The orang utan is not an indigenous name: knowing and naming the maias as a decolonizing epistemology

ABSTRACT

Much of wildlife conservation literature and practices rely on euro-western nomenclature that are legacies of empire. Although seemingly neutral, the practice of (re)naming nature depends on political, philosophical, and social assumptions that encode top-down behaviour and governance in conservation practices. Indigenous communities’ processes of classifying nature are not recognized as valid and, as such, their conservation strategies are made invisible. If Indigenous knowledge is accounted for by contemporary conservation, it is often from a paradigm that focusses on ecological-scientific knowledge, rather than the complex inter-species relationships that Indigenous communities have with nature. As such, Indigenous communities are often perceived as a barrier or problem towards conservation, due to what is perceived as their lack of care for species of conservation interest. In this article, drawing on a kin study of maias conservation in Sarawak, I explore the power dynamics and tensions emerging within practice and discourses of conservation. In particular, I focus upon the struggles and negotiations in which conservation actors understand the orang utan, as they are commonly known in an international space, that overshadow the Iban ways of naming and knowing the orang utan as maias. Finally, I discuss the Iban classifications/names and relations with nature and how this affects different understandings of conservation.

KEYWORDS:

• Taxonomy
• conservation
• Indigenous
• decolonization

Acknowledgements

Many thanks to Apai, his family, other community members and tourist guides who took me in and taught me so much. Many thanks to my supervisors, Sarah Wright and Yadvinder Malhi for their mentoring and advice. I thank the editors, Giulia Carabelli and Miloš Jovanović for inviting me to submit for this special edition and the peer reviewers for their very helpful contributions to the paper. All mistakes are solely my own.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes on contributor

Dr June Mary Rubis is in Sydney Environment Institute, University of Sydney, Australia

Notes

1 Malay was adopted as the lingua franca of the region, and communication in the Malay language between the English and the Malays, especially after British colonization of the partial Indo-Malaya region, became important.

2 Persian word originally used for ‘writer’ or ‘secretary’.

3 Silvia Federici (2018) describes how the rise of capitalism and associated witch hunts in seventeenth century Europe changed Europeans’ relationship with animals, from animals being deemed responsible beings to non-sentient machines, following Descartes’s theory (Federici 2018, p. 22).

4 For discussion for contemporary work on citation politics, see Sara Ahmed (2013, 2014).

5 The Bidayuh is a collective name for several Indigenous groups found in southwestern Sarawak, Malaysia and West Kalimantan, Indonesia.

6 I documented this conversation in my field notes on December, 2015.

7 Kent Redford coined the phrase, ‘empty forest’ in a paper published in the BioScience to refer to an ecosystem that is void of large mammals. The defaunation of large mammals are either by direct or indirect means, including habitat destruction and hunting.

8 Development in this case, refers to wider access to economic markets, better-equipped public facilities such as schools, and material accumulation.

9 The rest of the park staff are paid as daily labourers (and therefore not acknowledged as full-time staff) and are based at the park headquarters at the edge of the national park.

10 Some of the guides were also of ethnic Chinese or Malay origin but they are in the minority of the guides that I have encountered and spent longer time with.

11 Local machete.

12 I documented this conversation in my field notes on December, 2015.

13 I documented this conversation in my field notes on November, 2015.

14 Ibid.

15 Also known as the Syzgium jambos, and it originates in Southeast Asia, and occurs widely elsewhere, having been introduced as an ornamental or fruit tree.

16 I documented this conversation in my field notes on December, 2015.