséum
Collection(s) : Natures en sociétés
Contributeur(s) : Préfacier : Maan Barua
Série(s) : Non précisé.
ISBN : 978-2-85653-928-6
EAN13 : 9782856539286
Reliure : Broché
Pages : 272
Hauteur: 24.0 cm / Largeur 17.0 cm
Épaisseur: 1.6 cm
Poids: 1000 g
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