Anandi Gandhi

ANANDI GANDHI, then a graduate student at University of California, Santa Cruz, California, was approved funding in April 2023 to aid research on “Coexistent Futures: Asian Elephant-Farmer Relations in a Changing World,” supervised by Dr. Nancy Chen. Human-wildlife conflict has become a defining feature of the Anthropocene while extinction and biodiversity loss continue to accelerate. As elephants migrate from forests into industrial farms, tense encounters with villagers occur daily. Farmers and elephants are losing lives and limbs in Thailand as historical, ecological, political, and economic forces push wild elephants and farmers closer together on agricultural landscapes. Yet, conflict is not the only story. In Eastern Thailand, a wanakaset (agroforestry) farmer describes coexistence as “we cannot live together, but we must survive together,” reflecting a commitment to co-survival, coadaptation, and sharing landscapes, amidst uncertainty. This research asks: What socio-ecological conditions allow farmers and elephants to coexist? Over 12 months of ethnographic fieldwork, the grantee traced elephant-farmer sociality across diverse agricultural landscapes. Research examined how both respond to different crops and cultivation systems, conservation agendas and economic policies, and landscape transformations shaped by colonial histories and capitalist expansion. By integrating multispecies anthropology with agricultural and ecological perspectives, this research explores coexistence as an ongoing negotiation—one that may reveal what it takes to live alongside nonhumans on the edge.