Power, Care and Species Difference in Orangutan Rehabilitation in Sarawak: A Roundtable.

Abstract

Juno Parrenas’ ground-breaking monograph examines how power relations are embedded in interactions of work and care between humans and animals, using the case of orangutan rehabilitation in Sarawak as a lens. It encourages us to imagine a different, ethical mode of living with animals even if it involves risks to ourselves. Each contributor to this roundtable critically analyzes an aspect of the book. Alicia Izharuddin focuses on issues arising from gendered care in the volume, Monamie Haines reflects on how the book deploys the concepts of nature-culture and decolonization, Faizah Zakaria discusses the moral imperatives in the book and the possibilities it holds for radical change, and Robert Cribb analyzes the book’s colonial framework and the multiple meanings that freedom could take for humans and animals alike.

Summary

This roundtable brings together four scholars to critically engage with Juno Salazar Parreñas’ monograph Decolonizing Extinction: The Work of Care in Orangutan Rehabilitation (Duke University Press, 2018), which is based on over a year of ethnographic fieldwork at the Batu and Lundu Wildlife Centres in Sarawak. The central problem the book addresses is how colonial-era modernization embedded asymmetrical power relations into the very infrastructure of orangutan conservation, producing what Parreñas terms “arrested autonomy” for both the orangutans and the low-wage Sarawak workers charged with their care (pp. 205–206). The roundtable contributors each isolate a distinct analytical thread: Izharuddin examines how gendered care is defamiliarized in a bio-emergency context, where “tough love” and forced breeding invert the softness typically associated with caregiving; Haines explores the book’s treatment of nature-culture as an inseparable entanglement and its pedagogical effects on students in Singapore; Zakaria situates the work within environmental history and questions why its radical politics remain implicit rather than explicit; and Cribb interrogates the multiple meanings of the Malay term bebas (freedom) as it applies to both human and non-human subjects in captivity.

The discussion collectively reveals that the rehabilitation centres operate within a paradox: programs designed to make solitary, reclusive orangutans “wild” and “independent” are themselves products of the habitat destruction that made rehabilitation necessary, and the economic logic of ecotourism that funds the centres simultaneously confines large communities in spaces too small for their needs (pp. 206–207). Parreñas’ reply to the discussants clarifies her refusal to offer prescriptive solutions, arguing that doing so would replicate the colonial gesture of planning another’s liberation, and instead positions uncertainty itself as generative—a space in which new modes of relation might emerge before the window of coexistence closes entirely (pp. 213–214).

Key Findings

The monograph is grounded in over a year of participant observation at two Sarawak rehabilitation centres (Batu and Lundu Wildlife Centres), involving managing staff, international volunteers, local caretakers, and forest rangers (p. 205).
The book received the 2019 Michelle Z. Rosaldo Prize from the Association for Feminist Anthropology, recognizing its contribution to feminist and multispecies scholarship (p. 204).
The local rehabilitation worker Layang died of melioidosis contracted through direct contact with orangutans, illustrating the bodily risks borne by the lowest-ranked humans in the care hierarchy (p. 209).
1970s development initiatives and 1980s dam building in Sarawak directly displaced two orangutans and their caretaker at the site that became Lundu Wildlife Centre, linking infrastructure projects to the very conditions requiring rehabilitation (p. 214).
Sarawak’s former Chief Minister Taib Mahmud accumulated a fortune in the timber industry that decimated orangutan forest habitat during his thirty-year tenure, while the state remained among the poorest in Malaysia (p. 210).
The colonial-era origin of orangutan conservation in Sarawak is traced to Barbara Harrisson, wife of the curator of the Sarawak Museum of Natural History and Ethnology, whose “ape motherhood” established a template of interspecies power relations that persisted into the post-colonial period (pp. 206, 209).

Conclusion

The roundtable converges on the view that Decolonizing Extinction makes its most powerful contribution not through a prescriptive political programme but through its insistence that vulnerability, risk, and embodied care-work are the only honest responses to a bio-emergency in which both orangutans and the humans who care for them are trapped in “arrested autonomy.” Parreñas’ final position is that the grimness of the outlook is itself the point: the limited time remaining before extinction is what lends each cross-species encounter its poignancy and its resistance to the neoliberal structures that would otherwise reduce both animals and workers to manageable, profitable units.

Context

The roundtable draws on Parreñas’ ethnographic fieldwork in Sarawak and engages with secondary sources including the Bruno Manser Fonds investigative reports (Switzerland) and the Sarawak Report by Clare Rewcastle Brown (UK), which document environmental and human rights violations in the state (p. 214).
Historiographically, the article positions itself within the emerging “animal turn” in Southeast Asian studies, identifying a gap between Peter Boomgaard’s Frontiers of Fear (2001) and Cribb, Gilbert and Tiffin’s Wild Man from Borneo (2014) on one hand, and the lived-experience ethnography that Parreñas’ work introduces on the other (p. 205).