ABSTRACT
What does it mean to understand animals as historical subjects or historical actors? In this essay, I explore ways of considering China’s wild elephants as historical actors. For centuries, historical accounts gave little notice to animals, and if animals were included, they tended to exist as a side note, not as a central concern. In histories of North American colonization, for example, we learn of the beaver’s critical importance for international trade or the extermination of buffalo. We tend to learn little about animals as beings other than their near extinction. During the 1980s, however, environmental historians began to seriously
include animals in their accounts, with path-breaking books including William Cronon’s Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England (1983); Alfred Crosby’s Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900-1900 (1986); and Harriet Ritvo’s Animal Estate: The English and Other Creatures in the Victorian Age (1987). Since that time, scholars in different fields, including literature, geography, sociology, and my own field of anthropology, have shown interest in the lives of animals (Calarco 2008; Lorimer and Srinivasan 2013; Wilkie 2013). We are asking new questions, including about the issue of nonhuman agency, yet there is more contention over this term than some scholars realize. At a 2014 conference at the University of California at Santa Cruz, entitled “Anthropocene: Arts of living on a damaged planet,” William Cronon suggested that while animals could be actors in history, they could not be agents. For many members of the audience, this was a surprising statement, for Cronon’s own work seemed to contradict this claim. This leads to larger questions about exploring our understandings of nonhuman agency. Do our differing notions of agency shape the kinds of environmental historical projects we undertake and craft? My training in anthropology taught me that agency was only applicable to
human beings; in a discipline interested in human lives, nonhuman animals were often viewed through a materialist or symbolic perspective. For the materialists, animals often mattered only to the degree they affected human lives, and symbolic anthropologists primarily looked at the roles animals played in language and myth (Leach 1964; Lévi-Strauss 1963). My training spanned both materialist and humanist perspectives. During my fieldwork in Southwest China,
however, I found myself increasingly curious about elephants, including their material effect in the larger natural landscape, their symbolic role in generating and shaping international conservation efforts, and the ways their presence shaped the lives of those who shared the same land. Yet, this interest in elephants was neither part of my original research design, nor present in my initial papers. It was only years later, after telling stories about the co-existence of elephants and villagers, and in noticing my own excitement and that of my peers in talking about this, that I began to consider how elephants could be central characters in research narratives. Villagers introduced me to the notion of elephants as historical actors. By this
term, I mean something more than just the fact that elephants play a role in shaping human history. My extension is twofold: first I assert that elephants shape the larger landscape in ways that humans don’t necessarily understand or notice. Recognizing this can help us imagine a history in which humans are not always at the center, where change is not only understood in relationship to human lives.1 Although we have some non-anthropocentric accounts of history, these tend to be in epochal terms, over tens of thousands of years, if not more. Second, and this is a more radical claim, I assert that elephants themselves, in their ways of being and in their behaviors, are changing, not only through the long durée, but also in historical time. We know, for example, by watching movies or reading books written fifty years ago, that people’s sensibilities are changing, but it is much less widely appreciated that other animals, too, might also be changing. Even those animals most intimately associated with humans, such as dogs or cats, are not often seen as dynamic. Though new breeds may come into being or new sports such as agility training demonstrate novel physical capacities, few people seem to talk of the German shepherd of the 1950s compared to the German shepherd of the 1980s. During my fieldwork in China, however, this is precisely what I encountered: villagers talked about how elephants behaved during the time of Mao Zedong (leader from 1949-1976), Deng Xiaoping (19781992), and Jiang Zemin (1993-2003). Such statements were surprising to me, as I expected elephants, like other nonhumans, to be mainly instinctual. I assumed that changes in their behavior would only happen over the long term, beyond humans’ capacity to observe or comprehend. Villagers didn’t expect all Asian elephants to change in the ways they describe, but saw elephants as historically influential and historically influenced in ways that were new to me. In this chapter, I explore what it might mean to view elephants as historical actors and to write accounts of their lives.
