Cycle de conférences en Anthropologie (CCA) - James SMITH - "The Digital Elephant in the Room"

The Digital Elephant in the Room: The Trouble of Staying with Other People’s Animals in Southern Kenya

Conservation and tourism in southeastern Kenya help to produce elephants who are “more-than-human”, in the sense of often being deemed “more important” than the humans living near the parks.  Building on research in villages bordering Tsavo National Park, the essay shows how residents struggle to live with “digital elephants”—technologically empowered, revenue-generating animals that villagers often end up feeding and taking care of at their own expense.  In Kenya, multispecies relations are also shaped by a history of colonial conservation, from anti-poaching laws to Mau Mau era counter-insurgency; today’s conservation technologies amplify this history.  People describe “godfather” elephants who impose curfews, sabotage “development,” and even “know time” and history, while projecting onto them qualities, capacities, and memories they imagine themselves to have have lost. By foregrounding uneven commodification and the dispossession of humans by already commodified “proxy elephants”, the article contributes to a literature that shifts multispecies anthropology toward an emphasis on commodification and temporality.