Interspecies Care in a Hybrid Institution

Abstract

Piers Locke challenges the presuppositions of an anthropological education delimited in narrowly humanist-cultural terms. Recognizing elephants as moral actors in the institutional space of the elephant stable, he reconceives traditionally humanist ethnography as interspecies ethnography. By noting the ethically contested debates about subordinating elephants to humans in captivity and suggesting that elephants can develop consenting relations of emotionally meaningful care with humans, Locke then asks if we should deprive ourselves of this interspecies possibility.