This project challenges the anthropocentric foundations of historiography by proposing elephants as plausible subjects of history, arguing that their demonstrated temporal awareness—through memory, inherited trauma, and strategic anticipation—fulfills the core criterion of a historical subject. Moving beyond a biological lens, the project posits that elephant communities exhibit historically contingent behaviors, making their lives legible to historical analysis. To access this nonhuman history, the project turns to the decades-long archive of elephant bioacoustics, treating layered vocalizations from immediate trumpets to deferred rumbles as a form of nonhuman aural history that testifies to the embodied, affective lives of elephant communities. However, the method is critically self-reflexive, recognizing that the very tools used to capture this history—digital recording, archiving, and algorithmic analysis—are not neutral. These technologies come with mediating temporal frameworks and transductive processes that can distort the multi-layered temporality of elephant sound and re-center anthropocentric priorities. The core of the investigation, therefore, becomes the temporal politics of the archive itself.
The project analyzes how discontinuities between the elephant’s lived temporality and the scientific apparatuses that seek to capture it can reveal whether a historical narrative arises from genuine interspecies co-creation, human projection, or even from the elephant’s own epistemic resistance to human inquiry. Ultimately, this work uses the elephant sonic archive as a case study to expose fundamental tensions in the production of knowledge about the nonhuman world. It demands a parallel contemplation of species difference in knowing the world, between technologically-mediated human listening and the elephant’s own whole-bodied aural reception that regards both airborne sounds and seismic vibration. It deliberately refrains from presupposing the form a nonhuman history should take, instead asking: To what extent can the digitization of nonhuman experience—its capture, archiving, and interpretation—ever escape a recursive loop back to the human observer? What happens to the semiotic intent of communicative sounds that were originally imperceptible or unintelligible to humans? And how does interrogating the frictions between scientific data, contextual fieldwork, and public narrative itself become a primary method for writing a more authentic history, one that acknowledges the limits of our own systems of knowing?