 OK, thank you very much. As it is a privilege and a pleasure to be here today, I'm going to be giving a largely conceptual paper. So forgive me if I leave you a little bit hungry for more ethnographic and historical detail to substantiate my thesis. But let me introduce you to what I want to talk to you about today. So here we've got the Royal Jew to our national park, the lower portion of the park known as the Terai. There we have the Corsair Elephant Breeding Center. So it's on the edge of the Chitwan National Park, lowland Terai of Nepal. It's situated between very distinct spaces reserved for the activity of humans and wildlife. We're dealing with this idea of lines and demarcation zones of human development, zones of animal biodiversity conservation, this world of fences and lands. Now it's this part of a central node of a network of elephant stables, or Hattisar, that's managed under the authority of the Department of National Parks and Wildlife Conservation, the DNPWC. So Corsair is the elephant breeding center is the place where pregnant female elephants are brought to give birth. It's where they're young, are trained for working life. Because we're dealing here with a country that has virtually exhausted its population of free roaming elephants, big trade in it during the 19th century. It's no longer available to replenish its sources from the wild. So the thing is it needs to use elephants for the management of its protected areas, for army patrolling the border, patrolling for poachers, for facilitating biodiversity conservation with search, and more. So there's no longer the wild population available in sufficient quantity for sustainable capture from the wild. Key point, no longer in sufficient quantity. And furthermore, this enables Nepal to do so without resorting to trade and exchange with foreign countries, which as we heard yesterday is legally problematic. And in this case, it's legally problematic for a country that is a signatory to the convention on the trade and endangered species, Citi, since 1976. So regarding this issue, which cropped up on the first day, I'd like to note that it is a very different story for the private elephants. I'm talking about a government elephant stable. But there's a whole world of private elephant stables servicing the community forests where tourists come for their elephant safaris to see rhino. There it's different. Some hotels, they maintain their own stables of elephants and elephant handlers. Others bring in their elephants by leases. And while I was there during my research, I did hear these stories about bending the rules. As Silberoto Agoche was telling us about in his presentation about Sonapur. So historically, captive elephant management in Nepal was the preserve of the taro. An ethnic group indigenous to the Tarai, operating under royal authority in the inhospitably malarial jungle lowlands, no longer the case since the USA anti-malarial program in the mid 20th century. The taro played a crucial role, capturing, taming, and caring for elephants. So these were the people that were indigenous to this malarial lowland. In fact, this was a place full of ghosts. There's a funny reason why it was full of ghosts. They needed Brahmins to perform their funerary rites. But Brahmins would only come down in winter. So if you died in summer, you had to wait to winter before your departed ones' funerary rites could be performed. Consequently, this was a place full of ghosts. So the taro played a crucial role, as I say, capturing, taming, and caring for elephants. And these were used as trading commodities, as objects of tributary fealty, as symbols of political power, as vehicles for royal hunts, which obviously brings us to some of the concepts that Jonathan introduced us to. We are dealing with lively commodities, with encounter value. However, we also have to add in the fact these were lively commodities that were also treated with ritual veneration and respect for their behavioral individuality. So it's this tradition of occupational expertise and its associated ritual practices that continues to inform the culture of the contemporary elephant stable as a kind of adjunct institution of the DNPWC in the modern era of the national park. What was once a hunting reserve is now a national park. Instead of shooting animals, we shoot them no longer with guns, but with cabinets, just as Thomas Tram was talking about. And as I learned during field work at Corsor, it was some of the serving senior handlers themselves who had adapted this very longstanding tradition of capturing adult elephants from the wild. They adapted this for the training of a new regime for juvenile captive-born elephants, typically separated from their mothers at the age of three. And incidentally, I have to mention this. In 2008, an elephant called Davy Carly gave birth to twin male elephants, two boys, Rangaj and Lakshman Carly, Lakshman Raj. And what was interesting about this is they both survived. And I understand it's quite unusual for twin elephants to survive. And upon my return to Corsor in 2011, they were ready for their training. Now, during my field work as a doctoral student, I witnessed and participated in training of two juvenile elephants on two occasions. And at this time, I realized that elephant training had to be understood as more than just a sequence of practical procedures for imparting obedience, for understanding, and interspecies cooperation. Because training was also highly ritualized as an intensely social event, enrolling human and elephant members of the Hatterzal community, both human and elephant. And there's these intense ritual practices, and they caught my attention. And these ritual practices marked phases of separation, and then anality, that's this kind of awkward in between state, and reintegration. So this immediately reminded me as like, this resembles what my anthropological education has taught me or inclined me to recognize as a rite of passage. This was significantly theorized by Ahol van Genep in the early 20th century, later on in the 1960s by Victor Turner, and then in the 1990s by Morris Block. To ensure it typically involves a ritually marked separation from ordinary social life by which subjects sacrifice their autonomy, entering a temporary phase governed by non-ordinary expectations, and undergoing ordeals which serve to dramatize and affect some kind of transformation, usually by reference to transcendental powers, resulting in changes in social status, social responsibilities, and social practices. However, unlike other ethnographically documented cases of ritual initiation, this was not only a transformative process for the acquisition of new skills, capabilities, and to change status under divine sanction, but this was a case that involved both a human and then non-human partner. So I'm claiming then that the concept of rite of passage has applicability for elephants as well as humans. Now, that has radical implications, I think, and I think it forces us to revisit what I call the ontological starting points and the disciplinary subject positions that determine how one frames and studies human-elephant relations. Let me explain. So as a practitioner of a discipline, traditionally focused on one half of the opposition between humans and animals and nature and culture, I was only really trained to investigate the human condition and to do so in analytic isolation from the natural world that we live in populated by myriad life forms. So as a social anthropologist, I expected to study captive elephant management in a way that would make elephants ancillary to humans, that would make them external to human sociality as merely animate objects because I thought I was going to study the expert practice and occupational cultures of Mahoose, which I did, but I thought I was going to do so in a way that would treat the social and ecological agency of elephants as separate and secondary. And I was aware that my disciplinary expertise was limited regarding the science of elephant behavior and ecology. I did start reading some of it, but I realized I could have done with a lot more. So the social world of interspecies relations that I encountered confounded these convenient delimitations of the human from the animal. And these are very important delimitations because they're represented in the kind of disciplinary boundaries that are institutionalized in the structures of modern universities. And it also suggested to me the potential benefits of greater expertise in animal behavior and ecology, even if I have to add in this context, they suffer from their own limits of a rather zoo centric rather than anthropocentric kind. And these limits become significant when one evaluates the strengths and weaknesses of natural scientists and social scientists who are exploring issues of conflict and coexistence often in their own ways as experts on either one species or the other. And it's never quite adequate. We're always a little bit frustrated. And I think these limiting perspectives are also implicated in a kind of reticence of social and natural scientists to engage in collaborative exchange. It does happen, but it's not easy. And people often misunderstand each other. They talk past each other, I find. Indeed, I was in a department of anthropologists and biodiversity conservationists. And I was disappointed that I was not observing any synergistic relations developing. There was two cultures of practice. So I was yet to fully appreciate this during fieldwork, but nonetheless, it proved impossible for me to develop an ethnographic analysis that would restrict elephants to mere moving bodies subject to human purposes. In other words, to disregard them as subjective actors, actors with whom humans develop meaningful, affective, as well as merely instrumental relations. So this is a perspective that requires taking both kinds of sentient entity, seriously, their agency, their behavioral dispositions, their constitutive biographies, and their deep entanglement with human lives and projects made it so much more complex. And it demanded that they be fully incorporated as social actors. Furthermore, it became evident that elephants represented world-making partners. We've heard about them as ecosystem engineers. I think we can add more to that, not just ecosystem engineers, but world makers. And they do so making worlds with us and through us, generating, in my case, the life ways of the Hadesar. And I say so not just of thinking about the Hadesar as a configuration of actions and interactions in socially and materially constructed space, but also, and this is crucial because we know that ecologists have one concept of community, perfectly valid, but when a sociologist talks about community, there's a little bit of a difference. So for me, it wasn't just interactions, it was also about cross-cutting moral responsibilities. And here, then, was what Dominique Lestel has termed a hybrid community, comprising social relations, not just among species, but also between them, and involving social integration and shared obligation. So despite differing bodily qualities, differing sensorial capacities, differing modes of community interaction, humans and elephants live together in ways involving shared meanings and shared effects, even if differently apprehended. And here I should mention that it was this recognition that humans and elephants are mutually implicated in configuring shared lives in shared environments through intersecting social and environmental activity that led me to develop a framework for an integrated approach to the generative relations of impact and encounter between humans and elephants that I have called ethno-elephantology. And I hope that you won't treat it merely as just another neologism. I think there is a legitimate reason for this. Now, I was inspired by the anthropology of culture and historically variable human-primate interactions, which is known as ethno-primatology, and this combines ethnography with primatology. In other words, a social science practice with a natural science practice. And this approach aims for simultaneously social, historical, and ecological forms of analysis focused on the direct and indirect relations between humans, elephants, and environments across space and through time. So this concern with integrating perspectives traditionally associated with discrete disciplines from across the spectrum of the humanities, the social sciences, and the natural sciences motivated a symposium, not unlike this one in fact, that I convened at the University of Canterbury in 2013. And this has led to a book, which I've already been ruthlessly advertising. Forgive me, I'm excited about this. I cannot resist mentioning it. It's called Conflict Negotiation and Coexistence, Rethinking Human-Elephant Relations in South Asia. And it features contributions from anthropologists, biologists, ecologists, geographers, historians, political scientists, and Sanskritists. And as such, it represents, I think, an attempt to establish the interdisciplinary dialogue necessary for developing an integrated approach to human-elephant relations. And I should mention, there are several people in this room who have contributed to this book. And I am very grateful to them. Working with them has been a great pleasure. I hope then that this book will help to inspire more multidisciplinary cooperation. I would really like to see a world where ecologists and biologists and social scientists are working together to deal with the issues of human-elephant relations, with which so many of us are concerned, the problems of captive elephants, the problems of human-elephant conflict, and so on. So then, it's been a bit convoluted, I know. I've reached a point then at which I can connect to the agenda of ethno-elephantology and this idea of the hybrid community, this idea of the hattizar as a place where social life is generated through and between species. I can now connect that to my argument for elephant training as an inter-species right of passage, a right of passage not just for humans, but also for elephants. Now, unfortunately, as I say, the constraints of brevity forced me to give primacy to the argument I wish to make at the expense of detailed discussion of anthropological theories of right of passage. So I don't have time to tell you too much about that. And also, I'm afraid I don't have time to tell you a great deal about the detailed ethnographic description of the phenomena with which I'm concerned. I'll give you a few tidbits. I want to give you a sense of what's involved, but I can't tell you as much as I would like, so forgive me. Let us begin with a quote from an informant that indicates the revolt role of divine sanction in ritually configuring the practice of elephant training. This is Satya Narayan with young Paris gauge named after the then crown prince of Nepal. And Satya Narayan, this is a quote from Satya Narayan. He said, we respect the God, the elephant as a God, like we respect the God Ganesha. So we bow to them as we would the God Ganesha. Only then do we ride them. We think we are riding you as an elephant, but we know you are a God. So we bow to them because we have to respect them as gods. That's why for training, we have to do kamari puja. And that's nothing to do with the kamari of the young virgin girl in Kathmandu. This is the kamari, which is the special post for training the elephant, which must be ritually sanctified. He goes on, so that our elephant can succeed, we must pray to the gods and goddesses that the training goes well. We perform rituals in the hope that the elephant does well, doesn't get hurt and that the elephant learns to walk well. So, three points need to be made here. Firstly, I contend that the ritual dimension of elephant training should not be analyzed apart from the practical procedures. They have to be put together. We can't just treat the ritual as mere cultural ornamentation for an assemblage of instrumentally purposeful practices. Since here we find action, belief and understanding, they're so thoroughly intertwined that to separate meaning from behavior would produce a very disarticulated and partial analysis. So, conceiving of elephants as divine, not just animal beings, has significance, not only for the conduct of the petitioning rituals of appeasement that Satya Narayan alludes to, but also for attitudes of engagement with elephants in all aspects of the training process, which also includes daily driving sessions roped up to training elephants, as well as communal evening sessions of desensitization and familiarization during which Mahoots rub, touch, and sing songs to the elephant, as well as wheels, torches, or fire. And I do have to mention, I was talking to some people yesterday about this. This idea of the elephant as the animal and as a person and as a god, I think it represents a sense by which the Mahoots are trying to navigate the ambivalence of the fact, an animal they respect, but an animal they subjugate, and an animal that they can also treat as a friend and companion. So there's a lot going on, and I think they try and negotiate this through these different modes of relationship, talking about their elephants in different ways and different times, and emphasizing them in different ways. But that's the story of another paper. Second point, though, even though elephants cannot be expected to cognitively participate in the symbolic and semantic communication that's involved in this ritual process of transformation, I don't expect them to know who Bun Davy is the forest goddess to whom we perform our rituals of sacrifice. This does not mean that we should analyze training as if the elephant was exempt from the rite of passage that it represents. And I argue that we treat elephant training as an interspecies rite of passage, not only because it involves the acquisition of new capabilities and a change status for both human and elephant, but also because it is achieved through a process that binds them together as working partners who attune themselves to each other's characteristics. And that is most significant in these daily driving sessions where you can see the elephant roped up to the kunkis, although they don't call them kunkis in Nepal. Both human and elephant are subject to social and spatial separation from their hatties and companions. They have to live apart from their human and elephant others. For finite satchinarine, he says, I have to live in a state of sannyas, temporary asceticism. Both human and elephant are subject to ritual prohibitions. For the human, this means abstinence from meat, from alcohol, from women, from anything impure. And for the elephant, it also means, well, notice, there is no metal here. There's no metal. Most of the elephants, there is metal on the training gear. Now, not everyone performs this, but finite satchinarine was particularly fastidious about this. So there is this idea that there is an impurity to the metal. And you may have noticed in the previous slide how the training roasts themselves are being sanctified in the rituals. So everything is made special. So I have a third point now, dramatic pictures. Thirdly, to assert, I am nearly done, don't worry. To assert that this is an interspecies right of passage that binds human to elephant through a mutually transformative process should not be taken as licensed to disregard the asymmetry of power at play in these rights and procedures. It does involve the principal trainer acquiring practical mastery of the elephant through its submission to his commands. And it is conducted in the context of an institution that appropriates the labor and seeks to secure the obedience of elephants. Handlers perform a type of custodial labor that produces contradictions between veneration and subjugation as well as trusting companionship, as I mentioned, countervailing modes of relation that must be negotiated. In fact, my chapter in our forthcoming book deals with this very topic. In hasty conclusion, then, I contend firstly that an adequate understanding of the Hattisar must recognize the generative role of both humans and elephants as individual actors with particular biographies, particular dispositions and capabilities who shared lives constitute a hybrid or what we might call a more than human moral community. Secondly, I contend that elephant training cannot be adequately treated merely as a practical procedure for fulfilling particular purposes but must also be recognized as a ritual process of separation, liminality and reintegration that results not only in the acquisition of new capabilities and synergistic relations but also in a changed status for both human and elephant. The handler has proven his capability as a trainer. This is significant for his standing among his peers and the elephant has been separated from his mother and tamed to respond to humans prepared for a working life in the national parks of Nepal. Thank you very much.