Sanctuarization: Reworking Captive Elephant Labour in Sri Lanka

Abstract

This article explores contemporary human-elephant relations in Sri Lanka’s roadside riding camps through the lens of interspecies labour. Rather than opposing care to exploitation or tradition to reform, it argues that key ethical and political transformations become visible in the reorganization of work itself: who works, under what conditions, and with which forms of authority. Based on multi-sited research conducted between 2021 and 2024, the article focuses on a roadside riding camp where wider circuits of labour, welfare, and ethical claims are made visible and negotiated in practice. Through three ethnographic vignettes centred on chains, protective tubing, feeding devices, and debates over ritual participation, the article shows how compassionate care unfolds through material micro-adjustments that redistribute effort, vigilance, and limited autonomy across species. Building on these encounters, I develop the concept of sanctuarization to describe the gradual and uneven reconfiguration of captive elephant labour in the name of care. Sanctuarization operates both as material adjustment and as anticipatory imagination, animating visions of sanctuary that reshape present routines without dissolving captivity. In this sense, roadside camps emerge as provisional and contested “sanctuaries-in-the-making,” where labour, freedom, and responsibility are continually renegotiated within enduring infrastructures of constraint. In doing so, the article reframes debates on elephant tourism by foregrounding labour as the primary terrain on which ethical transformation is materially negotiated.