Tourism and human-elephant conflict in China: An embodied approach to coexistence

Vigilant habitus: mobilizing senses to escape elephants

For residents who depend on rubber tapping or farming, elephants threaten both bodily safety and livelihoods. People therefore learn to mobilize multiple senses to avoid direct encounters. First, smell serves as an early-warning system, as elephants emit a distinctive scent, especially during mating season. As resident P01 noted, ‘When an elephant is in mating season, it gives off a strong smell that carries with the wind, allowing you to be prepared in advance’.

Second, hearing becomes paramount in low-visibility conditions, especially at dawn when many residents harvest rubber and elephant activity peaks. Given the elephants’ near-silent movement, listening intently becomes critical. As one resident (P15) recounted: ‘I went to the rubber groves at dawn, and an elephant was behind me. I turned my head and was scared to death . . . Elephants have soft soles and do not make much sound when they walk’.

Third, vision also plays a crucial role in defending against elephant attacks. By examining elephant dung, residents assess danger. As one interviewee (P11) explained, ‘If it is soft and moist, that means an elephant has been here recently. If it has dried out, it means they have been gone for some time’. Moreover, residents also learn to interpret elephants’ body language to gauge their emotional state. Respondent P17 told, ‘When an elephant’s tail rises, it indicates a state of agitation and alertness. They make a whirring sound and rapidly flap their ears when angry’.

When direct encounters occur, locals advise running uphill in a zigzag pattern, though fear often impedes this response. These embodied strategies reflect elephant agency, as their scent, activity patterns, and body language become inscribed in villagers’ bodily practices:

We know the areas where wild elephants frequently roam. When passing through those spots, we instinctively exercise caution, slowing down in advance, listening intently, observing carefully, and staying alert to any signs. (P07)

The long history of HEC in Xishuangbanna has cultivated a shared vigilant habitus: embodied forms of environmental alertness passed across generations. Children learn from elders how to read elephant signs and neighbors share warnings and survival strategies. As one elder (P22) explained, ‘We have lived with elephants for generations. We learned how to smell them, hear them, and escape from them . . . my son does not know that elephants sometimes make sounds like dogs barking. But for his safety, I must tell him’. The presence of elephants has produced distinctive bodily practices shared across the community.

Tourism facilitates sensory rewilding

While villagers have obtained insights through their own lived experience, tourism development has systematized this knowledge and enhanced the community’s collective capacity. Wild Elephant Valley operation is frequently disrupted by elephant appearances (Cui, 2023; Cui and Xu, 2012). Located near eight elephant corridors to maximize wildlife viewing, the scenic area is highly vulnerable. Prior to 2010, fatal incidents occurred involving both a tourist and an employee.

In response, to enhance elephant activity monitoring and early warning capabilities, Wild Elephant Valley established a dedicated Asian Elephant Monitoring Team in 2005, composed primarily of local young adults. Their duties include patrolling the periphery, tracking elephant movements, and alerting management when elephants approach to ensure the safety of tourists and community residents. As the manager explained:

Visitors may encounter wild elephants on the road, which is extremely dangerous. Our scenic area must ensure visitor safety. This is precisely when the monitoring team becomes crucial. If they detect the elephants’ location and movements in advance, we can implement traffic control measures to keep visitors at a safe distance from the elephants. (P37)

The scenic area provides comprehensive training for its employees on elephant encounter protocols, serving as a critical source of embodied knowledge for villagers in Xiangyanqing Village on practical elephant deterrence. Additionally, Wild Elephant Valley organizes outreach teams to disseminate elephant response expertise to neighboring communities, with several villagers selected as team members. Compared to villagers’ self-acquired elephant knowledge, the scenic area’s expertise is derived from more structured practices and extensive real-world experience, thereby proving far more effective. ‘We are trained every year. We know the safe distance between people and wild elephants and how to escape when encountering them. Through systematic drills, we will not panic when suddenly encountering an elephant. Otherwise, many people would fall into panic and unsure of what to do’. (P11)

Yet this knowledge does not reach all residents equally. Training, drills, and outreach programs concentrate on those with formal ties to Wild Elephant Valley, while residents who continue to depend on rubber tapping, farming, or migrant labor still rely largely on the informal vigilant habitus. The sensory rewilding tourism produces is therefore as much a story of selective enrichment as of community transformation.

Informational fortress

Currently, the Yunnan Provincial Forestry and Grassland Bureau has partnered with a technology firm to develop a drone-based wild elephant monitoring system. Monitoring teams use drones equipped with high-resolution and infrared cameras to collect real-time data on elephant movements, translating these outputs into early-warning information disseminated through WeChat applications, group messaging, and mobile alerts. As a conservation station chief, P38 has extensive experience working with monitoring teams to track elephants and issue early warnings. ‘If we find elephants moving around the village or farmland, we activate the infrared warning system in the village, and the horns will beep. We also communicate through WeChat and phone calls so people could go to safe places’.

This technology exemplifies how technologies extend human perception, creating new forms of bodily engagement with the environment (Pink et al., 2017). Drone-based surveillance expands visual reach across otherwise inaccessible terrain, while digital communication platforms enhance the speed, scale, and precision of information transmission. Villagers now routinely check smartphones to view elephants’ real-time movements before traveling. A villager (P31) who makes a living growing rubber mentioned: ‘Now we mentally prepare ourselves before heading to the rubber fields, because drones alert us in advance where wild elephants are. We use this information to determine which times are unsafe for going out. Unlike before, when we could only constantly scan our surroundings with flashlights or keep sniffing the air to gauge whether it was safe’.

Through embodied extension technology, a flexible informational fortress has been established. By extending human sensory and communicative capacities, it enables individuals to proactively adjust their decisions and behaviors to prevent bodily encounters with wildlife, thereby achieving a flexible form of human-wildlife coexistence without relying on physical isolation.

Tourism and physical fortress

The informational fortress is not infallible, and its benefits are unevenly distributed. Elderly individuals unfamiliar with smartphones may fail to receive timely warnings, while those working in remote fields often lack stable network coverage. Moreover, not all elephants can be monitored in real time, particularly during late nights. One villager (P22) recounted the terror of finding an elephant standing in his courtyard when he used the outdoor bathroom in the middle of night:

At 1:00 a.m., I was going out to take a bath when I realized an elephant was in my yard. I was stunned and quickly ran back upstairs. Drone monitoring cannot fully guarantee safety. Elephants have their own behavioural patterns, and staff members cannot provide 24-hour supervision of every area because they also need to rest.

Practices that are taken for granted by urban dwellers are fraught with risks. The home, which ought to provide ontological security, has instead become a place of danger.

The scenic area faces similar challenges. Its southern sector accommodates staff dormitories and canteens. Historically, this zone was a regular nighttime foraging ground for elephants, instilling profound fear among the staff (Cui and Xu, 2012). Around 2010, an employee was trampled to death by an elephant after encountering it while attending to a midnight bathroom call. Wild Elephant Valley features a 4 km hiking trail that winds deep into the rainforest, where notifying every tourist in time has proven difficult. Notably, a tourist was attacked and killed by a wild elephant in the trail, as the scenic area failed to promptly alert him. Ultimately, the informational fortress depends on constant collection and analysis of elephant data to maintain human-elephant separation. Yet the cognitive demands of this system are incompatible with human biological rhythms, making flexible emergency protocols insufficient for ensuring 24-hour safety.

In response, management strategies have shifted from flexible information protocols to rigid physical infrastructure: constructing a ‘bodily fortress’. Through years of iterative practice, the scenic area has erected iron fencing to enclose most of its premises. Elevated walkways were built in non-enclosed sections. As the manager (P37) noted: ‘Safety remains top priority. We actively recalibrate these facilities based on changing elephant patterns. For example, by installing reinforced barriers in areas with increased human-elephant overlap’. Critically, the fencing specifications are calibrated to elephant behavioral traits as disclosed by the scenic area’s manager: early four-rail designs failed to block a juvenile elephant that squeezed through, prompting an upgrade to five-rail specifications (Figure 2).

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Figure 2.

The iron fences around Wild Elephant Valley and Xiangyanqing.

This infrastructure practice has spread to surrounding villages. Xiangyanqing, paired with Wild Elephant Valley for targeted assistance, incorporated fencing during its relocation phase (Figure 2). This illustrates how tourism development serves as a catalyst for infrastructure that reshapes residents’ embodied security. As noted by a resident (P14), the fencing provides a tangible sense of security:

We did not let our children go out at night when we had no fences here. It is much safer now and social activities after dinner are back. Generally, the elephants cannot get into our village if we lock the gate of the fence. Sometimes, we see wild elephants moving around outside. Still, we are not scared because we know they cannot come in.

However, physical barriers are not widespread adopted. Elephants can adapt to human-modified environments and devise adaptive strategies. As monitoring team member P01 observed: ‘Wild elephants are very smart. If there is a tree next to the fence, some elephant can roll up the tree, sticks with its trunk, steps on the fence with its feet, and turns over’. Consequently, thick trees cannot be left near fencing. Furthermore, widespread fencing is constrained by ecological concerns about habitat fragmentation. The bodily fortress is not a static human imposition but an ongoing multispecies negotiation, in which elephants’ adaptive intelligence, people’s uneven access to physical infrastructure, and broader conservation imperatives together shape what bodily security can mean in practice.

Tourism-mediated encounters and entangled empathy

Residents employed in tourism’s core positions have prolonged, safe, and intimate opportunities to observe elephants. These sustained encounters allow them to witness elephants’ intelligence, social behaviors, and emotional capacities firsthand, fostering entangled empathy, which is ‘a moral and caring perception that involves an intertwining of emotion and cognition in which we recognize we are in relations with others’ (Gruen, 2015: 16–17).

Those in caregiving and monitoring roles develop even deeper emotional connections. The nature reserve has established an Asian Elephant Rescue and Breeding Center in Wild Elephant Valley to rehabilitate injured elephants rescued from the wild, and several villagers have been recruited as caregivers. One elephant caregiver expressed his deep affection. Elephants as emotional beings are capable of forming social bonds and mutual trust with humans:

I am not afraid of elephants. On the contrary, I have grown to like them deeply. I look after one elephant in particular; he is just like a child to me. He plays with me, trusts me implicitly, and always comes running when I call his name. (P04)

Meanwhile, unlike ordinary farmers who must flee from elephants, villagers working in the Asian Elephant Monitoring Team of Wild Elephant Valley are trained to track and observe them, allowing for detailed engagement with elephant behavior. As one monitor shared: ‘Sometimes, you can really understand them. If you get too close when they have babies, they will attack to protect their young. They are just like us humans’. (P09) In this interpretation, elephant aggression becomes understandable as a protective response rather than irrational violence, dissolving simplistic resentment.

Another monitoring team member (P01) described witnessing maternal care among elephants:

When the baby elephant is sleeping, and the mosquitoes bite it, the mother elephant will pick up the leaves with her trunk and repel them. Their behaviors have changed my view of them. Why would it attack humans? Because it too must protect its family.

Such observation provides undeniable evidence of sentience, creating an emotional empathy (Figure 3). This connection represents a kind of vicarious sharing of emotion (Smith, 2006), where the observer experiences an affective response that is congruent with the animals’ condition. Through years of tracking, observing, and caring for elephants, villagers increasingly interpret elephant behaviors through analogies to humans.

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Figure 3.

An adult elephant with a baby elephant traveling in Wild Elephant Valley.

Differential pathways to empathy

While tourism-mediated encounters facilitate entangled empathy among caregivers and monitors, residents in other positions develop different relationships with elephants, shaped by their distinct bodily positioning within the tourism system. For general tourism employees, such as restaurant servers and vendors, friendly attitudes stem from economic gratitude combined with occasional safe observation. Unlike caregivers or monitors, they lack opportunities for close contact with elephants. Instead, their episodic and physically distanced observations cultivate a pragmatic perspective. Consider a cable car ticket agent (P02), who reported: ‘Working at the scenic area is safe, and the income is relatively stable. The presence of elephants is a good thing because it provides job opportunities for us’.

Even within general tourism positions, opportunities for observation vary. A cleaner (P08) who regularly patrols elevated walkways reported that the safety buffer has transformed elephants into objects of appreciation:

I have observed that when an elephant eats corn, it peels off the husk first. It also refuses to eat dirty food, rolling the corn in its trunk and rubbing it against a tree to clean it. (P08)

However, the meaning of such observations is shaped by bodily position. The same behavior in elephants can elicit opposite attitudes in those who lack the safe, mediated opportunities for observation. As P07 said, he is a farmer who makes a living by tapping rubber or doing part-time jobs: ‘Elephants know exactly when the corn we plant will be ready. Whatever we plant, the elephants eat it. Now we cannot even farm anymore’. Another elderly farmer (P16) approaching 80 spoke even more vehemently: ‘I absolutely hate elephants. I wish there were no elephants at all. They have devoured all my corn and rice crops, and the insurance payouts are both meager and slow’! For P07 and P16, elephants are experienced primarily through repeated loss and vulnerability, and compensation mechanisms fail to address their embodied experience. Consequently, there is no space for affective appreciation.

The stratification reveals that attitudes are shaped not simply by income, but by the nature of bodily contact with elephants. Those in tourism positions involving regular observation and interaction may develop understanding and affection, even though monitoring team salaries are not particularly high. However, those who remain exposed to hazardous working conditions primarily treat elephants as threats. Without the safety shield of tourism infrastructure and the structured observation opportunities it provides, the profound empathy found among caregivers and monitors remains inaccessible.

Importantly, even residents outside tourism acknowledge broader community shifts. P30, a rubber farmer whose wife works at Wild Elephant Valley, mentioned: ‘I have a love-hate relationship with them. Xishuangbanna’s tourism thrives largely because of their presence’. While entangled empathy emerges most strongly among those with intimate, sustained encounters, a gentler attitude shift that is grounded in collective benefits and shared harmony narratives extends beyond individual embodied experiences to shape community identity.