[Un]becoming a Resource: Translating the Nature of Civets in Indonesia

ABSTRACT

The development of the civet coffee industry in Indonesia has drawn critical attention to how humans and civets live together in the shadow of the global coffee trade. Since 2006, coffee producers have been caging civets for coffee production, resulting in new ways of knowing and living with the arboreal, cat-like animals. In this article, I draw on Michel Callon’s use of ‘translation’ to examine how civets have become a natural resource within a partial genealogy of how civets have been known in Indonesia, from transnational colonial science-making to local conflicts over the regulation of their harvesting from the forests of Indonesia. By attending to the nuances of translation as a sensuous process, I show how becoming and unbecoming a resource is more than a process of classifying. I argue that what might seem like semantic conflicts over naming are actually conflicts over social relations and world-making.

KEYWORDS:

• Translation
• classification
• civets
• natural resources
• Indonesia

Acknowledgments

This research was conducted as a part of my dissertation project in affiliation with the anthropology departments at the University of Indonesia and the University of California, Irvine. It was supported by the Fulbright-Hays Program, the American Institute for Indonesian Studies, and the Center for Asian Studies, the Center for Global Peace and Conflict Studies, and the Department of Anthropology at the University of California, Irvine. Sophie Haines and Piergiorgio Di Giminiani have been exceptional organisers from the original panel at the 2015 AAA’s onwards, and provided generous feedback on this paper. This article has benefitted from insightful feedback from Chima Anyadike-Danes, Tom Boellstorff, Rosalyn Cahill, Georgia Hartman, Kris Peterson, Paige West, Leah Zani, and Anna Zogas. The names and locations of my research subjects have been anonymised.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 This paper draws on my dissertation (Cahill 2018) research conducted with civet coffee producers, coffee farmers, coffee agents, cafe owners, agricultural scientists, barista communities, and representatives from various government regulatory bodies across Indonesia over 15 months in 2014–2015.

2 Recent work drawing on Callon’s scallop study (1999), as well as Bateson’s study of the constitutive nature of relations as an ecology (2000), has sought new ways to describe networks that allow for increased flexibility, inconsistency and indeterminability. For example, in her study of H5N1 Celia Lowe (2010) riffs on Deleuze and Guattari’s rhizomatic metaphor, proposing the ‘multispecies cloud,’ to describe assemblages that are not just unstable, but also proliferate contexts.

3 Horsfield 1824, Costerus 1893; Koningsberger 1902; For example, Horsfield, an American naturalist, describes coffee orchards in Java as ‘infested’ by civets, and that civets ‘ravaged’ the orchards to the point that coffee farmers took to calling civets ‘coffee-rats’; Koningsberger, a Dutch biologist who worked on coffee production in Java, described civets as wreaking damage on coffee businesses, devouring coffee cherries and seeds (1902:21). I provide a closer historical analysis of the development of a coffee industry and human-civet interactions in Indonesia in my dissertation.

4 I don’t include Sulawesi here, because according to farmers that I met with in South and Central Sulawesi, they don’t have civet coffee because they don’t have civets, or at least the kinds of civets which eat coffee cherries—Wallace (1962 [1869]) described the presence of at least one species of civet in Sulawesi. They shared that they have something similar, which they call kupi kuskus, or cuscus coffee, which has been eaten and excreted by small marsupials known as cuscus (including the Sulawesi dwarf cuscus Strigocuscus celebensis and Sulawesi bear cuscus Ailurops ursinus; locals also sometimes refer to tarsiers as kuskus). A few coffee producers in Sulawesi have been importing civets from Java and Sumatra to produce civet coffee with civets in various kinds of enclosures.

5 Shepherd (2012) notes the growing presence of civets in the small carnivore trade at Indonesia’s urban wildlife markets, stimulated by the demand within the civet coffee industry and a growing interest in civets as a novelty pet. While most civets have been seen as pests passing by in the night, Horsfield (1824) describes how the Javanese collected the fragrant secretions from the perineal glands of the Small Indian Civet (Viverricula indica), or what Indonesians call musang rase. While this practice seems to have disappeared, it is similar to the civiculture of Ethiopia (Ishihara 2003).

6 The narrowest point on the Malay peninsula, found in southern Myanmar and Thailand.

7 Arctictis binturong (binturong), Cynogale bennetti (otter civet), Macrogalidia musschenbroekii (Sulawesi palm civet), and Prionodon Linsang (banded linsang)

8 Lampiran Peraturan Pemerintah Republik Indonesia Nomor 7 Tahuan 1999.

Additional information

Funding

It was supported by the Fulbright-Hays Program, the American Institute for Indonesian Studies, and the Center for Asian Studies, the Center for Global Peace and Conflict Studies, and the Department of Anthropology at the University of California, Irvine.