What care takes: ripple affects and more-than-human politics in a conservation frontier

Abstract

In recent years, conservation has increasingly been framed as a ‘salvage’ frontier that—like resource, national, and other frontiers—drastically remakes territories, livelihoods, and socio-legal systems. Our article builds on but also nuances this framing by highlighting the (often-occluded) affective, moral, and relational dimensions of frontier-making, specifically in the context of orangutan conservation. Drawing on research in different parts of Borneo, we conceptualise orangutan conservation as a frontier of care: a powerful, diffuse interventionist project that transforms not only territories and livelihoods but also local carescapes, atmospheres, and quotidian relations in the name of caring for one critically endangered species. Ethnographically exploring the question of what care takes, we show how imaginaries and practices of care-for-orangutans can generate coercive, dispossessive effects on the ground. Yet examining the workings of this conservation frontier from the inside also sheds light on its sheer fragility and contingency, and, importantly, emergent possibilities for different projects of care within frontier zones.