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." -- John R. Platt ― The Revelator "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." -- L. K. Sheeran ― Choice " 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." -- Gabriel N. Rosenberg ― Radical History Review "[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." -- Rosemary Collard ― Society & Space " 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." -- Alice Hovorka ― Society & Space "The book brilliantly weaves discussions about broader socio-political transformations and norms alongside very careful and detailed accounts of the everyday practices and interactions between orangutans and people." -- Krithika Srinivasan ― Society & Space "A powerful, thought-provoking, and touching account of the quotidian nature of mass extinction." -- Becky Mansfield ― Society & Space "Parreñas’s Decolonizing Extinction is a beautifully written book, in which she uses a case study of orangutan rehabilitation on Borneo to weave together many complex analytic threads: gender, race, and labor; care, violence, and freedom; liberalism and neoliberalism; the geological past, the colonial present, and the prospect of a different future." -- Rebecca Lave ― Society & Space “With Decolonizing Extinction , Juno Salazar Parreñas gives us a groundbreaking and beautifully written multispecies ethnography that explores the entwined lives of human and nonhuman primates. Deftly combining primatology, political ecology, and postcolonial and feminist theory, her book will interest biological and cultural anthropologists alike and has the potential to foster deeper cross-disciplinary engagement.” -- Genese Marie Sodikoff ― American Ethnologist “How can humans and orangutans share a future together in the midst of violence and extinction? How do we embrace risk and cultivate attentiveness with endangered species? Can we let go of safe inequality? In this moving, stunning story of interspecies relations in a Malaysian wildlife center, Juno Salazar Parreñas demands we decolonize our understanding of conviviality, extinction, and loss. Functioning as an orangutan hospice, a place for palliation and not solutions, the wildlife center becomes a tragic allegory for the fate of our planet. What is to be done? Here Parreñas allows us to glimpse a different future.” -- Warwick Anderson, author of ― Colonial Pathologies: American Tropical Medicine, Race, and Hygiene in the Philippines Juno Salazar Parreñas is Assistant Professor of Science and Technology Studies & Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Cornell University and editor of Gender: Animals . Decolonizing Extinction The Work of Care in Orangutan Rehabilitation By Juno Salazar Parreñas Duke University Press Copyright © 2018 Duke University Press All rights reserved. ISBN: 978-0-8223-7077-2 Contents Acknowledgments, Introduction: Decolonizing Extinction, PART I RELATIONS, CHAPTER 1 From Ape Motherhood to Tough Love, C