2026/05/04 by Lalatendu Keshari Das · 1 voice
Social Sciences · Environmental Science · #South Asian Studies and Conflicts #Anthropological Studies and Insights #Conservation, Biodiversity, and Resource Management
paper · doi:10.2458/jpe.7427
openalex publication_date 2026/05/04 · openalex created_date 2026/05/06 · openalex updated_date 2026/05/21
Dominant biocultural conservation discourses on human–elephant conflict in India and elsewhere often reduce local communities to a victim/perpetrator binary. Even seemingly divergent models— fortress conservation, and rights-based approaches— reproduce this framing. Drawing on Gayatri Spivak's evocative question "Can the Subaltern Speak?" and insights from subaltern political ecology, this article argues that both perpetrator and victimhood theses encourage silencing and misrepresentation of the subaltern communities who interact with wildlife on an everyday basis. Based on qualitative research with the tribal and other traditional forest dwelling communities (the "subaltern") in Odisha, this article illustrates how these communities resist such portrayals. Through practices of livelihood adaptation, narrative resistance, and land-rights claims, they showcase their agency and frame human–elephant relations as political negotiations between "co-subalterns." This framing of co-subalternity moves beyond dominant conservation paradigms and critiques the victim/perpetrator binaries for subaltern communities in conservation discourse.