Land of the Hornbill, Home of the Captive

  

“In other words, we are different and together; what I have become is only possible because of what you have become, and the encounter between us had and has the power to transform each of us. This is the matter of affect, which we feel on the surface of skin and on the surface of earth.” 

Juno Salazar Parreñas

 

Introduction

What does it mean to “care” for a species whose very need for care stems from the same systems that displaced the people now tending to them? In Decolonizing Extinction: The Work of Care in Orangutan Rehabilitation, Juno Salazar Parreñas confronts the messy, uneven, and often painful work of sustaining orangutan life in postcolonial Malaysia. Far from the romanticized image of conservation as a pure good, Parreñas reveals the tangled web of colonial legacies, capitalist extraction, and multispecies entanglements that shape every act of feeding, training, and even restraining these animals.

This paper examines Decolonizing Extinction through the lens of ecological anthropology, drawing on two additional works to deepen the analysis: Cindy Isenhour’s critique of consumer-based conservation in the palm oil industry, and Alex Aisher and Vinita Damodaran’s call for place-based, multispecies conservation. Together, these sources reveal that orangutan rehabilitation is not merely about “saving” animals; it is about confronting the structural and historical forces that have rendered such saving necessary. I focus particularly on the shared conditions of displacement between indigenous caretakers and the orangutans they tend, the moral ambiguities of “saving,” and the difficult truths embedded in acts of care, including violence. The guiding question is this: Can the practice of care in orangutan rehabilitation ever be disentangled from the systems of domination that made it necessary?

Parallel Struggles: Caretakers and Orangutans in the Same Cage

One of Parreñas’s most striking interventions is her insistence that the lives of orangutans and their caretakers are linked not only through daily routines but through shared histories of loss. Many of the workers at Lundu Wildlife Center are indigenous to Sarawak, and like the orangutans, they have been displaced, moved into smaller spaces, stripped of autonomy, and made to navigate survival within the constraints of state and corporate power. As Parreñas writes, “Even without a claim to a shared ‘family of man’ Sarawakian people and orangutans already share experiences of displacement and arrested autonomy” (loc. 521).

This is more than metaphor. Both species have been pushed into enclosures (physical, economic, and political) by the same extractive forces. Palm oil expansion, logging, and land privatization have devoured forests and livelihoods alike, leaving both orangutans and indigenous people with fractured territories and diminished autonomy. The forest, once a space of movement, sustenance, and cultural meaning, is reduced to fragmented patches ringed by plantations or development projects, making both human and nonhuman survival dependent on outside institutions. 

For orangutans, this means life in rehabilitation centers, where every meal, every movement, and even reproduction are mediated by human decision. For the people of Sarawak, it means wage labor in industries (forestry, palm oil, tourism) that often accelerate the very ecological collapse they are living through. In ecological anthropology terms, this is a political ecology problem: environmental degradation and biodiversity loss are inseparable from histories of colonialism and capitalist development, where power over land and resources is concentrated in the hands of those far removed from its daily realities. The result is a shared condition of constraint, in which the boundaries of freedom are drawn not by biology alone but by the long reach of global markets and political histories.

The workers’ labor is therefore double-edged: it sustains orangutan life but also sustains the very system that depends on a steady supply of “rescued” animals for its legitimacy and funding. Aisher and Damodaran’s framework of place-based, multispecies conservation clarifies that this shared displacement is not an abstract similarity; it emerges from the “contact zones” where human and nonhuman lives are forced into cohabitation by political and economic pressures. The Lundu Wildlife Center is such a contact zone, and in it, survival is a collaborative but deeply unequal project.

The Ethics of “Rescue”

Mainstream conservation narratives frame orangutan rehabilitation as an unqualified good: the animal is “saved” from poachers or deforestation, brought to a center, and nursed toward eventual release. But Parreñas complicates this moral arc, showing how the very idea of saving is enmeshed in the histories that made orangutans vulnerable in the first place. The reality is that many orangutans never “graduate” to the wild. Those who cannot meet the behavioral benchmarks, such as tree climbing or nest building, may be shunted into captive breeding programs, where “female choice” is not considered (loc. 191). For some, “saving” means living out life in an enclosure, dependent on human provision and subject to management decisions that prioritize species survival over individual well-being.

This moral ambiguity mirrors Isenhour’s critique of palm oil boycotts and “rational choice” environmentalism. Well-intentioned consumers in Sweden may avoid margarine to “save the rainforest,” but their choices are constrained by global commodity chains, limited alternatives, and the structural dominance of industrial agriculture. Similarly, the caretakers’ and managers’ “choices” in rehabilitation are constrained by budgets, regulations, and the colonial histories that determined who has the right to land, forests, and animal bodies. The work of saving is thus always already compromised.

The moral ambiguities embedded in the act of “rescue” become even more pronounced when rehabilitation work intersects with the intimate and often troubling realities of reproduction. If saving an orangutan sometimes means confining it for life, then breeding programs introduce another layer of ethical complexity, especially when reproduction occurs without consent or under coercive conditions. The line between conservation as protection and conservation as control blurs, revealing that the same systems that limit orangutans’ autonomy in the name of survival can also perpetuate forms of violence against them. It is here, in the space where species preservation meets bodily control, that Parreñas’s ethnography pushes us to confront one of the most difficult and least discussed aspects of rehabilitation: the role of sexual violence in captive and semi-wild populations, and how this mirrors the extractive and dominating logics of colonial histories in Sarawak.

Sexual Violence and the Rape of Land

One of the most unsettling elements of Parreñas’s ethnography is her unflinching discussion of sexual violence among semi-wild orangutans. In some cases, mating is coerced by confinement; in others, male aggression toward females is witnessed but rarely prevented. This raises difficult questions: Is such aggression “natural,” and therefore beyond human moral judgment? Or is it a form of violence that should be mitigated, even in conservation contexts?

Parreñas refuses simple answers. Instead, she draws parallels between this gendered violence and the symbolic rape of the land and its people under colonial and capitalist regimes. Just as forests are cleared for palm oil plantations, displacing communities and ecosystems, female orangutans are sometimes subjected to forced (often violent) reproduction in the name of species survival. In both cases, bodies, whether of land, people, or animals, are treated as resources to be managed, extracted from, and optimized for particular ends.

The violence female orangutans face in captivity is not incidental; it is structured into the very system that claims to protect them. Confinement removes their ability to choose mates, while breeding programs treat their reproductive capacity as an asset to be controlled. The parallels to Sarawak’s colonial history are stark. Under the White Rajahs and later British administration, indigenous communities endured dispossession of their lands, forced labor, and the restructuring of their livelihoods to serve imperial economies. Both forms of violence, sexual coercion in orangutan enclosures and economic-political coercion under colonial rule, are rooted in the same hierarchical logic: those with power decide the terms of life and reproduction for others, prioritizing profit, control, and imagined “progress” over autonomy and consent.

Ecological anthropology’s commitment to linking the cultural, political, and environmental makes it clear that such violence cannot be understood in isolation. It is not an unfortunate byproduct of conservation; it is entangled with the very histories and power structures that produced the conditions for “rescue” in the first place. The forced breeding of female orangutans is not only a biological intervention; it is an enactment of control over a body deemed valuable for its reproductive potential, echoing the ways colonial regimes controlled, exploited, and reorganized human bodies and lands for extraction. 

When we call this “management,” we risk sanitizing what is, at its core, an exercise of domination. The metaphor of the “rape of the land” is not merely a poetic flourish; it points to a structural reality in which both female bodies and ecologies are stripped of autonomy, transformed into resources to be optimized, and justified by narratives of necessity and progress. This forces us to confront uncomfortable questions: How often do our ideas of care conceal acts of coercion? At what point does “saving” become another form of taking? And if we can so easily normalize the subjugation of a female orangutan in the name of species survival, what does that say about the moral frameworks we use to justify interventions into the more-than-human world? To grapple with these questions is to acknowledge that the violence done to orangutans and the violence done to land are not separate phenomena; they are parallel expressions of the same worldview, one that treats living beings, human or otherwise, as means to an end rather than as autonomous participants in shared worlds.

Arrested Autonomy and Interdependence

Parreñas describes the condition of “arrested autonomy” as applying to both people and orangutans in Sarawak: “Thwarted freedom is a condition shared between almost everybody and every body [who] survive in an extractive economy with unequal exchange” (loc. 2492). This concept is central to understanding why “release” into the wild is often impossible. The forests themselves have been fragmented, commodified, and made dangerous by the very systems that fund rehabilitation.

Here, Aisher and Damodaran’s emphasis on place-based conservation becomes vital. They argue that conservation must move beyond top-down, fortress-style models and instead reckon with the multispecies assemblages that actually exist in a place. In Sarawak, those assemblages are already shaped by oil palm plantations, logging roads, and human settlements. Orangutans and people alike depend on altered landscapes; interdependence is not a romantic ideal but a material reality.

“To be bebas,” Parreñas writes, “is to have relations of interdependence; fostering independence is an impossible ideal when material conditions foster interdependency” (loc. 2928). This reframes freedom not as separation but as negotiated coexistence, even under constraint. It also forces us to reconsider what survival actually looks like in a place where autonomy is structurally impossible. In Sarawak, humans and orangutans do not simply live side by side…they live through each other, bound together by shared vulnerabilities and the altered landscapes they inhabit. Such interdependence is not without tension; it requires constant negotiation, adaptation, and sometimes, acts that blur the line between care and control. These daily negotiations (feeding, training, setting boundaries) are the lived reality of arrested autonomy, and they are where the abstract concept meets the physical, emotional, and moral labor of rehabilitation. It is in this space, where freedom is constrained yet relationships are deeply enmeshed, that the ethics of care take on their most complex and demanding form, leading us into the next question: what does it mean to care under such conditions, and what costs, emotional, physical, and ethical, does that care entail?

The Work of Care: Pain, Risk, and Transformation

Care in Parreñas’s account is not gentle or purely nurturing—it is dangerous, exhausting, and sometimes involves inflicting pain. A keeper may need to discipline an orangutan to prevent injury or reject an animal’s attempts at affection to maintain necessary boundaries. “Must they use punishment to exercise their custodianship?” she asks (loc. 1122). The answer is not straightforward, because genuine care requires both responsiveness to another’s needs and protection from harm, which sometimes means saying no.

This is where the central quote of this paper takes on full weight: “We are different and together the encounter between us had and has the power to transform each of us” (loc. 1242). Such transformation is not symmetrical; caretakers and orangutans do not share equal power, but it is real. Both become knowledgeable about the other, learning the textures, rhythms, and dangers of coexistence. Parreñas calls this process becoming pandai, developing skill and attunement through experience (loc. 2262).

In ecological anthropology, this resonates with the idea that multispecies encounters are sites of mutual becoming, even when shaped by asymmetry and domination. Aisher and Damodaran remind us that conservation encounters are not abstract; they are embedded in the histories, economies, and ecologies of particular places. At Lundu, care work is a form of living-with in the Anthropocene: a practice of “slowly dying together” (loc. 3310) in a damaged world. If we accept Parreñas’s framing, then decolonizing extinction is not about purifying conservation from all traces of colonialism (an impossible task) but about making those traces visible and contestable. It means recognizing that orangutan rehabilitation centers are themselves products of colonial histories, capitalist economies, and global conservation politics.

Isenhour’s work underscores that shifting the burden of responsibility onto individual consumers, or in this case, individual caretakers, cannot address the structural forces driving extinction. A decolonized approach would instead attend to those forces: land rights, corporate accountability, and the redistribution of decision-making power in conservation. Aisher and Damodaran’s place-based lens offers one pathway forward: conservation that begins with the actual, messy multispecies relationships in a place, rather than imposing abstract ideals. In Sarawak, this would mean acknowledging that orangutans, indigenous communities, palm oil plantations, and conservation NGOs are already entangled…and that any viable future must be negotiated among them.

Conclusion

Decolonizing Extinction refuses the tidy narratives of conservation-as-rescue, replacing them with a portrait of care as entanglement: loving and violent, hopeful and complicit, transformative and constrained. The orangutans and their caretakers share more than proximity: they share conditions of displacement, interdependence, and arrested autonomy. By reading Parreñas alongside Isenhour’s critique of consumer-based environmentalism and Aisher & Damodaran’s place-based multispecies conservation, we see that rehabilitation is not a neutral or purely benevolent project. It is a contact zone shaped by colonial legacies, global capital, and the daily negotiations of living together in a damaged world.

Ecological anthropology pushes us to see these relationships not as failures of idealized conservation but as the real terrain on which the future of species, human and more-than-human, will be decided. Decolonizing care, in this sense, is not about removing politics from conservation, but about making politics central to it. It is about asking not only how we can keep another species alive, but what forms of life, relationships, and responsibility we are willing to live with in the Anthropocene.

The “Land of the Hornbill” is celebrated for its beauty, its soaring national symbol, its image of wild freedom. Yet in the shadow of that emblem, it is also a home of the captive; a place where both people and orangutans live within boundaries drawn by others, their freedoms rationed by the same forces that once carved up land and futures under colonial rule. To name Sarawak in this way is to hold two truths at once: the enduring vitality of its cultures, forests, and beings, and the constraining architectures of power that keep so many wings clipped. If we are moved by the hornbill’s flight, we must also be unsettled by the cages (visible and invisible) that mark life here. 

And in that unease lies the real question this ethnography leaves us with: will we be content to admire freedom as a symbol, or will we take seriously the work of dismantling the systems that make captivity the norm?

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Works Cited

Aisher, Alex, and Vinita Damodaran. 2016. “Introduction: Human-Nature Interactions through a Multispecies Lens.” Conservation & Society 14(4): 293–304. https://www.jstor.org/stable/26393253

Isenhour, Cindy. 2014. “Trading Fat for Forests: On Palm Oil, Tropical Forest Conservation, and Rational Consumption.” Conservation & Society 12(3): 257–267. https://www.jstor.org/stable/26393161

Parreñas, Juno Salazar. 2018. Decolonizing Extinction: The Work of Care in Orangutan Rehabilitation. Durham: Duke University Press. Kindle Edition.