Elephant Ivory and the Temporalities of Consumer Ethics by Terrance H. Witkowski Ph.D (original) (raw)
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Ivory was the cause of the some of the oldest trading networks in human history. It is part of our cultural landscape yet ivory has commonly only been viewed through the lens of slavery or conservation. This article takes a broad look at the place of ivory in human history, from prehistoric times to the 19th century, with emphasis on the early modern world. Ivory trade is set against the backdrop of the environmental and evolutionary history of the elephant. It decouples the commodity from its adjuncts, to encourage a better understanding of the impact of ivory.
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Global responses to the hotly debated China-Africa ivory trade in the past decade offer an entry point to examine whether and how African elephants have come to matter in China ethically. This article highlights the complexity of more-than-human ethics across geographic spaces and politico-cultural boundaries. We focus on the pivotal roles of conservationists who are embedded in multispecies relations on a transnational scale and who actively cultivate distant care for elephants. Reflecting upon a conservation trip named ‘From Kenya to China’, we demonstrate a simultaneous process through which the conservationists, on the one hand, have grown to realise different cultural contexts and regimes of values, while continuing to promote conservation ideologies and build human-nonhuman connections on the other. We argue that relational ethics in the more-than-human worlds across borders is not just about how we treat other species, but ultimately about how we treat other humans and how we educate ‘others’ about treating nonhumans.
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The new reality of a world without ivory trade demands a re-examination of human values towards both elephants and ivory and what each has come to represent. The closure of the world’s largest ivory markets (US and China), in line with the longstanding international ivory trade ban, must reflect a change in values. Understanding those values and how they interact with each other will be critical to successful implementation. Values act as arbitrators of meaning, sources of interests and – when collectively framed as regulatory norms regimes – the basis of compliance for local communities. This paper addresses how policymakers can optimally ensure that such international norms, decided at multilateral forums such as CITES, gain traction at the local level, where it really matters. Local values associated with elephants and ivory differ widely from place to place. At the coalface of supply and demand are often competing and mutually exclusive value sets. For instance, consumers of ivory may attach status significance to owning a rare piece. On the other end of the spectrum, communities living with elephants may view those elephants as an extension of their identity. These value sets are differentiated across levels of authority and from one region to the next. International and domestic ivory trade prohibitions that do not take this complexity into account may therefore inadvertently produce adverse reactions in local contexts. These dynamics are crucial to understand if international norms are to be locally effective, both on the supply and demand sides of the equation.
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Kremer and Morcom focus on how the price of ivory affects the incentive to poach elephants and how government policies can be developed to address this problem. Despite an ostensible emphasis on policy, however, the ‘state of the world’ that is assumed throughout the paper is so far removed from the real world of elephant conservation that the authors’ policy
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Moral concern with food intake is as old as morality itself. In the course of history, however, several ways of critically examining practices of food production and food intake have been developed. Whereas ancient Greek food ethics concentrated on the problem of temperance, and ancient Jewish ethics on the distinction between legitimate and illicit food products, early Christian morality simply refused to attach any moral significance to food intake. Yet, during the middle ages food became one of the principle objects of monastic programs for moral exercise (askesis). During the seventeenth and eighteenth century, food ethics was transformed in terms of the increasing scientific interest in food intake, while in the nineteenth century the social dimension of food ethics was discovered, with the result that more and more attention was given to the production and distribution of food products. Because of the increasing distance between the production and consumption of food products ever since, the outstanding feature of contemporary food ethics is it reliance and dependence on labeling practices.
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