Description
Book SynopsisIn 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 expe
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"This is seriously thought-provoking and challenging material, and it may be essential to understand it if we want to save orangutans from ourselves." -- John R. Platt * The Revelator *
"Impactful. . . . Juno S. Parreñas details diverse assumptions and expectations participants bring to this complex network, thereby generating a unique and timely addition to the conservation literature. Highly recommended. Advanced undergraduates through faculty and professionals." -- L. K. Sheeran * Choice *
"Decolonizing Extinction is essential reading for anyone with the ambition to do multispecies ethnography well. It’s also a beautiful and moving book that struggles with the ethical weight of ethnography as a mode of knowledge production." -- Gabriel N. Rosenberg * Radical History Review *
"[This book] excels in these tricky in-between places: in meetings between species, between temporalities, between bodies, between genders, between sexes, and across divergent positions within colonial histories and presents. Parreñas tracks meetings across difference with the best kind of ethnographic sensitivity." -- Rosemary Collard * Society & Space *
"Decolonizing Extinction offers a compelling example of why feminism is well suited and positioned to take on issues related to animals, as well as how gender relations of power are necessarily embedded in human-animal relations, and in turn broader process of colonization and arrested autonomy." -- Alice Hovorka * Society & Space *
"The book brilliantly weaves discussions about broader socio-political transformations and norms alongside very careful and detailed accounts of the everyday practices and interactions between orangutans and people." -- Krithika Srinivasan * Society & Space *
"A powerful, thought-provoking, and touching account of the quotidian nature of mass extinction." -- Becky Mansfield * Society & Space *
"Parreñas’s Decolonizing Extinction is a beautifully written book, in which she uses a case study of orangutan rehabilitation on Borneo to weave together many complex analytic threads: gender, race, and labor; care, violence, and freedom; liberalism and neoliberalism; the geological past, the colonial present, and the prospect of a different future." -- Rebecca Lave * Society & Space *
“With Decolonizing Extinction, Juno Salazar Parreñas gives us a groundbreaking and beautifully written multispecies ethnography that explores the entwined lives of human and nonhuman primates. Deftly combining primatology, political ecology, and postcolonial and feminist theory, her book will interest biological and cultural anthropologists alike and has the potential to foster deeper cross-disciplinary engagement.” -- Genese Marie Sodikoff * American Ethnologist *
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments ix
Introduction: Decolonizing Extinction 1
Part I. Relations
1. From Ape Motherhood to Tough Love 33
2. On the Surface of Skin and Earth 61
Part II. Enclosures
3. Forced Copulation for Conservation 83
4. Finding a Living 105
Part III. Futures
5. Arrested Autonomy 131
6. Hospice for a Dying Species 157
Conclusion: Living and Dying Together 177
Notes 189
References 223
Index 255
