Hospice for a Dying Species: Institutionalizing Semi-Wild Orangutans

• In Event: Messing with Methods in More-than-Human Worlds I

Abstract

How do individuals come to stand in for their species? This scalar question is imposed upon orangutans that have been displaced from their wild habitats and who are held captive within bounded forests known as wildlife centers in Sarawak on Borneo, in present-day Malaysia. All subspecies of orangutans are critically endangered as of 2016. The institution holding semi-wild orangutans is less like a zoo and more like a commercial hospice. Both wildlife centers and hospices offer institutionalized care for those unable to survive alone. Both must stay profitable, especially in the context of privatization and diminished state support. Both are workplaces for caregivers who support their charges’ lives while also actively anticipating their deaths. Both are also places of mutual but unequal vulnerability, where abuse and harm can go in multiple directions. The wildlife center provides palliative care at a scale that collapses individual with species. However, the analogy ends when the palliative care of the rehabilitation center lacks comfort. The paper engages care workers’ perspectives and stories of dying orangutans and is based on seventeen months of multispecies ethnographic fieldwork in Sarawak. It contributes to the robust literature in STS on animals, care, Asia, extinction, and capitalism (Choy 2011; Haraway 1989, 2010, 2008; Hayden 2003; Rajan 2006).

Author

• Juno Salazar Parrenas, The Ohio State University