‘Low-skilled’ workers in orangutan conservation - The global lives of the orangutan

Discussion date:

2 October 2018

Discussion Description:

This session centres on a much-neglected but crucial figure in conservation: the ‘low-skilled’ worker who mediates between different parties, contexts and human/nonhuman entities, and without whom the on-the-ground work of conservation would be impossible.

References

Münster, Ursula. 2014. “Working for the Forest: The Ambivalent Intimacies of Human–Elephant Collaboration in South Indian Wildlife Conservation.” Ethnos: Journal of Anthropology 81(3): 425–47. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00141844.2014.969292

Parreñas, Rheana Juno Salazar. 2018. “Introduction: Decolonizing Extinction”. In Decolonizing Extinction. The Work of Care in Orangutan Rehabilitation. Durham and London: Duke University Press, pp. 1- 30.

—- 2012. “Producing Affect: Transnational Volunteerism in a Malaysian Orangutan Rehabilitation Center.” American Ethnologist 39(4): 673–87.

Sodikoff, Genese. 2009. “The Low-Wage Conservationist: Biodiversity and Perversities of Value in Madagascar.” American Anthropologist 111(4): 443–55.