What does care take? Saving and sequestering in an age of mass extinction

Liana Chua (Tunku Abdul Rahman University Associate Professor in Malay World Studies, Department of Social Anthropology, University of Cambridge) with the GLO and POKOK project teams

Abstract: What does it take to care about and for (non)human others at a time of sustained environmental crisis? What does it mean to be a care-taker? And what do programmes and practices of care take – as in demand, claim, or extract? I explore these questions by drawing on my colleagues’ and my recent multi-sited research on the global nexus of orangutan conservation – a sprawling multispecies field teeming with concerns over who/what cares for orangutans, and how. Taking a critical relational view of how multiple forms and registers of cross-species care play out – particularly in the fraught frontier zones of rural Borneo – I foreground the continued importance of careful(l) ethnographic engagement in nuancing and ‘unsettling’ (Murphy 2015) hierarchies of care in both conservation and academia.

Short bio: Liana Chua (she/her) is a social anthropologist with long-term research interests in ethnic politics, Christianity, development, environmental transformations and more-than-human landscapes in Borneo. She currently works on the social, political and aesthetic dimensions of the global nexus of orangutan conservation in the age of ‘the Anthropocene’, notably through the Global Lives of the Orangutan project (ERC 2018-23). Her publications include The Christianity of Culture: Conversion, Ethnic Citizenship, and the Matter of Religion in Malaysian Borneo (2012) and several co-edited collections, including Who are “We”? Reimagining Alterity and Affinity in Anthropology (with Nayanika Mathur, 2018), and “Witnessing : Truths, Technologies, Transformations” (with Omri Grinberg, Cambridge Journal of Anthropology, 2021).