Giants of the Monsoon Forest
Page 22
ONE AFTERNOON on the way to one of the hill ranges of central Burma, I passed through Naypyidaw, Burma’s new capital city, built by the military government during the late 2000s and early ’10s. It is the only major urban settlement in Burma far from any waterway. Billions of dollars have gone into the rapid construction of the sprawling new metropolis, and at every turn the place begs comparison with the previous capital, Yangon. While Yangon is forever suffering power outages, Naypyidaw’s bright, tall lights are kept on through the night. Yangon’s streets are full of crowds, food stands, and honking traffic jams of taxis and motorcycles, while Naypyidaw is planned around empty superhighways of absurd width (one is twenty lanes across, with hardly any traffic at all). Yangon’s downtown is arranged on a tightly knit street grid similar to New York’s. With its more sprawling fabric of curvilinear arterials and cul-de-sacs, Naypyidaw’s analogous “model” could be Lake Havasu or Palm Springs.
Naypyidaw is a kind of bubble of gleaming first-world luxury in one of the poorest countries on earth. It hosted the World Economic Forum in June 2013, a few days after I passed through. The metropolis is equipped with high-end supermarkets (unused), sweeping office parks (mostly unused), and an army of landscapers and gardeners to keep the many highway medians looking trim and pristine. Precious little street life was anywhere to be found, except at an unplanned open-air market at the edge of town, used by the capital’s workforce and by the inhabitants of Pyinmana, the district’s preexisting town, which Naypyidaw has swallowed up and annexed. No one I spoke with cares for the new capital city; one person told me curtly, “It’s a sore subject,” and left it at that. Some told me the idea for the new capital came to one of the generals’ astrologers in a dream. Another said that during the run-up to the U.S. invasion of Iraq, the Burmese regime’s leading military officials convinced each other that they were next. Naypyidaw’s position between the Bago Hills and the Karen Hills seemed easier to defend than Yangon, which faces the sea.
Later in my travels, I was in a hotel in Yangon, going through notes and photographs. I considered Naypyidaw’s landscape of vacant superhighways alongside various scenes of transport by elephant: a logging village’s well-trod elephant trails, the elephant convoys of the KIA winding their way through the forest, the elephant ford at the Sissiri River, the “relief” elephants who rescued refugees in the Patkai Mountains in 1942 and who cleared tsunami wreckage in Indonesia in 2005. I considered the elephants I had met in my travels or had come to know from mahouts’ tales or records from history: Air Singh, Neh Ong, Maggie, Rungdot, Sokona, Pak Chan, and many others. Naypyidaw’s planners intend the new capital, more exurb than city, as a vision of a “modern,” newly opened Burma. But in the contrast between landscapes of mobility, the freshly hardened ribbons of asphalt appeared regressive and constricting. The animals and their riders seemed to be carving out unknown frontiers that were otherworldly and everywhere.
Acknowledgments
THIS BOOK WOULD HAVE BEEN IMPOSSIBLE HAD I NOT crossed paths with and received help and advice from dozens of people. Kushal Konwar helped me identify research sites. Ja Seng Mai Lahkyen and Naw Doh graciously provided me with conversational language lessons. Yingkying helped me get to the field, as did Marj Rosenblum. Richard Lair and Khyne U Mar shared their deep knowledge about elephants’ care. Bertil Lintner, the Bisa family, Larry Brown, David Air, Shona Patel, Philippe Gautier, Prajna Chowta, Semh Sumhka, and Ewa Narkiewicz all provided invaluable leads and recollections. My research in Indonesia came together thanks to the help of Wahdi Azmi, Ika Nurhayani, Asri Wijayanti, Chris Stremmer, and Hasbi Azhar. Nikil Saval gave me the momentum I needed to get the project moving during its early stages. Mimi Sheller, Gijs Mom, Mandy Sadan, Bob Wilson, Joachim Schliesinger, Kishore Saval, James C. Scott, Mark Elvin, Kafui Attoh, Andrew Liu, Piers Locke, and Daniel Schlozman all offered important historical, anthropological, and theoretical input. So did the late Rob Mason—whom I shall miss terribly.
Frustratingly, much of the most significant and brilliant help I received was from people whom I cannot directly name, due to the sensitivity of some aspects of the research. The guides and translators whose names have been coded in the book as Sang, Kagung, Nkumgam, P., and J. all deserve special mention. In the field, I was grateful for their acumen, creativity, and friendship. I want to extend this gratitude to others as well, in particular to the person, who must go unnamed, who arranged for me to visit the logging village site in central Burma, and with whom I traveled to the Karenni Hills. And of course this gratitude extends to all the mahouts and mahouts’ friends and family members who were kind enough to talk with me, share their time, food, and drink with me, and grant me some degree of entrance into the world of forest mahoutship and elephants.
Finally, I cannot imagine having launched this project without the love and support of members of my family—too many of whom I lost during the period when I was writing this book. Marc Shell, Susan Shell, Hanna Rose Shell, Jason Sanford, Yvette Sanford Shell, the late Murray and Sophie Meld, and the late Sophie Shell: thank you for your wisdom, solace, and encouragement.
Notes
Map Citations
The ancient range of the Asian elephant in Map A roughly shows information from Mark Elvin, The Retreat of Elephants (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004), esp. 10; and R. Olivier, “Distribution and Status of the Asian Elephant,” Oryx 14, no. 4 (1978): 379–424. The ancient range of the African elephant in Map D roughly shows information from Deon Furstenburg, “Focus on the African Elephant—Loxodonta Africana,” South African Hunter 05040 (2010): 46–49; and Nick A. Drake et al., “Ancient Watercourses and Biogeography of the Sahara Explain the Peopling of the Desert,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 108, no. 2 (2011), esp. appendix fig. 11. Present ranges roughly show geographic information drawn from International Union for Conservation of Nature, IUCN Red List of Threatened Species (2008).
A Note about Interviews and Anonymization
Throughout this notes section, I denote most of my 2013–17 mahout interviews with a randomly assigned letter rather than with a specific time and place. This precaution became necessary to protect the identities of people who spoke with me about sensitive subjects. A letter-coded document with further information about each interview is kept privately.
INTRODUCTION
1. Walter Kollert and Przemyslaw Walotek, “Global Teak Trade in the Aftermath of Myanmar’s Log Export Ban,” Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations—Planted Forests and Trees Working Paper Series 49, no. 6 (2015).
2. Dambuk Interview 1, 2017.
3. Population estimates of Asian elephants, as well as of their numbers in domesticity (and of these, how many are doing which kinds of work), are highly imprecise. Richard Lair, Gone Astray (Bangkok: FAO Regional Office for Asia and the Pacific, 1997), estimated that, around the turn of the millennium, roughly a quarter of the world’s Asian elephant population, then around 60,000, were in domesticity. Of these, roughly 9,000 were engaged in logging and transport work, as opposed to work in the tourism and festival sectors. During the subsequent two decades, the total species population has shrunk from roughly 60,000 to somewhere between 40,000 and 50,000 (according to the World Wildlife Fund and other agencies). If we assume the proportion of domesticated to wild elephants has grown during this subsequent period—which seems reasonable due to intensifying human pressure on wild herds—and widen the margin of error to account for a shift in the ratio of tourism and festival elephants to transport and logging elephants, then a very broad estimate would suggest that in the 2010s, somewhere between 7,000 and 11,000 domestic elephants are outside the tourism and festival sectors.
4. Some elephant researchers have gone so far as question the word domesticated as a descriptor of the situation of Asian elephants who do work alongside human beings. Words like trained, captive, work (as in “work elephants”), or simply domestic come up throughout the relevant literature, each term presenting its own sema
ntic tradeoffs. In this book I use these words interchangeably, to describe a situation that no English adjective describes perfectly. See Lair, Gone Astray, 3–4; and Piers Locke, “The Anomalous Elephant: Terminological Dilemmas and the Incalcitrant Domestication Debate,” Gajah 41 (2014): 12–19. Recognizing the exceptional nature of the Asian elephant, Jared Diamond omits them from his analysis of the global history of animal domestication on the grounds that “Asian work elephants are just wild elephants that were captured and tamed; they were not bred in captivity.” Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies (New York: W. W. Norton, 1997), 159.
5. Dogs (to continue the example) are similar to Asian elephants, and a range of other species, in that they have adjusted their behavior to strike up symbiotic relationships with humans. Indeed, dogs seem to have played an active role shaping the dog-human working relationship in prehistoric times. But to develop skills like sniffing for bombs, performing rescues, or aiding mobility of the blind—that is, cognitively demanding skills useful to humans in high-stakes situations—dogs required many additional generations of externally imposed mating selection. See Raymond Pierotti and Brandy Fogg, The First Domestication: How Wolves and Humans Coevolved (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2017); and Rebecca Cassidy and Molly Mullin, eds., Where the Wild Things Are Now: Domestication Reconsidered (Oxford: Berg, 2007).
6. Victoria Taylor and Trevor Poole, “Captive Breeding and Infant Mortality in Asian Elephants: A Comparison Between Western Zoos and Three Eastern Elephant Centers,” Zoo-Biology 17 (1998): 311–32; F. Kurt and Khyne U Mar, “Neonate Mortality in Captive Asian Elephants (Elephas maximus),” International Journal of Mammalian Biology 61 (1996): 155–64; and Interview U.
7. Ros Clubb et al., “Compromised Survivorship in Zoo Elephants,” Science 322, no. 5908 (2008): 1649; and Interview U.
8. Elizabeth Kolbert, The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History (New York: Henry Holt, 2014).
9. See Piers Locke, “Explorations in Ethnoelephantology: Social, Historical, and Ecological Intersections Between Asian Elephants and Humans,” Environment and Society: Advances in Research 4, no. 1 (2013): 79–97; Piers Locke and Jane Buckingham, eds., Conflict, Negotiation, and Coexistence: Rethinking Human-Elephant Relations in South Asia (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016); Maan Barua, “Bio-Geo-Graphy: Landscape, Dwelling, and the Political Ecology of Human-Elephant Relations,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 32, no. 5 (2014): 915–34; and Jamie Lorimer, “Elephants as Companion Species: The Lively Biogeographies of Asian Elephant Conservation in Sri Lanka,” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 35, no. 4 (2010): 491–506.
10. A notable exception is Nicolas Lainé, “Conduct and Collaboration in Human-Elephant Working Communities of Northeast India,” in Conflict, Negotiation, and Coexistence: Rethinking Human- Elephant Relations in South Asia, ed. Piers Locke and Jane Buckingham (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016): 180–204. This study focuses on the logging mahouts of the Hkamti area of Arunachal Pradesh.
11. Interview X.
12. Throughout this book, I have altered or scrambled some names to preserve anonymity of interviewees who discussed sensitive subject matter. Similarly, each field interview is referred to by a randomly assigned letter, which does not reveal date or location.
CHAPTER 1: CATCHING ELEPHANTS
1. Interview fully anonymized.
2. Interview H.
3. Interviews N and P.
4. Some people in central Burma use a different term: djaung pandu. The words fandi and pandu appear to be related. Interview H.
5. Interview K.
6. U Toke Gale, Burmese Timber Elephant (Singapore: Toppan Printing Co., 1974), 88–98; Thomas Trautmann, Elephants and Kings: An Environmental History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), 324; and Interview K.
7. Guy Tachard, A Relation of the Voyage to Siam (London: Printed for J. Robinson, at the Golden-Lyon in St. Pauls Church-Yard, 1688), 233.
8. Michael Charney, Southeast Asian Warfare: 1300–1900 (Leiden: Brill, 2004), 139.
9. Interview U.
10. Gale, Burmese Timber, 98–103; Tappan Kamar Baruah, The Singphos and Their Religion (Shillong: Government of Arunachal Pradesh, 1977), 39; Richard Lair, Gone Astray: The Care and Management of the Asian Elephant in Domesticity (Bangkok: FAO Regional Office for Asia and the Pacific, 1997), 62; and Interviews G, J, K, P, U, V, and W.
11. Interviews J and K.
12. Interviews C, J, K, and P.
13. Interview fully anonymized.
14. Interview U.
15. Interview J.
16. Interview X.
17. C.W.A. Bruce, “Some Notes on the Indian Elephant,” Journal of the Bombay Natural History Society 14 (1903): 151–55, esp. 152.
18. Interviews F and Y.
19. Interview T.
20. Gale, Burmese Timber, 35. Gale notes that during the work period, logging and transport elephants may require 1,000 to 1,200 pounds of fodder per day.
21. James Howard Williams, Elephant Bill (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1950), 56.
22. Interviews U and Y; Victoria Taylor and Trevor Poole, “Captive Breeding and Infant Mortality in Asian Elephants: A Comparison between Western Zoos and Three Eastern Elephant Centers,” Zoo-Biology 17 (1998): 311–32; and F. Kurt and Khyne U Mar, “Neonate Mortality in Captive Asian Elephants (Elephas maximus),” International Journal of Mammalian Biology 61 (1996): 155–64.
23. Interviews C, P, and W.
24. Interview P.
25. Interview fully anonymized.
26. Interview W.
27. Interviews C and F.
CHAPTER 2: POWERS OF TRUNK AND MIND
1. Guy Tachard, A Relation of the Voyage to Siam (London: Printed for J. Robinson, at the Golden-Lyon in St. Pauls Church-Yard, 1688), 233.
2. Gary Marchant and Jeheskel Shoshani, “Head Muscles of Loxodonta africana and Elephas maximas with Comments on Mammuthus primigenius Muscles,” Quaternary International 169 (2007): 186–91.
3. Interview B.
4. The Singphos are closely related to the Jinghpaws on the Burmese side of the Patkai Mountains; both are Kachin groups.
5. Interview F.
6. Interview Z.
7. Interview F.
8. U Toke Gale, Burmese Timber Elephant (Singapore: Toppan Printing Co., 1974), 129.
9. Gale, Burmese Timber, 129–30.
10. Dambuk Interview 3, 2017.
11. Dambuk Interview 1, 2017.
12. Dambuk Interview 2, 2017.
13. Interviews A, C, J, N, and Y.
14. Interviews G, N, and W.
15. Interview A.
16. Interview Y.
17. My 2013 central Burma field notes.
18. Interview W.
19. Interview Z.
20. Interview W.
21. Interview B.
22. Interview P.
23. Interview T.
24. James Howard Williams, Elephant Bill (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1950), 295–97.
CHAPTER 3: MUDDY EXODUS
1. Geoffrey Tyson, Forgotten Frontier (Calcutta: W.H. Targett & Co., 1945), 102; and Andrew Martin, Flight by Elephant (London: Fourth Estate, 2013), 59.
2. Raymond Bryant, The Political Ecology of Forestry in Burma (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1997), 22–32, 78–92.
3. Martin, Flight, 47–48.
4. Tyson, Forgotten Frontier, 103; Felicity Goodall, Exodus Burma (Stroud, UK: Spellmount, 2011), 217.
5. Martin, Flight, 49.
6. Williams, Elephant Bill [UK ed.], 267, 272.
7. Williams, Elephant Bill [UK ed.], 275–76.
8. Martin, Flight, 49.
9. Tyson, Forgotten Frontier, 102.
10. Martin, Flight, 99.
11. Francis Kingdon-Ward, From China to Hkamti Long (London: E. Arnold & Co., 1924), 264.
12. Goodall, Exodus Burma, 217–19.
13. Martin, Flight, 100–1.
14. Tyson, Forgotten Frontier, 102.
15. S. Farrant Russell, Muddy Exodus (London: Epworth Press, 1944), 39.
16. Russell, Muddy Exodus, 15.
17. Russell, Muddy Exodus, 8–9, 26–29.
18. Russell, Muddy Exodus, 28–29.
19. Russell, Muddy Exodus, 29.
20. R. H. Gribble, Out of Burma Night (Calcutta: Thacker Spink & Co., 1944), 145.
21. Jayantha Jayewardene, The Elephant in Sri Lanka (Colombo: Wildlife Heritage Trust of Sri Lanka, 1994), 25.
22. Russell, Muddy Exodus, 6.
23. Russell, Muddy Exodus, 15–17.
24. Gribble, Burma Night, 80; Russell, Muddy Exodus, 15.
25. Gribble, Burma Night, 80; Russell, Muddy Exodus, 24.
26. Russell, Muddy Exodus, 31–32.
27. Russell, Muddy Exodus, 35–41. In these passages, the account becomes somewhat geographically confusing. Russell does not clarify whether the incident with the rope occurred at the Tagap ford across the Namyung or at a different crossing point. It is possible that the path was interwoven with the river along its ravine and crossed the river in multiple places. It is also possible that Russell, unsure of his surroundings, identified more than one mountain channel as the Namyung. Gribble, Burma Night, notes that four mountain rivers all bunched together around Pangsau, and all four had to be crossed (83).
28. Russell, Muddy Exodus, 40–42.
29. Russell, Muddy Exodus, 39.
30. Russell, Muddy Exodus, 49.