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

Human-wildlife conflict has become a challenge in global biodiversity conservation. Existing studies mainly view tourism as an economic instrument for mitigating conflict, with limited attention on the embodied aspects of living with dangerous wildlife for the residents. Drawing on embodiment as the theoretical framework and multispecies ethnography as a methodological approach, this study explores how tourism reshapes resident-elephant conflicts in Xishuangbanna, southwest China. Ethnographic fieldwork reveals three processes. First, tourism facilitates sensory rewilding by systematizing residents’ embodied knowledge of elephant behavior through training and monitoring systems. Second, tourism catalyzes the construction of physical fortresses that provide ontological security. Third, tourism creates conditions for entangled empathy, enabling residents to recognize elephants as intelligent, social, and sentient beings, although the empathy is not uniformly distributed across occupational positions. By situating these findings within China’s distinctive context of conservation and poverty alleviation, the study reveals that tourism is not a panacea but a partial, stratified, and dynamically negotiated intervention into human-wildlife relations.