Decolonizing Extinction: The Work of Care in Orangutan Rehabilitation
288
Decolonizing Extinction: The Work of Care in Orangutan Rehabilitation
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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780822370772 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Duke University Press |
| Publication date: | 08/20/2018 |
| Series: | Experimental Futures |
| Edition description: | New Edition |
| Pages: | 288 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.60(d) |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
FROM APE MOTHERHOOD TO TOUGH LOVE
When explaining the project of orangutan rehabilitation to a potential donor, the British program manager of Endangered Great Ape Getaways (ENGAGE) Tom said, "Our philosophy is to provide tough love, not mother's love." He went on to mimic what he would say to an orphaned orangutan sent to the center: "So your mother's been shot. Tough luck; off you go." He stuck out his hand in front of him and deliberately pushed the air, gesturing what such a training of rejection looks like. How did motherhood come to be the antithesis of rehabilitation, especially when it had been the idiom of choice for Barbara Harrisson, whose experiment in raising orphaned orangutans began the practices used in all orangutan rehabilitation efforts today?
Harrisson, as the wife of the curator of the Sarawak Museum of Natural History and Ethnology, raised orphaned orangutan infants from 1956 until 1967. Unable to return them to the wild, where they would die without their mothers, where "the wild" was subjected to mass logging and road construction hitherto unseen, and unwilling to send them to metropolitan zoos built during the late nineteenth century, where orangutans in captivity were housed in concrete exhibits and displayed signs of poor health, Harrisson sought an alternative. She worked to realize that alternative with the help of a small workforce active in her home. This experiment took place at the periphery of modern biology, in the space of the colonial domicile.
Domestic labor was crucial in this domestic laboratory, which was the site of active experimentation looking toward a flourishing future independence in a decolonizing Sarawak. This experiment with orangutans meant their learning to live independently while living together with human caretakers. For Bidai and Dayang, who worked in Harrisson's home, it meant figuring out how to foster independence in others while they experienced new forms of dependency on money through wage labor. For Barbara Harrisson, it meant staking out new kinds of social relations and an attempt to achieve influence from a distance by way of modern scientific knowledge production. For the orangutans and the people who cared for them, this was the direct interface of extinction, a condition new to everyone in it.
Fifty years later, the term ape motherhood had been replaced by tough love. Both concepts employed the same tactics of rejection, in which handlers literally push away orangutans. Both occurred at the site of orangutan rehabilitation, in the space between human handlers and infant or juvenile orangutans. Both were enacted at the peripheries of scientific knowledge production. Both strove for orangutans' eventual independence. Yet the earlier domain of ape motherhood transgressed the boundaries between the domestic and the scientific, between private home and public museum. Tough love cut through various boundaries of private and public. It occurred in a space created by a private–public entity, shared between a private volunteer company and the semigovernmental, privatized wing of the Forestry Department. It was a space that rejects the home and the domicile in favor of the wildlife center: a privately managed but state-owned space, a place of work, not of dwelling, a place of manly bravado and not womanly motherhood — regardless of how transgressive that motherhood may have been.
The comparison I make across a time span of fifty years is not meant to demonstrate how far we have progressed. Indeed, it shows the opposite: the challenges Barbara Harrisson faced continue in the present: how are humans to conduct themselves in the interface of extinction? What futures are possible in these circumstances? The responses to these questions have evoked the same issues in both the past and present: it compelled, and continues to compel, the production of scientific knowledge at the peripheries of science.
In this chapter, I examine the embodied colonial legacies of caring for orangutans. Barbara Harrisson's idea of ape motherhood was carried out in collaboration with her assistant, Bidai anak Pengulu Nimbun, a Selakau youth who lived with the Harrissons, and to a limited extent Dayang, Harrisson's matronly Malay housekeeper. I show that Harrisson's ape motherhood was both a colonial project of stewardship and one that envisioned an alternative future that stood against the institution of the bourgeois colonial family. I then examine a confrontation described by Harrisson in her memoir Orang-Utan as a way to explain how she ambivalently reflected upon care, gender, ethnicity, and expertise in the colonial era. I then end with a comparison between contemporary and past ideas of orangutan infant care, as they were mediated through the language and embodiment of tough love and through the method of photo elicitation, in which contemporary orangutan handlers interpreted two archival photographs from Harrisson's orangutan rehabilitation efforts. I ultimately argue that Harrisson's interspecies experiment to instill freedom among displaced orangutans was both a colonial and a decolonizing intervention, one that served as a history of a feral future. Yet that history is dissociated from the present, even as the present evokes that history through everyday violence.
Motherhood across Species
The project of handling displaced infant orangutans fell into Barbara Harrisson's lap, literally, on Christmas Day in 1956. The Forestry Department had confiscated an illegally kept infant orangutan and sent the little one to Tom Harrisson, who brought him home. Their home, Bunglo Segu, was unlike any other British colonial abode. It was the modestly sized summer bungalow of the last White Rajah of Sarawak before he abdicated the throne following World War II and transferred power to the British Crown. As the newly appointed curator of the Sarawak Museum following the war, Tom Harrisson relocated the entire structure in 1947 from Serian Road to its present-day location on what was known during the colonial era as Pig Lane. Harrisson commissioned elaborate Kelabit and Kenyah murals on the walls and ceilings. Sarawakian artwork and artifacts filled the entire house, blurring the distinction of spheres between private residence and public museum as well as between private possession and public ownership. The house had accommodated Harrisson and his Kelabit wife Sigang, who as a Kelabit and thereby a Sarawakian native, was unable to live with him in the government resthouse. By late 1955, Sigang and Tom Harrisson's marriage had dissolved; he and the then-named Barbara Brünig nee Güttler developed a close relationship while they worked together at the Sarawak Museum. Barbara divorced her first husband and married Tom Harrisson in May 1956.
With the arrival of that infant orangutan six months after Barbara and Tom Harrisson married, the house was to become the site of the world's first-ever orangutan rehabilitation project. This was twenty years before the formation of Sepilok Orang Utan Reserve in Sabah and Biruté Galdikas's even more famous Tanjung Puting site in Central Kalimantan, Indonesia. Barbara would go on to raise a total of twenty-five orangutans at the home she shared with Tom Harrisson, until her departure from Sarawak in June 1967, when she was forced to leave following official decolonization.
Barbara Harrisson fostered infant orangutans so that they might eventually lead independent lives. This occurred during Sarawak's years of political transition from British crown colony to the federal state of Malaysia, between 1961 and 1966. Her initial musings about orangutan independence occurred a year after the Asian-African Conference took place in neighboring Indonesia in Bandung, where the Third World stance against "colonialism in all of its manifestations" was articulated (Abdulgani 1955). This was fifteen years after the last White Rajah promised Sarawak's eventual self-governance in 1941, ten years after he reneged on that promise and transferred Sarawak to Britain in 1946, and seven years after an anticolonial assassination of the first British appointed governor of Sarawak in 1949. As a form of punishment, the colonial government forbade the participation of Malays in political parties (Leigh 1974). The problem of how to instill independence was as much a political one for Sarawak's colonial society as it was a programmatic one in the Harrisson household.
Barbara Harrisson's experiments on how best to care for orphaned orangutans show how the colonial dynamics of care and intimacy shaped orientations toward native animals that by then were categorized as endangered species (Fisher et al. 1969; Harrisson 1965a, 1965b, 1987). Orangutan infants are not just vulnerable beings, deprived of their mothers who would otherwise have cared for them for about seven years (Galdikas and Wood 1990). Their bodies bear the weight of being archives for a lively future worth saving from potential extinction and worth fostering so that they may eventually return to a life with some form of freedom.
The infant orangutans themselves make their own material demands: satiating their hunger is one of their needs; grasping arms accustomed to holding onto the furry flesh of their mothers' bodies makes a demand, too. Such demands elicit complex responses. Barbara Harrisson described one such response in her memoir Orang-Utan as "ape motherhood." This kind of motherhood was a form of interspecific care that fostered relations of rejection instead of affection. Its authority rested on Harrisson's appropriation of scientific instruments and her own fraught relationship to the colonial state as the German-born wife of a British colonial officer in which her whiteness represented the British power to police and punish Sarawakians of all ethnic groups.
Barbara Harrisson became a researcher and conservationist by carrying out the work of research and conservation at a time when formal education had been unnecessary. In fact, her first degree in art history meant that her formal education exceeded her husband's, since he had left Cambridge University in his first term and never resumed his studies. Without an advanced degree, Barbara Harrisson personally excavated Niah Caves, which at the time had been the site of the oldest known hominid remains in Asia. She did this while carrying out what she called an "experiment" in fostering orangutan infants out of her modest home, which had been partially converted into a rehabilitation center and later a section of the newly founded Bako Nature Reserve. When she left Sarawak, she accepted an invitation to pursue a PhD at Cornell University, where she specialized in Asian ceramics. Although she was in correspondence with the newly formed Wenner-Gren Foundation, the possibility of studying nonhuman primates at a Max Planck Institute in West Germany with Wenner-Gren funds did not materialize. She went on to direct the Royal Museum of Ceramics in the Netherlands. There, she retired and continued to live independently in her own home until her death at the age of ninety-three in 2015. When I met her in 2006 at her home in the Netherlands, I was struck by her commanding height, the clarity with which she spoke, her generosity in letting me stay overnight in her home, and the precision of her words: "I will not speak about my personal life with a stranger."
The wish to not discuss her personal life may seem to be an espousal of bourgeois private and public spheres. Yet her own memoir of her experiments in rehabilitating orangutans made no such distinction between the personal and the public. Originally published in 1962, Harrisson's book Orang-Utan (1987) takes us to the most intimate spaces of her life in Sarawak: the bed on which she lay sick with a cold when Bob, the first orangutan she raised, was brought to her lap; the bathroom in which she and her husband brushed their teeth and hair while infant orangutans would stare at them from the other side of the wire screen covered window, where the infants slept on the veranda in cages with burlap gunnysacks. Her writing evokes the memory of Alfred Russel Wallace and the genre of the travelogue in which natural history and ethnography blend together. Yet her descriptions are set amid sweeping changes brought about by modernization. Her vision of Sarawak is marked with a careful respect for the details of her everyday encounters with Sarawakians, from the city's Chinese coffee shops, to its rural Iban longhouses, to the grounds of her own home.
Her refusal to address my personal questions was likely less about the preservation of public and private distinctions, and more about a refusal to respond to the stories in Tom Harrisson's biography, The Most Offending Soul Alive, written by a member of their colonial social circle in Kuching (Heimann 1998). The work details Barbara Harrisson's life and the life she shared with Tom Harrisson. My interest here is not to pry into her marriage and intimate life for the sake of unearthing scandal. Instead, my interest is in how colonial and transgressive intimacy shaped her own and her assistants' conduct in raising orphaned orangutans, which was to become the standard for other orangutan rehabilitation sites. Their conduct served as the basis of how to live together at the interface of extinction.
In her memoir Orang-Utan, Barbara Harrisson distinguishes her household and by extension herself from the hegemony of the colonial bourgeoisie. This is especially expressed in regard to the aesthetics of the home. She explains that her home was "the housewife's bad dream, a conglomeration of all things Bornean, pinned and stuck on wall and ceiling, lying on tables and floor everywhere and nowhere" (1987: 32). Her tastes stood in contrast to "lady visitors of orthodox tastes," who would enter her home and either be shocked into silence or compelled to pose the stark question, "How can you live here?" (1987: 32). Through her portrayal of such visitors, Harrisson rejects the civilizing authority of British colonial femininity (Burton 1994; McClintock 1995).
If the interior spaces of their home rejected Western civilization and celebrated Sarawakiana instead, the same sentiment echoed through the "green wilderness" of their bungalow's exterior (1987: 32). It was not severely manicured European landscaping; neither was it the controlled flourishing of an English garden (Thomas 1996; Tuan 1984). Rather, it was as Sarawakian as the rest of the house: durian trees and pineapple bushes with frangipani and hibiscus. It was technically not a "wilderness" since her descriptions consisted of cultivars, domesticated by definition. Yet at Bunglo Segu they took on a life of their own. Harrisson illustrates feral growth that was made possible by the "sporadic" quality of human interventions on the land (1987: 32). This too stood in distinct contrast to the gardens of Borneo's swidden agriculturalists, including Iban, Bidayuh, Kelabit, and Selakau peoples, whose carefully managed gardens featuring rattan and durian trees, coming in and out of years of production and lying fallow during rest periods, are often misunderstood by outsiders as abandoned or lying waste (Fried 2000; Merchant 1980; Padoch and Peluso 1996; Scott 1998; Tsing 2005). Harrisson's colonial home and garden were neither civilized nor wild, but something else: something odd and extraordinary in its alterity against colonial family and propriety. Her garden mirrored the feral futures for which she hoped on the behalf of the orangutans she raised.
Adding to that "something else" was Barbara Harrisson's lack of children, which distinguished her from her female peers among the colonial elite in Kuching. It was also a major point of difference between herself and the Sarawakian woman with whom she had the most contact: her housekeeper or amah. Harrisson perceived that her Malay housekeeper, Dayang, wanted them, her employers, to have a child. Harrisson writes, "In her [Dayang's] view, a house without children was no house, empty, without purpose, without fun" (Harrisson 1987: 38). Following Ann Stoler and Karen Strassler (2000), it is quite possible that Dayang's interest in children could have been an interest in the security of her employment within a colonial household. To the contrary, Harrisson seems convinced that Dayang's interest was an emotional or personal one tied to reproduction as a form of female fulfillment.
Readers see what Harrisson perceives as her housekeeper's genuine interest in children and reproduction upon the arrival of Eve, the second orangutan at their house. Eve was extremely malnourished at just seven pounds, despite having teeth that indicated an age of about ten months. Perhaps it was the sight of Eve's skinny body or the chafe marks on Eve's neck from a chain that left the skin raw that compelled Dayang to say something. It is in this moment that Barbara Harrisson explains to readers that her housekeeper has raised many children, alluding to the idea that Dayang raised her own kin and not her employers'. Harrisson writes that Dayang reared "a crowd of children and adopted children" (1987: 38). The multitude indicated by the word crowd could have been meant to convey Harrisson's own alienation toward child-rearing. It could also have been meant disdainfully to convey masses of individuals, like a mob, or the litters birthed by such domesticated and commensal animals as cats, dogs, and mice. Yet for Harrisson, it works to establish a difference between an affectionate and tender kind of motherhood versus a form of care that requires being tough and stern. Upon seeing the sickly and skinny Eve, Dayang in Harrisson's memoir, "looked her over with suspicion: 'She is surely small, Mem, she must take milk or she will die — let me try and take her.' With a sigh of relief I [Barbara Harrisson] handed her over, hoping that Dayang at last had found what she missed so much in our household: a baby to cuddle and look after" (1987: 38). In that moment, Dayang represents a sympathetic human motherhood, in which feeding and cuddling are crucial for the survival and well-being of the desperately dependent baby. This is set as the norm against which Harrisson finds her own way.
(Continues…)
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Table of Contents
Acknowledgments ix Introduction: Decolonizing Extinction 1 Part I. Relations 1. From Ape Motherhood to Tough Love 33 2. On the Surface of Skin and Earth 61 Part II. Enclosures 3. Forced Copulation for Conservation 83 4. Finding a Living 105 Part III. Futures 5. Arrested Autonomy 131 6. Hospice for a Dying Species 157 Conclusion: Living and Dying Together 177 Notes 189 References 223 Index 255What People are Saying About This
“How can humans and orangutans share a future together in the midst of violence and extinction? How do we embrace risk and cultivate attentiveness with endangered species? Can we let go of safe inequality? In this moving, stunning story of interspecies relations in a Malaysian wildlife center, Juno Salazar Parreñas demands we decolonize our understanding of conviviality, extinction, and loss. Functioning as an orangutan hospice, a place for palliation and not solutions, the wildlife center becomes a tragic allegory for the fate of our planet. What is to be done? Here Parreñas allows us to glimpse a different future.”
“Even the processes of extinction are subject to active colonization. But what would shared vulnerability be outside violent domination and ongoing colonization of human and nonhuman others? This book's focus is the painful work of care of captive 'rehabilitating' orangutans by workers themselves enmeshed in structures of arrested autonomy. These are extraordinary, entirely unromantic social relations at the edge of extinction and at the heart of extraction and exploitation. Here is a deep, heartfelt, and quite simply brilliant book that gives us a needed theory of decolonization in the everyday work of care in impossible circumstances. Who lives and who dies and how inside which practices of care? How might things—still—be otherwise?”