Elephant Riders of the Hukawng Valley, Kachin State: Evasive Mobility and Vadological Geography

Abstract

Elephant Riders of the Hukawng Valley, Kachin State:Evasive Mobility and Vadological Geography Jacob Shell (bio) Introduction Some 40,000 to 50,000 Asian elephants (Elephas maximus) remain in the world today. The number has been shrinking: tallies from the 1990s placed the species-wide population size at around 60,000. Of the remaining Asian elephants, around two-thirds are in the wild, and onethird are in a state of domesticity or captivity (with both the wild and domestic groups' being genetically identical and interchangeable).1 African elephants, by contrast—not the focus of this article—are around ten times more numerous and exist almost entirely in the wild.2 Of the domestic group of Asian elephants, the bestknown, or highest-visibility, are elephants in zoos, tourist parks, and religious parades. However, a substantial portion of the domestic "work elephants," likely around 8,000 or 9,000 overall, operate in much lower-visibility [End Page 261] spheres of economic life, performing human-directed tasks in forested areas (Shell 2019a). Due to their remoteness from the tourist parks and wildlife preserves with which international conservationist and wildlife institutions tend to strike up formal relations, these forestbased work elephants have been mostly overlooked by the international research community—despite the fact that these elephants enjoy better biological outcomes, in terms of lifespan and reproduction, than Asian elephants in tourist compounds or zoos (Clubb et al. 2008; Taylor and Poole 1998; Kurt and U Mar 1996). This grouping of Asian elephants is engaged in a mix of loosely related sylvan logistical activities, entailing off-road or "roadless" logging, cross-forest baggage and passenger transport, and flood-season transport. Elephantbased logging takes place mainly in the teak forests of central Burma, Kachin State in northern Burma, as well as the timber rich forest zones of eastern Arunachal Pradesh, India, and Xayaboury, Laos. To a lesser extent, elephant logging also occurs elsewhere in India, as well as in Sumatra, Indonesia, and Sri Lanka. In Burma and northeast India, timber elephants are released into the surrounding forestland on a nightly basis, to seek food and mates—a routine which largely accounts for the improved biological situation of these elephants compared to those kept in walled compounds (Shell 2019a:Ch. 1). This biologically beneficial freedom to roam the forest at night also extends to forest-work elephants doing transportation tasks. Compared with elephant-based logging, elephant-based transportation is far less widespread a practice in the twenty-first century, persisting only in Kachin State in northern Burma, and in some Kachin-adjacent zones of Sagaing Division, Burma, and Arunachal Pradesh, India (see figures 1 and 2 for maps). A heavily forested and resource-rich subregion [End Page 262] of Kachin State called the Hukawng Valley is especially important within this lingering, mostly unnoticed, geography of human transportation which occurs on the backs of elephants (Shell 2019a:Ch. 8; Tucker 2001; Lintner 1990). Because elephant-based transportation, unlike logging, associates the work elephants with activities which are not inherently destructive of forest cover, the practice merits recognition and deeper examination from conservationists, ethnozoologists, and other kinds of environmental researchers. To help generate such recognition, and to gesture at several interrelated courses such deeper examination could follow, this article presents the knowledge conveyed by a Kachin elephant rider from a Hukawng Valley village called Awng Lawt, based on interviews conducted in 2019. This elephant rider provided invaluable information pertaining to various interwoven themes: the reliance of his village, and its forms of local livelihood, upon the involvement of work elephants; significant ethnotribal aspects of this cospecies working dynamic; relations between the village elephants and nearby wild elephants; and relations between the village elephants and the elephant convoys of the Kachin Independence Army (KIA). This article also links information from these interviews to related fieldwork I conducted during 2015–2017 at elephant-logging and elephant-transport zones elsewhere in the region: in particular in the southwestern Kachin Hills, in the forested hills of central Burma, and in the Dihing, Lohit, and Dibang Valleys of eastern Arunachal Pradesh, India. Though the more recent, Hukawng Valley-focused thrust of research is methodologically limited by its ethnographic derivation from one Hukawng Valley interviewee...