Ape Motherhood as Counter-Science in a Colonial Home: Orangutan Rehabilitation in Sarawak

• In Event: Racial Mattering and Scientific (In)Sensibilities

Abstract

Rehabilitating orangutans entails training orphaned and displaced orangutans to live as semi-wild orangutans in sanctuaries. The idea began as a form of “ape motherhood,” which was an experiment of freedom in the midst of active debates around decolonization. “Ape motherhood” was a queer practice of trans-species life at the peripheries of science. Embodying ape motherhood for Barbara Harrisson entailed embodying another kind of gender, one opposed to both colonial motherhood and a universal sense of human nurturing, one situated in the jungles of Borneo and in a homemade laboratory in a colonial bungalow far from the centers of scientific knowledge production. This paper is based on archival and ethnographic research in Sarawak between 2008-2016. It builds on feminist STS literatures on care, colonial knowledge production, fieldwork, as well as diversity and relations across species to argue that the adoption of scientific instruments and measurements in the colonial home of Barbara Harrisson rooted her experimentation not in the world of gentlemanly science from which her husband Tom Harrisson came, nor in the bourgeois world of homemaking and home economics, but rather in an alternative world-making project akin to colonial civic science (Weiss 1977; Haraway 1989; Stoler 2002; Fortun and Fortun 2005; Anderson 2006; Kirksey and Helmreich 2010; von Oertzen, Rentetzi, and Watkins 2013; Subramaniam 2014; Martin, Myers, and Viseu 2015; Murphy 2015).

Author

• Juno Salazar Parrenas, The Ohio State University