Decolonizing Extinction

In Decolonizing Extinction Juno Salazar Parreñas ethnographically traces the ways in which colonialism, decolonization, and indigeneity shape relations that form more-than-human worlds at orangutan rehabilitation centers on Borneo. Parreñas tells the interweaving stories of wildlife workers and the centers' endangered animals while demonstrating the inseparability of risk and futurity from orangutan care. Drawing on anthropology, primatology, Southeast Asian history, gender studies, queer theory, and science and technology studies, Parreñas suggests that examining workers’ care for these semi-wild apes can serve as a basis for cultivating mutual but unequal vulnerability in an era of annihilation. Only by considering rehabilitation from perspectives thus far ignored, Parreñas contends, could conservation biology turn away from ultimately violent investments in population growth and embrace a feminist sense of welfare, even if it means experiencing loss and pain.

"This is seriously thought-provoking and challenging material, and it may be essential to understand it if we want to save orangutans from ourselves.", "Impactful. . . .  Juno S. Parreñas details diverse assumptions and expectations participants bring to this complex network, thereby generating a unique and timely addition to the conservation literature. Highly recommended. Advanced undergraduates through faculty and professionals.", "Decolonizing Extinction is essential reading for anyone with the ambition to do multispecies ethnography well. It’s also a beautiful and moving book that struggles with the ethical weight of ethnography as a mode of knowledge production.", "[This book] excels in these tricky in-between places: in meetings between species, between temporalities, between bodies, between genders, between sexes, and across divergent positions within colonial histories and presents. Parreñas tracks meetings across difference with the best kind of ethnographic sensitivity.", "Decolonizing Extinction offers a compelling example of why feminism is well suited and positioned to take on issues related to animals, as well as how gender relations of power are necessarily embedded in human-animal relations, and in turn broader process of colonization and arrested autonomy."

Juno Salazar Parreñas is Assistant Professor of Science and Technology Studies & Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Cornell University and editor of Gender: Animals.