Periodic Reporting for period 4 - GLO (Refiguring Conservation in/for 'the Anthropocene': The Global Lives of the Orangutan)
Période du rapport: 2021-09-01 au 2023-09-30
In recent years, conservationists have engaged in heated debates about whether and how conservation should respond to the challenges posed by ‘the Anthropocene’—a term encapsulating the overwhelming impact of human activity on the Earth system. How are these debates reshaping conservation thought, strategy and practice? How are they manifested in and across diverse contexts? How, conversely, are global conservation developments and ‘Anthropocenic’ phenomena apprehended and reshaped on the ground? The GLO project explored such urgent questions through an unprecedented study of the global nexus of orangutan conservation in a planetary moment marked by flux and uncertainty. Combining in-depth ethnography and multiply-scaled cross-context comparison, it approached orangutan conservation as a sprawling, uneven terrain across which the rapidly-evolving relationship between conservation and ‘the Anthropocene’ was playing out. Its objectives were 1) to examine if and how contemporary conservation was being ‘scaled up’ and re(con)figured in and for ‘the Anthropocene’; and 2) to cut ‘the Anthropocene’ down to size by exploring how it was experienced, conceptualized, contested or refused across multiple conservation settings.
GLO used synchronous, multi-sited ethnography to build a picture of the flows and tensions shaping one global conservation nexus. It constituted a rare multi-sited portrait of one global conservation nexus, tracing how images, idea(l)s, resources, people and policies moved across it. This was thus a snapshot of a conjuncture in which conservation was ‘scaling up’ its imaginaries, strategies and alliances to deal with planetary concerns, while simultaneously grappling with the inescapably anthropogenic dimensions of its work. These developments, however, were not easily reconciled with ground-level realities. Our research revealed deep tensions between the iconicity of orangutans in the Global North and their relative insignificance to indigenous/rural communities in Borneo and Sumatra. By extracting orangutans from local moral, social and environmental relations and according them special privileges, conservation can cause tensions and resentment among local stakeholders, who often see them as another external party with interests in their land. Such concerns disrupt the imaginaries of planetary commons and ‘the need to save’ that increasingly underpin conservation, laying bare its deeply political and unexceptional nature in these spaces. Indeed, the spread of Anthropocenic discourses and politics in international conservation can exacerbate inequalities in the places worst impacted by the Anthropocene (e.g. indigenous villagers displaced for orangutan protection).
These findings gave rise to four key analytics. 1) Responsibility unpacks the power dynamics and uneven stakes of orangutan conservation and/in/for the Anthropocene. Rather than thinking about responsibility in the Anthropocene, we propose thinking the Anthropocene as responsibility in multiple senses, e.g. causality, effect, accountability, ownership. More than defining the Anthropocene, we thus raise more directed, relational questions about justice, care and repair. 2) Responsivity captures the processual, improvisatory dynamics through which human and nonhuman parties (inter)act in power-saturated spaces of the Anthropocene, without reducing them to moral exemplars or generic multispecies tangles. 3) In/visibilities highlights the contingent technologies, structures and processes through which responsibility is invoked, made in/visible, claimed and contested in Anthropocenic spaces. 4) Finally, we depict conservation as a frontier of care, foregrounding the geopolitical, interventionist, sometimes extractive nature of cross-species care and the intimate, affective dimensions of frontier spaces. Throughout the grant, we worked with conservation scientists and practitioners to explore how ethnographic research and methods could be used in conservation in critical, productive and transformative ways. Our outputs and activities were thus not solely academic but geared towards facilitating more just, contextually specific and effective conservation outcomes.
GLO used synchronous, multi-sited ethnography to build a picture of the flows and tensions shaping one global conservation nexus. It constituted a rare multi-sited portrait of one global conservation nexus, tracing how images, idea(l)s, resources, people and policies moved across it. This was thus a snapshot of a conjuncture in which conservation was ‘scaling up’ its imaginaries, strategies and alliances to deal with planetary concerns, while simultaneously grappling with the inescapably anthropogenic dimensions of its work. These developments, however, were not easily reconciled with ground-level realities. Our research revealed deep tensions between the iconicity of orangutans in the Global North and their relative insignificance to indigenous/rural communities in Borneo and Sumatra. By extracting orangutans from local moral, social and environmental relations and according them special privileges, conservation can cause tensions and resentment among local stakeholders, who often see them as another external party with interests in their land. Such concerns disrupt the imaginaries of planetary commons and ‘the need to save’ that increasingly underpin conservation, laying bare its deeply political and unexceptional nature in these spaces. Indeed, the spread of Anthropocenic discourses and politics in international conservation can exacerbate inequalities in the places worst impacted by the Anthropocene (e.g. indigenous villagers displaced for orangutan protection).
These findings gave rise to four key analytics. 1) Responsibility unpacks the power dynamics and uneven stakes of orangutan conservation and/in/for the Anthropocene. Rather than thinking about responsibility in the Anthropocene, we propose thinking the Anthropocene as responsibility in multiple senses, e.g. causality, effect, accountability, ownership. More than defining the Anthropocene, we thus raise more directed, relational questions about justice, care and repair. 2) Responsivity captures the processual, improvisatory dynamics through which human and nonhuman parties (inter)act in power-saturated spaces of the Anthropocene, without reducing them to moral exemplars or generic multispecies tangles. 3) In/visibilities highlights the contingent technologies, structures and processes through which responsibility is invoked, made in/visible, claimed and contested in Anthropocenic spaces. 4) Finally, we depict conservation as a frontier of care, foregrounding the geopolitical, interventionist, sometimes extractive nature of cross-species care and the intimate, affective dimensions of frontier spaces. Throughout the grant, we worked with conservation scientists and practitioners to explore how ethnographic research and methods could be used in conservation in critical, productive and transformative ways. Our outputs and activities were thus not solely academic but geared towards facilitating more just, contextually specific and effective conservation outcomes.
In Year 1 (2018) we set up the project and built a strong team dynamic. We convened a workshop with orangutan conservationists that led to a co-authored piece (2020) on challenges and possibilities at the conservation/social science interface. In Year 2 (2019) we conducted multi-sited research, with regular comparative discussions to piece together a fuller picture of this conservation nexus. Fieldwork and travel in Years 3-4 (2020-21) were disrupted by COVID. We used this time for joint analysis, writing groups and co-authoring papers, notably ‘Only the orangutans get a life jacket’ (2021). We convened a virtual webinar series, Heroes and Villains in the Anthropocene (2020-21), and co-curated a digital exhibition, Orangutan In/visibilities (2021) with conservation partners. In Years 4-5 (2021-2022), in addition to publishing, we created and trialled an ethnographic toolkit for conservationists. We continued engaging with conservation, e.g. through a Decolonising Conservation symposium. We used a 9-month extension in Year 6 (2023) to create more resources for conservation in collaboration with Research Retold. We also connected our work to broader conceptual and thematic concerns, such as grassroots movements in the ‘Southeast Asian Anthropocene’ – the topic of our final interdisciplinary conference (2023).
During the project, we published 12 peer-reviewed pieces and several reports and recommendations, carried out public engagement, and created a set of resources to foster ethnographic thinking and improve social engagement among conservationists. Due to COVID delays, there are still a few publications in preparation/under review. We later plan to work on a co-authored monograph that synthesises our findings and insights and explore further avenues for engaging with conservationists.
During the project, we published 12 peer-reviewed pieces and several reports and recommendations, carried out public engagement, and created a set of resources to foster ethnographic thinking and improve social engagement among conservationists. Due to COVID delays, there are still a few publications in preparation/under review. We later plan to work on a co-authored monograph that synthesises our findings and insights and explore further avenues for engaging with conservationists.
1) Multi-sited, collaborative ethnographies of global assemblages are still relatively unconventional in anthropology. Conversely, large-scale analyses of global assemblages often lack the granular, ground-level detail yielded by anthropological fieldwork. By combining that depth with comparative multi-sited perspectives, the project serves as a model for future ethnographies of complex global phenomena like conservation. 2) Our activities and outputs have contributed to (re)conceptualistions of the Anthropocene within and beyond anthropology. Our American Ethnologist article (Chua et al. 2021) developed two analytics for ‘uncommoning’ the Anthropocene: responsibility and responsivity. These transcend dominant questions of how to define the Anthropocene, opening up more directed, relational questions of justice, care and repair. Our final conference opened new cross-disciplinary conversations between Southeast Asian(ist) scholars on how a Southeast Asian Anthropocene might be conceived. 3) Finally, the project sought to tack a path between social scientific research for conservation and critical social scientific analyses of conservation, and to develop new modes of engagement and collaboration that go beyond mere co-optation and critique (Chua et al. 2020). In this way, we laid the grounds for novel conservation/social science models of interaction and collaboration.