Organizers
- Ishika Ramakrishna, Centre for Wildlife Studies, Bengaluru, India
- Prof. Anindya Sinha, National Institute of Advanced Studies, India
Speakers
- Prof. Anindya Sinha
National Institute of Advanced Studies, India
Of Human-Macaques and Macaque-Humans: My Collaborative Research with Wild Bonnet Macaques in Southern India
- Ishika Ramakrishna
Centre for Wildlife Studies, Bengaluru, India
Can We Know What a Gibbon Knows? A Multispecies Ethnographic Approach to Investigate Other-than-Human Agency within Co-Constructed Lifeworlds
- Dr. Samira Agnihotri
University of Trans-Disciplinary Health Sciences and Technology, Bengaluru, India
The Darkness of the Evergreen Forest, Or Why Bother about Ethno-Ornithologies?
- Dr. Nishant Srinivasaiah
University of Trans-Disciplinary Health Sciences and Technology, Bengaluru, India
Elephanthood
- Dr. Shweta Shivakumar
Nature Conservation Foundation, India
Vernacular Ethologies of Leopard–Human Encounters
- Prof. Nishant Kumar
Dr B R Ambedkar University Delhi; DBT/Wellcome Trust UK India Alliance Fellow (National Centre for Biological Sciences Bengaluru & University of Oxford); THINKPAWS Sustainability Research Foundation Delhi
Perceptual Worlds: Sensory Shifts Shape Human-Animal Conflicts
Abstract
The lives of nonhumans are typically examined through anthropocentric perspectives, relying heavily on the lived experiences of people and researchers to interpret the behaviours and decisions of other-than-humans. To effectively study nonhuman behaviour and increasingly, human and nonhuman relationships, we should pay closer attention to animal agency and their affectual geographies from a nonhuman rather than a human perspective. In this symposium, we emphasise a series of novel approaches, perspectives, methodologies and academic interpretations that are imperative in contemporary ethno-ethological studies of more-than-humans.
The papers presented in this symposium will shed a light on the collection of innovative inquiries into animal behaviour, using case studies from across India, including work with elephants, racket-tailed drongos and other birds, western hoolock gibbons, different macaque species, sloth bears and leopards. Apart from being unique in their approaches, these studies lay a crucial focus on other-than-human perspectives and explore deep understandings of how and why animals exhibit certain behaviours and make the decisions they do, especially in changing landscapes.
We thus propose a paradigm shift from anthropocentric approaches in the study of nonhuman ecology and behaviour to more nonhuman species-centric perspectives, to learn more about other-than-human individuals as themselves, wherein human biology, behaviour and cognition are no longer employed as gold standards against which all other species are measured.
Through the fascinating insights obtained from the work of the presenters of this symposium, we also argue that although we may never completely comprehend nonhuman perspectives first-hand and uncover the details of their cognitive processes, we must do our best to incorporate their agency and the impacts of their own lived experiences and affect in shaping their worlds while studying their ecologies, behaviours and interactions with people, and in developing management and conservation strategies for their populations and their interactions with human communities in the long term.