Producing affect: Transnational volunteerism in a Malaysian orangutan rehabilitation center

Abstract

In a postcolonial economy of volunteer tourism from the Global North to the Global South, mostly British women pay thousands of U.S. dollars to travel to Sarawak, on Malaysian Borneo, to work in a wildlife rehabilitation center. There, in a program operated as a public–private partnership, they provide hard labor to maintain and improve the facility and assist subcontracted indigenous Iban men in caring for displaced orangutans. Through the concept of “custodial labor,” I argue that affect produced at the interface of bodies in the work of orangutan rehabilitation also produces an unequal distribution of risk and vulnerability among those involved, across differences of species, classes, nationalities, and genders. My findings contribute to understandings of how humanity is constituted through multispecies encounters, help demonstrate how animals can be treated as subjects in ethnography, and show how affective encounters produce human and nonhuman subjectivities.

Anthropomorphized species as tools for conservation: utility beyond prosocial, intelligent and suffering species

“…In totemic and animistic complexes, anthropomorphism per se is a non-concept. For example, identification of orangutans as human-like persons by Western visitors to orangutan conservation centers in Malaysia can result in a strong emotional bond that rewards conservationoriented caring through volunteerism (Parreñas 2012). This empathetic egomorphization constructs a hybrid orangutan/human actor that ''disrupts'' nature vs. culture while also linking these categories through the ''fluid nature of identification'' with the orangutan (Sowards 2006;see Descola 1996).…”

The Jungle Academy: Molding White Supremacy in American Police Recruits

“…I situate the hetero‐masculinities molded into police as intimacies of the hypermasculinity espoused in global white fascisms (A. Harris , 798–99). Here, I see intimacies as a relatedness produced through “bodily effects”—not just physical but also imagined contact between bodies (Parreñas , 120). Fascist intimacies are thus white supremacist norms produced through the relatedness that emerges through the effects of embodied white racialized copresence and contact with bodies of color.…”

Challenging Subjects: Towards Ethnographic Analyses of Animals

“…Most disciplines in the social sciences and humanities now have clusters of scholars challenging their anthropocentric peers to see their particular sites/areas/emphases as multispecies, to identify animals as worthy of study, and, in some cases, to recognize other species not only as worthwhile subjects of scholarly inquiry, but as deserving of greater political and ethical consideration. Social and cultural anthropologists have contributed ethnographic cases and theoretical fodder that reflect the field's commitment to holism, nuance, and cross‐cultural understanding (see, for example, Anneberg, Vaarst, and Bubandt ; Cassidy Davis and Maurstad ; Hurn ; Knight ; Mullin ; Simon ; Parreñas ; see Kopnina for a more robust synthesis). Multispecies ethnography (Kirksey and Helmreich ; Ogden, Hall, and Tanita ; Smart ) has been posited as a way to situate or re‐situate other species in studies of human activity; indeed, some anthropologists have noted that early ethnographies included other species given the livelihoods, lifeways, and cosmologies of those being studied (see, for example Cassidy and Mullin ; Descola and Pálsson ; Smart and Smart ).…”