“Only the orangutans get a life jacket”: Uncommoning responsibility in a global conservation nexus
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Publication Date
2021Journal Title
American Ethnologist
ISSN
0094-0496
Publisher
Wiley
Language
en
Type
Article
This Version
VoR
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Show full item recordCitation
Chua, L., Fair, H., Schreer, V., Stępień, A., & Thung, P. (2021). “Only the orangutans get a life jacket”: Uncommoning responsibility in a global conservation nexus. American Ethnologist https://doi.org/10.1111/amet.13045
Abstract
In an era of mass extinction, who gets a life jacket, who is left to drown or swim—and on what basis? This article addresses these questions by analyzing how tropes and practices of responsibility are variously enacted, reworked, contested, and refused across the global nexus of orangutan conservation. Drawing on multisited, collaborative ethnography, we trace the mutually constitutive relation between multiple orangutan figures and commons imaginaries at different nodes of conservation—from environmental activism in the Global North to NGO-villager encounters in rural Borneo. In so doing, we “uncommon” international conservation's encompassing planetary imaginaries, showing how dominant portrayals of the orangutan as a global responsibility are translated and fragmented in different settings. We further contemplate what an analytic of responsibility might bring to ongoing discussions about the “commoning” planetary epoch in which conservation is increasingly embedded: the Anthropocene.
Sponsorship
European Research Council Starting Grant 758494, Arcus Foundation Great Apes Program, Brunel University London
Funder references
European Commission Horizon 2020 (H2020) ERC (758494)
Identifiers
External DOI: https://doi.org/10.1111/amet.13045
This record's URL: https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/handle/1810/331137
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