This book manuscript workshop provides the opportunity for Professor Juno Parrenas to receive constructive criticism regarding her book manuscript from workshop participants, including the discussant Danilyn Rutherford, Professor of Anthropology at UC Santa Cruz, past president of the Society for Cultural Anthropology, and former fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton. Professor Rutherford will give a public lecture later in the afternoon. Workshop participation requires an RSVP by November 26 to Parrenas.1@osu.edu. Lunch will be provided.
Forced Life: Disciplining Orangutans and Workers in Borneo
Juno Salazar Parreñas (WGSS)
Forced Life: Disciplining Orangutans and Workers in Borneo examines the interface between endangered orangutans, the local men paid to care for them, and the transnational eco-volunteering British women who pay to care for them, to show how humans and animals must make a living together in the face of extinction. By tracing indigenous efforts to gain a living in the midst of ecological loss, forms of care that shift from the 1950’s colonial domicile to the 2000’s private-public partnership, and the indefinite deferral of independence for both Sarawak’s orangutans and people, this book manuscript argues that supporting the diversity of life in the Anthropocene entails losing an aspiration for human hegemony and instead accepting a mutual vulnerability shared with multitudes of life forms. Using transdisciplinary methods, including seventeen months of ethnographic participant-observation, primatological behavioral sampling, archival research, linguistic analysis, and literary criticism, this work articulates an expansive feminist theorization of how lively material bodies circulate in a global political economy.
