Where Does Nature End and Culture Begin? The Cultural Elephant

Although ‘misinterpretations’ of the human-elephant relations were not always arbitrary and my informants hinted at the dwindling human-elephant relations, the fear of the activist discourse that oversimplifies the bond as a relation of torture was palpable, however complex this relation is with its pitfalls. This chapter looks at how my informants respond to the ethicality of elephant captivity within the wild-domesticated, nature-culture framework and how their attributions to the sociocult..