In Decolonizing Extinction Juno Salazar Parreñas ethnographically traces the ways in which colonialism, decolonization, and indigeneity shape relations that form more-than-human worlds at orangutan rehabilitation centers on Borneo. Parreñas tells the interweaving stories of wildlife workers and the centers' endangered animals while demonstrating the inseparability of risk and futurity from orangutan care. Drawing on anthropology, primatology, Southeast Asian history, gender studies, queer theory, and science and technology studies, Parreñas suggests that examining workers’ care for these semi-wild apes can serve as a basis for cultivating mutual but unequal vulnerability in an era of annihilation. Only by considering rehabilitation from perspectives thus far ignored, Parreñas contends, could conservation biology turn away from ultimately violent investments in population growth and embrace a feminist sense of welfare, even if it means experiencing loss and pain.
Curated and Introduced by Kristina Lyons, Juno Parreñas and Noah Tamarkin
Southeast Asian wildlife rehabilitation centers, such as an orangutan rehabilitation center in Malaysia and an elephant sanctuary in Thailand, facilitate commodified forms of intimacy between endemic animals, their caretakers who also hail from the region, and transnational commercial volunteers. These forms of intimacy include cleaning animal feces as well as gaining physical proximity and even tactile contact. At first glance, commercial volunteerism at such sites appears to convey the idea of ethical capitalism, which Slavoj Žižek describes as “consumption for a cause.” However, ethnographic investigation of these sites reveals that focusing on clean consumption alone cannot account for the ways in which dirty bodily effects fuel the industry of commercialized volunteerism. This article ethnographically examines how intimate encounters across species, specifically between people and endemic charismatic megafauna, fuel a transnational economy. It is based on ethnographic research conducted in Sarawak, Malaysia, and Chiang Mai, Thailand, between 2008 and 2010. Ultimately, it helps show how a global industry is produced through the commodification of intimate encounters across difference.
Relations between humans and orangutans in present‐day Malaysia show the historiographic and ethnographic problem of using the term “Indigenous knowledge.” Iban and Malay relationships with nonhuman animals are intersubjective and informed by particular subject formations, and indigeneity explains only one kind of relation. To analyze their relations simply in terms of decolonial Indigenous knowledge would be a culturally imperialist act from the Americas: decoloniality is specific to the development of racialization in the West via white settler colonialism, antiblack enslavement, and anti‐Indigenous exploitation and genocide. Instead, this article draws from southern African historical sources and Southeast Asian ethnographic sources to advocate a historiography and ethnography of vernaculars, both vernacular knowledge and vernacular ignorance, in order to avoid autochthonous and potentially xenophobic claims.
For many today, extraction is a damning feature of all ethnography. Yet anthropologically minded ethnographers should not think of themselves as multinational mining corporations. The self‐estimation of any ethnographer, especially an anthropologically minded ethnographer, should be much lower and smaller, as low and small as tiny moles that make new connections by digging channels in the dark. Moles might not be the perfect analogy. They do, however, demonstrate to anthropologically minded ethnographers two important characteristics: they are fuzzy, and they spend an enormous amount of time digging. Ethnographers should be like moles, maintaining a sensitivity to where they tread and where they might dig, feeling compelled to dig deeper instead of staying on the open surface, and being open to a synesthesia of fuzziness.
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