Decolonizing Extinction: The Work of Care in Orangutan Rehabilitation

Experimental Futures

by Juno Salazar Parreñas

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.

Genres: Nonfiction, Anthropology, Animals, Environment, Science, Ethnography, Read For School

288 pages, Kindle Edition

Published August 9, 2018

About the author

Juno Salazar Parreñas is an Associate Professor of Science and Technology Studies and Feminist, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Cornell University. She examines human-animal relations, environmental issues, and efforts to institutionalize justice.

Reviews

[Sam Orndorff · Rating 5 out of 5]

I’ve read a lot of books about colonization, deforestation, genocide, etc. but this one might have been the most difficult to process out of them all. I just finished reading it and feel ill. I suppose extinction was never going to be an easy one, but here goes…

Due to agriculture (palm oil plantations), dams, logging and infrastructure projects in Borneo, orangutans face a precarious situation that humans attempt to resolve with wildlife rehabilitation centers. These sites are both semi-wild and highly controlled (violent). Perhaps the main premise of the book, exhibited in numerous interactions from Parreñas’ fieldwork, is that the temporary solutions to species extinction, the very goal of survival, is undermined by indefinite captivity and loss of the holistic habitat that ensures animals’ subsistence. Other relevant issues include the role of class, race, and gender, which constrain relations inside the wildlife center where people work, volunteer, and experience wildlife.

Parreñas is absolutely an excellent scholar, and the book is very readable. She poses relevant questions for people interested in the environment, ethnic and gender studies, and anthropology. The book provides critical insight for people who love animals, and covers some of the most profound problems, almost casually. There are no easy solutions to human and environmental relationships, but she suggests we desperately need to find modes of care that do not reinforce unnecessary pain. I was surprised by how hard it can be, even for experts who respect and revere orangutans, to ensure their wellbeing. But this is the task we face. The conclusion deals with the drowning of a biodiverse forest from a dam, and it’s one of the most harrowing accounts of dams that one could find. Overall, a vital book!

[JC · Rating 4 out of 5]

Comps reading. A very readable book. Not a profoundly transforming read for me personally, but not unenjoyable either. I disagree on a few issues, which I will briefly mention later. I saw Juno speak at 4S this past December. She was nice in the sense that she made time to talk to everyone that wanted to talk to her, despite being prodded by her partner to leave to make it in time for another appointment. But she was also fairly confrontational to another (white) grad student on the panel who had a fairly interesting paper on metabolic rift and basic nutritional levels that the British colonial administration had mapped out in their colonies in Malaya. The student had been drawing a lot on Black feminist geography, and Juno was asking why she wasn’t drawing on Southeast Asian scholars for work on Southeast Asia, and that it felt tokenizing to cite Black scholars in that context. A Black student from Berkeley who I talked with at dinner afterward agreed with Juno, and said she found this was a problem in reading groups she was a part of. I don’t have a strong opinion about this and I’m not Black so it’s perhaps not my place to voice my opinion even if I had one. Though I will take one sentence here to spill some tea for those who appreciate some STS gossip, Juno apparently got into a fight with Zoe Todd at some thing at Harvard over privilege. Honestly don’t share gossip with me because I will just spread it on goodreads. Just saying.

Anyway, my interest in this book firstly has to do with this book being about Malaysia and I have a significant interest of Southeast Asia both because my family have lived there for numerous generations and also because the main political org I organize with is focused on solidarity work in Southeast Asia. My favourite parts of this book are the little detours into Southeast Asian history.

Secondly, my own academic research is about colonial watermills which caused local fish populations like Atlantic salmon to go extinct around rivers that fed Lake Ontario in the mid to late 19th century (to clarify they were extirpated, or locally extinct, though who knows what fish species did go extinct). And there were significant fish restoration projects carried out by colonial scientists that largely failed, and the predominant fish in rivers around Toronto like the Don, Humber, and Credit are Pacific salmon.

A quick overview of the book. We meet Barbara Harrisson from the Sarawak Museum who runs the first orangutan rehab center ever, and the shift from framing rehab as a role of motherhood to a role of tough love, both orientations that are coloured by the regions colonial and postcolonial labour histories (Chapter 1). Then we get a little explanation of the bizarre phenomena of commercial volunteerism where people pay big bucks to do a shit load of work — like quite literally moving loads of shit out of orangutan cages (Chapter 2). Next we have some reflections on ‘enclosure’ both in the sense of a wildlife center that distinguishes itself from zoos but still has cages, and the privatization of common land which happened under colonialism and still happens under capitalist development. Perhaps the most interesting chapter is the one Salazar Parrenas thinks about the sexual violence that happens in these wildlife centers where female orangutans live under conditions that almost promote forced copulation which dovetails with the reproduction goals of the conservation center (Chapter 3). Pretty fucked up. There are debates within feminist science studies and among feminist primatologists whether the term rape is appropriate here. What Salazar Parrenas shows is that when the environment permits female choice, orangutans at the center reproduce at rates consistent with those outside of captivity. After this section, we get a glimpse at the lives of Indigenous workers at the Wildlife Center who like the animals they care for have been displaced and alienated from their land (Chapter 4). The next two chapters are about futures (both in the temporal sense and in the sense of capitalist instruments). We get a glimpse of orangutans returning to the semi-wild (Chapter 5) and a for-profit wildlife center that functions as hospice to a dying species that are financial assets for the little time they are still alive (Chapter 6).

Ok, I’ll just finish with some excerpts I liked.

This one is about time:

“If we were to take on an earthbound perspective of multiscalar time, we would see that extinction, like individual death, is a condition of planetary living. Decolonizing extinction is not an attempt to try to stop it. Rather, the question and challenge of decolonizing ex- tinction is its experimentation with other responses and other senses of re- sponsibility than what usually inspires us when we want to do something— anything—to stop what might be inevitable. The challenge of decolonizing extinction, then, is not to end extinction, but to consider how else might it unfold for those who will perish and for those who will survive.”

This one is about environmental justice:

“Critical questions such as which bodies—land, human, and otherwise—bear the toxins of industries indict environmental racism and ongoing colonialism, especially settler colonialism and its subtle and not-so-subtle forms of genocide”

This one is a take on worlds system theory which I disagree with (I still don’t understand why she thinks this theory is defeatist:

“While decolonial scholars like Maria Lugones (2010) offer a means to recognize nonhuman others as colonized sub- jects, decolonial efforts to center colonial exploitation beginning in 1492 and the subsequent sixteenth century ultimately work as a modified world systems theory (Mignolo 2015; Quijano 1995; Wallerstein 1974).26 To con- sider world systems theory at this moment, whether called as such or by a new name, suggests that colonialism is singular and far more totalizing and absolute in its power.27 If we were to accept the hegemony and totality of colonialism, we could not sufficiently consider the possibilities for how things might be otherwise.”

This is an excerpt about how dangerous working at the center can be:

“The potential threat of injury characterizes the work of caring for semi-- wild orangutans because there are no physical barriers between apes and people. This contrasts with modern zoos, where experiences with animals take place in a controlled environment and are mediated through the hindrances of iron bars, Plexiglas, or man-made moats.”

This is a great excerpt on colonial history and the etymology of orangutan:

“Consider the word orangutan. Orangutan is often translated as “Man of the Forest,” based on the Malay terms orang (person) and hutan (forest). It comes to English by way of the Dutch physician Jacobus Bontius, who was employed by the Dutch East Indies Company. He offered the first Euro- pean account of orangutans in the 1600s. On Java, in present-day Indone- sia, far from the forests in which orangutans live, Bontius had heard that orangutans are capable of speech but refuse to speak in order to avoid being put to work (Bontius [1642] 1931; Cribb et al. 2014). This has haunting significance insofar that this was in Batavia, when it was an entrepôl of the Dutch slave trade (Baay 2015; van Rossum 2015).

One better versed in Southeast Asia history or philology will tell you that the word orangutan was not the colloquial term for people living in orangutan habitats. The famed explorer Alfred Russel Wallace ([1869] 1890) reported that maias was the preferred term in Sarawak in the 1850s. It sounded like mawas, the common term used on the northern area of the island of Sumatra, across the Karimata Strait (Payne and Prudente 2008). These terms are likely cognates. Contemporary conservationists Junaidi Payne and J. Cede Prudente (2008) note that Sarawakians historically made three distinctions among orangutans: maias kesa (or small orangutans or juveniles), maias rambai (or medium-sized orangutans, presumably females and subadult males), and maias timbau or maias papan (or large and flanged adult males).45 As late as the 1950s, the curator of Sarawak Museum Tom Harrisson organized the Maias Commission to consider the ape’s conser- vation status. Since then, the term maias has faded out of everyday speech in Sarawak and orangutan has taken its place. People working at either of Sarawak’s two orangutan rehabilitation centers were unfamiliar with the word maias. The translation of orangutan as “person of the forest” or “man of the forest” bears only recent significance for Malay speakers at best.

If we take the history of language into account, we see that the idea of shared humanity through the audial affinity between orangutan and orang likely has its origin in a misunderstanding between a sixteenth-century Dutchman and the Javanese traders with whom he spoke. Understanding the relations that I describe in this book does not require a perspective that centers humanity, such as a Dutch Calvinist vision of animals as degenerate immoral products of the sinful and “detestable” desire of “women of the In- dies.”46 Indeed, evolution is irrelevant for how Sarawakian people relate to Sarawakian wildlife. Even without a claim to a shared “family of man”—11 million years have passed since humans shared a common ancestor with orangutans—Sarawakian people and orangutans already share experiences of displacement and arrested autonomy.”

This is a great excerpt on Raffles and the bizarre way Sarawak got its name:

“The era of European colonialism began in Sarawak in 1841, around twenty years after Sir Thomas Raffles founded Singapore as a trading post serving the British East Indies Company.52 James Brooke, the son of a colonial judge in British India, was inspired by Raffles to found a port to serve British maritime trading interests. In turn, the famous imperialist author Rudyard Kipling found a muse in James Brooke and his temerity. Kipling coined the verb “Sar-a-whack” to describe how an Englishman became the divine king of a land on the outskirts of the British Empire (Kipling 1919).
The historical record supports no such story of deification, but instead points to a story of subterfuge and gunboat diplomacy.53 In 1841, on behalf of the sultan of Brunei, Brooke suppressed a rebellion in the coastal city of Kuching, at the mouth of the Sarawak River. He then demanded that the sultan cede to him the area’s control.”

This is an excerpt connecting the loss of autonomy between colonial subjects and orangutans and neocolonialism:

“Arrested autonomy is expressed in Sarawak’s semiautonomous status. It is conveyed by orangutans who seem to be able to roam freely, but are actually constrained in a space shaped by colonial interventions on the land. It is evoked in Layang’s conviction that one ought to do something but is instead actively prevented from doing so. Arrested autonomy is arrested decolonization in the face of ongoing colonialism when colonialism is sup- posed to be over. It is the frustration of having the means intended to foster independence instead work toward continued dependence. Such forms of arrested autonomy serve as a recurring trope in Sarawak’s history since colonial contact.

And another one about how more-than-human subjects also suffer under colonialism

“But the insult of animality and the deprivation of humanity both depend on a colonial hierarchy in which some people are treated as less human than others (Weheliye 2014).59 Rejecting colonialism also requires rejecting the refusal to acknowledge the possibility of shared experiences with nonhuman others, for lack of a better word. In other words, decolonization offers potential recognition that colonial- ism has brutal impacts for many of Earth’s inhabitants, many of whom are not human.”

This is about the start of the communist insurgency in Malaya:

“The colonial government cracked down on opposition by issuing the Restricted Residence Ordinance in October 1961, which au- thorized the exile of critics of the government. This sparked a movement in Sarawak pushing for evaluation by the United Nations Decolonization Committee. It also led to a communist insurgency. The UN team visited Sarawak in April 1963 and encountered protests.”

And more about the communist insurgency:

“The crisis of food shortages and the inability to sufficiently participate in a cash economy while upriver coincided with the political crisis of com- munist insurgency and the Cold War. Apai Julai explained to me that they were encouraged by the government of Sarawak to relocate because of the communist insurgency that began in 1962, in the period of transition from British colonial rule to the rule of the federal state of Malaysia.16 With war being waged in the forests on the border between Sarawak and Indonesia, orangutans, too, felt the consequences of the Cold War: an infant orang- utan served as a living mascot to the Royal Army’s Troop C at Batu Lintang, which was only a few miles from the Sarawak Museum in the city center of Kuching. When the orangutan infant was surrendered to the museum, it was bald, constipated, and underfed (Sarawak Museum Curator 1965).17
Violence continued into the 1970s, despite the fall of the leftist Sukarno in Indonesia and the ascendancy of Suharto’s CIA-backed military dic- tatorship that formally ended the confrontation between Indonesia and Malaysia. The 1970s witnessed a series of state-supported military operations against communists in Sarawak. It was estimated that five hundred communists operated in the state, working on both sides of the border shared with Indonesia. Five thousand Malaysian troops were deployed for counterinsurgency efforts. Some operations, such as Operation Jala Raya (Malay royal net), increased policing by placing curfews, conducting house searches, patrolling jungles, and bombing communist hideouts. Others, like Operation Ngayau (Iban: to hunt or go on a war party), attempted to undermine communist support by promoting rural development. Rural communities received treatment from medics while army engineers built roads and bridges for local use. And other actions, like Operation Pumpong (Iban: to decapitate), forced the resettlement of specific longhouses”

This is an endnote of the anticommunist crackdown by the British:

"Britain had just spent more than a decade waging anticommunist war in Malaya, which entailed such tactics as indefinite detention, forced migration, and the first weaponized use of Agent Orange (Khalili 2013; Komer 1972). Sarawak would be the new nation-state’s largest territory. The British Crown set up the Cob- bold Commission to assess Sarawakian support of this plan (Chin and Langub 2007). Although they found that opinions were split three ways between yes, no, and maybe, the Crown interpreted this as a unanimous yes. This led to war between Malaysia and Indonesia and a communist insurgency that was ultimately suppressed following the genocide of Communist Party members in Indonesia..."

[Adam · Rating 2 out of 5]

It's been a while since I've read a proper academic humanities book, and I feel like I've forgotten how the whole enterprise is supposed to work. Or maybe I never really knew. There's a twitter meme humanities scholars have about how without humanities classes, STEM majors turn into supervillains. As if the purpose of their work is to inculcate a set of virtues--awareness of oft-overlooked cultural forces, but also something more overtly normative. And this book was presented to me, and presents itself, as if that's its purpose. To find a better way to handle the interspecies and interhuman relations involved in conservation of direly endangered species.

But the meat of the text is something very different. It's an account of a participant observation period spent in a single orangutan facility. Some of the history and the incidents described are fairly interesting, but they aren't built into a larger argument. No deeper meditation takes place. Incidents and historical facts are presented, and then they are, to my outsider's eye, legitimized by juxtaposition with formal discipline-specific terminology and extensive reference to schemas offered by previous scholars. That last part really bugged me. There would be a paragraph or two in the intro of each chapter where Parrenas simply listed relevant conceptual schemas she intended to apply. It struck me as very odd, because she never felt the need to justify why these schemas were valid or applicable, much less useful, and she never invoked them by name during the chapter that followed. They were simply invoked, as if that was sufficient for them to improve the book.

The same applies to a more complicated degree with the specific terms of humanities scholarship. Things like "affective" or "intersubjective" or "gendered"--words that have a clear meaning, and which you could conceivably use to make a point more clearly or direct attention to things that might otherwise be overlooked, but which in practice felt like they were used to make an anecdote worthwhile all on their own.

Annoyance with those tics is a shallow critique, ultimately. And honestly it was a superficial bad impression that didn't end up being a major issue. The fact that those terms and conceptual schemas from the literature don't come up in the body of the chapters is a relief, because that means they're mostly just plain and broadly interesting anecdotes about conservation work and the people and animals it involves. There are plenty of worthwhile observations in the text and it's rarely unpleasant or slow to read. I actually went through it quite quickly.

What bugged me, though, was more the sense that I never knew what Parrenas was trying to do, because she never actually makes her points. Perhaps I was expecting too much, and this is merely a descriptive book in which she tries to identify the strands of cultural causality operating in this space--a purely academic question of why some things happen some ways and by some people, and why they're interpreted as they are by the parties involved. But that exercise is never completed. Instead, it feels like she's always in the setup phase of a deeper and wider normative, ethical argument about how people should behave in these spaces. Maybe I'm reading too much into it, but describing extensive gendered violence between and within two primate species, in the context of a book framed about finding a new way to engage more humanely with dying species--it feels very normative! Which is fine, but why (presumably the norms of the field? feigning an "objective" perspective they don't want people to believe they can hold?) doesn't she dive into that material more explicitly? And then there are times when she pulls back yet another layer and puts a spotlight on the conceptual history of where her and her presumed audience's ideas about individual rights, consent, etc come from, how they differ from those of the local traditions, etc--raising yet more possible angles, further confusing the point of the book, and bringing resolution to none of it.

Overall it feels like a good and interesting piece of dissertation work, a brick in the wall of scholarship, but undermined for me by its unfulfilled pretense to something much larger and more interesting than it is actually prepared to achieve.

[Stephanie Froebel · Rating 4 out of 5]

Thank you to my (ex :/)roomie who suggested this book for me to read! It is a wonderful extension to ideas I have for my upcoming thesis and definitely presents new and insightful avenues to explore on human-wildlife connections!

I want to give this book 5 stars so badly, but I cannot neglect some of the meh about this book. The first four or so chapters are not weak, but not the strongest. A lot of arguments seem like simple opinions presented as intellectual advancements masked with academic jargon. The author brings in a lot of great minds to contextual her writing (Trouillot, Foucault, etc.), but these insertions, to me, present more as "I am well educated" instead of evidence to support her discussion. The final 2 chapters and the conclusion are where Parereñas hones her ideas better. The chapter on arrested autonomy, for me, was the strongest when paired with the exceptional introduction.

Her introduction is great. It says a lot, but I am not always confident her subsequent chapters match the ambition of her introduction. The examples to prove the violence she describes often feel like extrapolations and reading too deep into things.

This book review so far seems to have a negative tone, but lets not forget that this book does get 4 stars. Juno Salazar Parreñas is definitely contributing novel ideas to academia. I have so far read nothing similar and I have been searching (maybe her bibliography will guide me further). I greatly appreciate her looking at the intersection of history, politics, philosophy, conservation, and science. This intersection (or interface as she might suggest) is essential to progress being made in humanity. These fields cannot exist in isolation and I greatly appreciate her work to bridge the gaps.

If you are interested in wildlife conservation, rehabilitation, animal husbandry (although I hate that word), decolonization, environmental justice, orangutans 🦧, gender & queer theory.... this book is worth taking a glance at.

PS: the footnotes are essential so do read them as you read the main text!

[Anna Groover · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Everybody we know will pass away. How well we die depends on others. Decolonizing extinction is one aspiration for what remains of our lives. This to me is about experimentally living together, feeling obliged to others, without a sense of safety or control that requires violent domination, and while being open to the uncertain possibility of experiencing harm from contact with others, even when that potential harm may be fatal. Do we have the courage to face up to this challenge?" (185)

"When we make conservation interventions, can we be less enamored with the proliferation of new life and be more concerned with the process of dying well? Can we come to terms with the future we have imposed on orangutans? Are we, like Nadim, able to shift our perspectives to imagine the thoughts and feelings of those who are different from us? Do we have the courage to face the uncertainty that arises in our relations with others, however fleeting our time together may be?" (186)

[Heather Browning · Rating 3 out of 5]

I picked this up expecting a book of orangutan stories, and instead found a dense academic treatise which uses orangutans only as an illustration about larger points regarding decolonisation. It’s not for a general audience - thick with discipline-specific jargon and dotted with footnotes that continually break up the flow of the main text (though perhaps it was my fault - I could have skipped them). But given that, there were a lot of interesting themes covered here: the nature of motherly care and the 'tough love' used on infant orangutans intended for release, the ethics of forced copulation, voluntourism and gendered experience, displacement and loss, and the general entwined plight of humans and animals. A difficult read but an interesting one.

[Rhacel Parrenas · Rating 5 out of 5]

“Everybody we know will pass away. How well we die depends on others. Decolonizing extinction is one aspiration for what remains of our lives. This to me is about experimentally living together, felling obliged to others, without a sense of safety or control that requires violent domination, and while being open to the uncertain possibility of experiencing harm from contact with others, even when that potential harm may be fatal. Do we have the courage to face up to this challenge?”

[Lilith · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Decolonizing extinction requires a fundamental reorientation towards others, especially nonhuman others, in which we accept the risk of living together, even when others' lives pose dangers to our own."

[FluffyNyctea]

When Parreñas writes that ‘autonomy has to be understood through translation and through the specificity of contexts (pp. 153),’ she gestures toward plural autonomies. Not, however, equal autonomies. Parreñas’ assertion that ‘the state of being free and having license is exceptional and denied to most (pp. 156)’ points precisely to power differentials that order different autonomies. Let’s join Parreñas’ attention to ‘the movement of vision between scales of time and space (pp. 156),’ and see how different autonomies encounter and play out.

When powerful actors such as the former chief minister exercise their autonomies, they enact spatial and temporal regimes that impinge upon the autonomies of other inhabitants of Sarawak. With ‘sand, concrete, dams, and plantations (pp. 156),’ specific spaces and times take shape. The space of displacement, from ulu [far upriver] to near the bandar [city], from forests to wildlife centres; the space of enclosure. The time of waged labour, of ‘caring or watching out for the person/orangutan (pp. 148)’; the time of extinction. This is where and when autonomies arrest autonomies. ‘Arrested autonomy’ is both spatial and temporal. It’s a capture of other spaces and other times. It’s when Wani finds Lundu Wildlife Center the only space of survival, the kind of survival that melts into extinction. It’s when Nadim can only care for Wani by providing mere subsistence, for he himself is confined by wage labour. ‘Arrested autonomy’ is a capture of relations beyond impositions.

The question is, with autonomies being plural, can there really be relations beyond impositions? Isn’t somebody/some body’s autonomy always an imposition on somebody/some body else? Parreñas encourages us to think of autonomy as distinction. Autonomy as distinction suggests that, in order to reach across differences, to imaginatively take on other subjectivities, we have to first be different, including desiring different autonomies. Autonomy, then, is relational not in the sense that, in order to achieve a singular, harmonious autonomy, we must cultivate specific kinds of relationality. Instead, plural autonomies give us the very grammar of relationality, of ‘empathetically [living] with differences, distinctions, and potential risks (pp. 154).’ So, while autonomies do not guarantee relations beyond impositions, they offer a powerful analytic to critique imposing and arresting relations, and they are the very conditions of possibility for better relations.

Then, when Parreñas asserts that ‘the state of being free and having license is exceptional and denied to most (pp. 156),’ she does not just point to a bleak reality. She also opens up the space and time to imagine being together, while being different.

[Swarm Feral · Rating 4 out of 5]

Retreads critiques of volunteerism, neocolonial conservation, and ethical tourism. I don't have a lot of time to do this book justice, but Parreñas suggests we rethink rehabilitation not as a progressive, agency building, journey to wildness but as a form of hospice care in the face of likely extinction which resonated with me deeply as someone who went from helping adults with learning disabilities become more independent from the state to doing end of life care for my grandma. This is a call to radically reimagine ethical life with nonhumans beyond mastery, management, or salvation. It also calls into question the reproductive futurism and state of exception and banality almost fascist trappings.

[Amber Manning · Rating 5 out of 5]

“Everybody we know will pass away. How well we die depends on others. Decolonizing extinction is one aspiration for what remains of our lives. This to me is about experimentally living together, felling obliged to others, without a sense of safety or control that requires violent domination, and while being open to the uncertain possibility of experiencing harm from contact with others, even when that potential harm may be fatal. Do we have the courage to face up to this challenge?” (185).

[Femke Rutgers · Rating 4 out of 5]

"A quarter of mammals on Earth are threatened, endangered, or critically endangered. Orangutans are one of many that are now fewer than ever before."

"Working with semi-wild orangutans entailed taking personal risk and experiencing physical vulnerability."

Great anthropological book on multispecies ethnography and the politics of extinction.

[Aaron · Rating 5 out of 5]

I've been reading wayyy too much about extinction in the past month for my own sanity but this book was still a gut punch. Absolutely harrowing and provocative not for the sake of provocation but because its just real and so damn important.

[LaanSiBB]

Care with violence isn't a new idea, but it's always a good cue to think beyond our own experience, while not making things up in a vacuum

[Maya Rice]

read for class => anthropology of the anthropocene (spring 2022)

[Celia Austin · Rating 4 out of 5]

no one escapes the British empire 😔

[Marc Jackson · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a really interesting look at the intersections between colonialism, politics, class, gender, ethics, and caretaking in an area of Borneo undertaking the care of orangutans displaced by palm oil production.
Much of the book is heart-breaking and infuriating however it reveals the complexities of conservation projects working to save critically endangered species. What is clear from Parrreñas' observations is that funding and oversight are crucial to any sense of sustainability but without addressing the underlying causes of species extinction — habitat fragmentation and destruction, that conservation efforts will always struggle at the expense of the species we are attempting to save.

This book really opens your eyes to the political and ethical issues at play in conservation projects while exploring the lives of both the people and orangutans inhabiting the space of compassionate captivity.