provisional-programme-soas-elephant-conference-2019

Programme for the second SOAS ELEPHANT CONFERENCE School of Oriental and African Studies, London [Room B 104] Saturday 22 June 2019 – 10.00am to 6.00pm Open to the general public You are invited to attend the second SOAS Elephant Conference, which will be held at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London on Saturday 22 June 2019 The conference will address all aspects of elephant culture, past, present and future and in all continents It will deal with both material and cultural concerns, and will cover 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] ADMISSION to the conference is open to the general public, and is free However you are asked to register in advance by writing to the conference organiser at this address: ed.emery@soas.ac.uk _ CONFERENCE PAPERS [in alphabetical order of speakers] _ The regal elephant in medieval Cairo Doris Behrens-Abouseif [SOAS, University of London] 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: doris@abouseif.co.uk The elephant and its ivory in the sculpture of Western Europe Charles Avery [Independent researcher] 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: dr.charles.avery@gmail.com Elephants under the Rising Sun Martha Chaiklin [University of Pittsburgh] 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 traveling 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 specializes 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: chaiklin@pitt.edu Elephants in Mongol history: from military obstacles to symbols of Buddhist power William G Clarence-Smith [SOAS, University of London] 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: wc2@soas.ac.uk Elephants in the Illustrated London News, with a postscript on elephants in Afghanistan Shah Mahmoud Hanifi [James Madison University, USA] ABSTRACT: This presentation will begin with a brief update to Hanifi’s Elephants in Afghanistan paper that appears as part of the just released 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 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 an Associate 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) and a number of essays on the history, culture and politics of Afghanistan Hanifi participated in the inaugural SOAS camel conference in 2011 http://www.jmu.edu/history/people/all-people/Hanifi.shtml E-mail: hanifism@gmail.com 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: 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: paul.keil@mq.edu.au Humans, elephants and plants in Laos Nicolas Lainé [IRASEC, Bangkok] 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 humananimal 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: nicoelephant@gmail.com 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: 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: lizzieoriel@gmail.com jayantha.deepani@gmail.com Cultural syncretism in Hispanic-Philippine ivories Ana Ruiz Gutiérrez [University Of Granada] 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: anarg@ugr.es Elephant hunting and poaching in Botswana Keith Somerville [University of Kent] ABSTRACT: [Pending] E-mail: K.Somerville@kent.ac.uk 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-Conference498958913596711/ 30 May 2019