How to dwell in a forest alongside giants, avoid disturbing a living god, assist an animal with their manners, and help an elephant cross the road. The Presence of Elephants is an anthropological consideration of coexistence, grounded in people-s everyday interactions with household and free-roaming Asian elephants. Drawing on two years of fieldwork in Assam, northeast India, this book is an ethnography of human-elephant co-presence that examines how minds, tasks, identities, and places are shared between the two species. Sharing lives and landscapes with such a formidable being is a continuously shifting and negotiated exchange, inherently composed of tensions, asymmetries, and uncertainty, especially in the Anthropocene when breakdowns in communication increasingly have violent effect. Developing a multifaceted picture of human-elephant relations in a postcolonial setting, each chapter focuses on a different dimension of encounter, where elephants adapt to human norms, peop
