‘The Elephant Is Part of Us and Our Village’: Reflections on Memories, Places and (Non-) Spatial Objects

Abstract

This chapter contributes to small and strange geographies — geographies that aim to describe the unusual and grotesque stories of everyday life that occur in ordinary places. It points to the relevance of researching those objects and events which appear exotic and ‘far’ to us in social terms even if they are ‘near’ and ‘close’ to us in spatial terms. To illustrate this interest, I will explore how the strange death of an elephant called Miss Baba, in the late 1850s, still affects memory and identity in a rural village in Thuringia, eastern Germany. The death of this particular elephant can be regarded as a unique event which facilitates the construction of difference and distinctiveness for the local inhabitants towards the ‘outside’. Hence, the elephant is turned into a kind of myth to express and communicate the identity of the villagers.