00:01.55 heritagevoices Chris um, so we're gonna edit out that last part that I was saying about the orangutans. Um, just because yeah long history of people putting charismatic species above indigenous people. So let's just not um I'm gonna rear. Or that and then um I'll record the intro into this one and then we'll go from there. So um, and I don't even remember what we were saying right before that but all right? Oh you are already at our second breakpoint. 00:30.60 Liana Chua A yeah. 00:36.91 heritagevoices Um, but when we come back, We're going to talk about your work with indigenous communities and orangutans and um, sorry so when we come back, We'll talk about your work with indigenous communities and orangutans so everybody. 00:47.83 Liana Chua And. 00:55.43 heritagevoices Stay tuned for that. Okay, so you we that was weird. Okay, so we are back from our break. So yeah,, let's let's dive In. Um, how did you get from from that work that you were doing to your current work working with these. I Don't know if it's even these same communities but indigenous communities and or and orangutans. 01:21.45 Liana Chua So um, with the resettlement project I began thinking a lot about how people experience very radical and very rapid environmental change and at the same time I was also looking at how you know people especially my interlocutors who were. The anti-resettlement group were engaging very strategically and very creatively with a whole range of different international or or national rights movements you know activists advocates in very different ways in order to draw attention to their cause and try and you know, kind of build support for the anti-resettlement. Legal case and so that that sort of combination of experiences of environmental change and engagement with international movements and politics started got me started thinking about what was going on elsewhere in Borneo and you know at that point I started thinking more about how these questions could be applied to um. Another major industry across the island of Borneo but also sumatra which is orangutan conservation. So a very very well-known very charismatic and and prominent inhabitant of the island. So at that point. Um I decided to try and shift my attention a little bit to. Ah, to understanding the social political cultural and also aesthetic dimensions of orangutan conservation and especially the sorts of um, ground level complications and tensions that conservation programs could generate. 02:52.88 Liana Chua You you know by looking at the interactions between conservationists and indigenous villages and orangutans now I should say that this this research has been very different to my previous research in the sense that it's all been done collectively as part of 2 research projects one called Boko and the other one called the global lives of the orangutans. Which involved me working with ah a small team of postdoccs and ph d students on creating this multi-sighted ethnography of this global network of orangutan conservation and I think this was really important for um, a couple of reasons one was a very pragmatic reason which was. When I started doing this research I was not in a position to actually do long-term field work in bordo I I had 2 small children at the time and it was just impossible for me to do you know? what? I'd done for my ph d in my postdoctoral research and so I thought it would be much more useful for me to be able to work with a team of people who could in fact. Um, do that sort of work but then sort of keep you know keep that conversation going as a team and the second reason was simply that you know this conservation is a huge sprawling incredibly complicated and problematic global field and. It's exactly the sort of thing that you can't study in 1 place which is what anthropologists have conventionally done. So what? what these 2 projects tried to do was actually pull together ethnographic research and fieldwork and perspectives from quite specific nodes of orangutan conservation across the world including the u k. 04:23.80 Liana Chua Ah, you know, kind of international scientific and and artistic imaginaries which was what I was working on and then very specific. Um rural areas where conservation programs were unfolding and very often causing these complicated interactions between humans and apes and conservationists. 04:43.70 Liana Chua Ah, so we've just tied up both of those projects. It's been a really really exciting and very rewarding experience working with my colleagues and I just want to say that. You know, anything else I say at this point is is is reflective not simply of my own research but also of our collective discussions and a way've been thinking and writing together as a team for the last several years. So I think essentially what. What we're interested in is trying to understand how ideas and people and finances and all sorts of other things move from 1 place to another across the globe right in in orangutan conservation and the effects that these movements generate in different sites on the ground and also the way that these these movements. May or may not enable orangutan conservation to hang together. So we're as interested in the sorts of gaps and slippages and and points of conflict in orangutan conservation as we were in the way that things actually connected and held together and and kind of moved from 1 context to another. Ah so yeah, that's. That's basically where we got to I can't remember what the question was. 05:54.27 heritagevoices Um, the the question was basically just um, ah how the one led to the other. So um, yes, yeah, it's which is great. Um. 06:03.69 Liana Chua Um I I've gone way past that. But. 06:09.47 heritagevoices So can you talk a little bit more about um, like your specific role and like what that look what what that has looked like um on more of ah I guess day-to-day basis. 06:12.95 Liana Chua And. 06:20.15 Liana Chua Yeah, um, so I mean a lot of my work has been in kind of leading these 2 research projects so you know making sure we're doing. We're reading together. We're thinking together I usually take the lead on co-authored pieces. Um, so I do you know there's there's quite a strong sense of responsibility for. All the research that's being carried out as part of these 2 projects. My specific research ended up focusing on the digital manifestations of verangutan conservation. So I started out by looking at the social media scape of orangutan conservation. Um, this really strange sort of you know, dispersed space in which people who shared a common interest in in saving these apes from extinction came together and the kinds of ah politics and um I guess modes of intervention that arose as a result of those. Of those interactions so in in one of my articles I wrote about how um you know very often orangutan conservation organizations. Try to raise funds and awareness for their courses by um, by using what I call a logic of small acts. So it's this idea that you know even though you're somewhere in the west and. You don't have the expertise or the time or the money to actually be physically there in the field in the forests saving orangutans as people like to see it. You can still contribute in lots of small ways and cumulatively those small acts can make a genuine difference on the ground so that's a kind of logic. Um. 07:46.37 Liana Chua Through which many conservation organizations raise their funds and and get people invested in their causes. Another thing I did was work was was look at how different visualizations of orangutans but also or around orangutan extinction biodiversity loss. You know, all all all these related questions were being produced by both science and popular media. So you know extinction is a very very difficult thing to to visualize to pin down in concrete terms. So one of my questions was how do you visualize the extinction of the orangutan. How do these things come to take visual shape and and visual form. Um, and what kinds of politics do these give rise to um so I was kind of looking a lot at at how these you know these discourses and these narratives and these visual imaginaries that. Shape orangutan conservation that gets sent out across um across the world to places like Bornia and sumatra where orangutans actually exist um are being created what they actually do what effects they have um as they move across this global network of orangutan conservation. Um, and I was also drawing partly on my earlier research you know up up in the hills with bidoy communities where orangutans are not. You know they're not really seen very much They're not very much a feature of everyday life but people are sort of vaguely aware of them because they occasionally do pop up and and so do conservationists but that's a slightly different story so I was trying to pull all these different insights together. 09:13.90 Liana Chua Ah, you know to try and understand what's going on at the source of these conservation narratives and organizations and then I had um a number of different people working on different nodes of Orangutan conservation that we then. You you know that that we could then sort of pull together. It was like it was like assembling the pieces of a jigsaw right to try and pull ah pull together this bigger picture of of how this network operated so I was here looking at these visualizations and ideas as they moved around the world and digital spaces. 1 of my one of the Postdocs on my team. Was working with ah with Uk -based Orangutan um adoption schemes. So It's these schemes that Uk -based charities run to try and get money and you know get support for orangutans that are being rehabilitated over in Bornu and sumatra and then um. Ah, two Ph D students Both of whom were working at very specific conservation sites. But you know, very very very much looking at the interactions between ordinary people and conservationists and then another Postdoc who was in Rural Central Kalimantan looking at a new Community conservation. In an area where there are lots of wild orangutans that had been set up by this western conservation research group and so we're all kind of you know we're all doing field work and research at the same time and we're all talking to each other constantly and trying to pull together. 10:32.15 Liana Chua You know our insights and findings and descriptions from these different bits of orangutan conservation to try and build up this slightly fractured and slightly weird picture of how this one conservation nexus operates and and it was absolutely fascinating stuff. So yes, that's that's. That's what I did but it was very much in relation to other bits of that of of those 2 research projects. 10:52.78 heritagevoices Okay, ah so first of all when you said that when you were talking about um oranga orangutans not being. You know, popping up every now and then and then conservations popping up I just had this image of like the stereotypical conservationist with like their Indiana Jones outfit like just popping out of nowhere. So um. 11:02.20 Liana Chua Um, the. 11:12.39 heritagevoices But before we get too far from ah your methods I'm just curious. You know your experience. Um as you know so you're you're from southeast Asia but not the communities. Um, that have orangutans. Um or that you've worked with. But then you're also working you know you're also looking at this project. Um at at communities in the u k you know where you're living and across the world and um, you know as a as a social anthropologist. Um, what was that like for you looking at? um. 11:36.80 Liana Chua Um. 11:49.23 heritagevoices You know, like obviously you're connected in some ways to all these different communities and um also you know did it did it affect the way you related to you know the people you were studying in the UK versus like um, you know in Borneo for example. 11:51.75 Liana Chua Um, yeah. 12:07.75 heritagevoices Just if you had any reflections on on that experience. 12:10.12 Liana Chua Yeah, ah, it's It's a really tricky question because you know I think in many ways that this experience has it's It's really blurred the the binaries you know the the divisions that tend to Dominate. Um. Contemporary and popular understandings of anthropology right? because you know historically there's there's very much this the stereotype of anthropology which in some ways gets reproduced in you know doctoral training programs and universities all over the global North. Um, as as the science of you know why. Western individuals going out to study Non-western radically different cultural others and that you know obviously anthropology has changed a lot since since those days but I think that image is is very much. Alive and well and it still it still gets baked into um you know the way we teach our students about field work. You know participant observation dealing with otherness um, taking Seriously you know that sort of thing. Um and it Also you know it very often infuses our theory because a lot of our sorts of conceptual insights come from. Revelations that you're expected to get when you're confronted with radical otherness. You know, radical cultural difference and so you know I think I've always been very aware of this because ah. 13:32.95 Liana Chua As a sort of you know as as a singaporean southeast asian anthropologists working in the Uk for a long time but with indigenous groups in Borneo. Um I've been very aware that I I don't quite fit that that sort of white western anthropologist mold and and this was. Absolutely clear to me even when I was doing my ph d you know I was I was definitely not I didn't necessarily feel feel like I I fitted very well into that stereotype which which in a way we were all being encouraged to live up to um in our ph d training program. Um, and so I think. Became a little bit more obvious to me when I was doing this research you know on orangutan conservation because in some ways it felt sometimes like when I was talking to people at events you know in the yeah uk at demonstrations at charity events I sometimes felt a little bit uncomfortable in the sense that. It almost felt as if they were looking at me as if I was one of those one of those southeast asians very generic southeast asians right? One of those people who lives you know over in Southeast Asia um, not quite alongside orangutans but in the same countries in the same regions. Um, and I think you know i. 14:33.66 heritagevoices Um. 14:44.22 Liana Chua In people's minds. You know if you sort of mention that I'm I'm pretty sure they'd say no no, no, you're obviously different because you were singaporean and and they're you know, indigenous people in Borneo or sumatra or whatever. Um, but I I often sort of felt like there was that there was an attempt to sort of There was an assumption of complicity. Um, which made me feel quite weird in the sense that there was it was assumed that I was you know that that because I was over here and I spoke good english and I was an anthropologist that I would therefore be complicit with this slightly um ah not slightly I mean very often. You know, completely colonial view of what was going on in in bornu and sumatra where you know there were these ignorant uneducated. You know, cruel natives who did not understand the value of orangutans and were not good. Environmental subjects. Um. Just kind of you know, just shooting them at will and being really horrible to them and either that or just not understanding why they were important right? So we got to educate um and these poor people. Um, and there was a little bit of a sense that you know I was being pulled into that that sort of that space that there was an there was an assumption that I sort of. Belonged in that space. But at the same time people were a little bit sort of wary of me just in case you know I didn't necessarily share the same values as they did so I remember having this slightly weird conversation where you know we were talking ah sort I kind of. 16:15.48 Liana Chua Who it was but I was talking to somebody at some random event about how you know some people in Borneo still hunt and consume orangutans because why not you know there's just any other game that you might encounter in the florist. Um, and and there was and and this guy was like yeah. 16:28.50 heritagevoices Um. 16:34.33 Liana Chua Yeah, you know? Um, yeah, you know these people will these people will just eat anything won't they you just you know you just you just never know what sort of diet they have and then he sort of paused and sort of looked at me and you know like I I could sort of almost imagining him thinking oh is she Chinese Chinese eat Everything don't great. Oh you know I say the right thing here and so there was always this really uneasy. 16:39.31 heritagevoices Booth. 16:46.27 heritagevoices Oh my God yeah. 16:54.29 Liana Chua You know I wasn't quite sure and they were never quite sure whether I was fully complicit and fully with them or whether I was part of that other um, who they were trying very hard to be sympathetic towards and understand um so it was it was a really weird one. You know there was no avert hostility but there was very much this sense of oh do I or do I not. Get enrolled into these very sort of colonial assumptions about what's going on on the ground in places like Borneo. 17:19.22 heritagevoices Um, yeah, so did that experience like make you think at all about um, like or think in different ways about you know how you might have been perceived by the communities in Borneo just curious like. 17:34.67 Liana Chua Ah, no I don't think so because I was I mean certainly for the for the Bidou communities that I've worked with for a long time I've been I've always known how they perceive me. Um you know they, they've always perceived me as or I mean certainly especially when I was younger you know they they always called me. 17:43.36 heritagevoices Yeah, okay. 17:53.92 Liana Chua Tina you know, which just means oh you know chinese person right? that chinese girl because I was from singapore by definition most people in Singapore are chinese and most people in Singapore are rich so there was always a little bit of that going on anyway and you know sometimes I'd get kind of you know. 17:55.14 heritagevoices So. 18:09.37 Liana Chua Request like oh could you buy me some yeah buy me a nice present or or could should could you help me find you know my cousin a job in in this or that Chinese shop in in the town and obviously I couldn't because you know I I basically couldn't but there were these stereotypes that they had as well. Um, so you know I think. 18:17.28 heritagevoices I. 18:27.83 Liana Chua They were very clear that I was not a white western anthropologist I was a girl from Singapore who was you know doing big schooling as they said in the u k um, but they they didn't relate to me necessarily as a white person. So yeah, it's I think I've always been aware of that. Um. 18:40.10 heritagevoices So. 18:47.20 Liana Chua As to how I might be perceived by you know some of the indigenous communities that maybe my my postdocs and ph ds worked with that's a really interesting question and then I think that that would depend on the context in which I was introduced to them. So if I came in For example, you know under the auspices of ah of a conservation. Organization I might either be seen as I mean they they know I was they call me chinese anyway. But I think they'd sort of basically link me with either you know these middle class urbanites from Jakarta or you know the cities or with white people. And and that would be a slightly different proposition because they're often quite suspicious of conservation. 19:30.74 heritagevoices Um, yeah, so can you tell us a little bit about what you know so we talked about methods but what did what did you actually find when you were doing this research. 19:39.32 Liana Chua Um. 19:44.70 Liana Chua We found some very interesting things and maybe they're not entirely surprising but they were still very interesting. Um, so I think maybe the first thing to say is that it became very very clear to us very early on and and I think I only knew this anyway from my previous fieldwork. Um, that this kind of international. You know, mostly western global north fascination with orangutans as this charismatic, unique endangered species isn't necessarily shared um in the forests where orangutans actually live um and so a lot of our time was spent. Actually trying to understand what people thought about orangutans. Um, you know these spaces. Um, and generally I think we can say that most most indigenous communities in Borneo don't see orangutans as particularly interesting or special or exceptional. Um, you know they're very much part of this. Wider um, multi-species environment so in an environment in in which there are lots of living beings including trees rivers animals human spirits. Um that are bound by certain relations and certain ties of you know, accountability and reciprocity. So. There's certain moral codes. Um, that you expect to find across all living beings in a lot of these environments. Um, and so you know I mean most of the time if you're an indigenous person and you encounter an orangutan in the jungle. You'd be like there. Whatever you know, no big deal. Nothing interesting. Sometimes you might hunt it and kill it. 21:16.93 Liana Chua And eat it. Um, but you know you wouldn't necessarily see it as particularly special or particularly interesting or different to any other primate that you might encounter and so I think one of the big problems and 1 of the big sources of tension that we found in our research is that. 21:36.19 Liana Chua What conservation does is it disrupts this this moral and social fabric because with the backing of the state and and with laws and stuff. Um, it comes in and it plucks this one animal that nobody necessarily sees as special or exceptional. Out from this multi-species fabric this wider environment and makes it special. It makes it super Visible. You know, um super Protected. Um and therefore no longer bound by the same sorts of relations and conventions that Govern life in these environments. Um, it's conservation that sort of makes the Orangutan um exceptional and and this very often comes you know people feel at the expense of indigenous land rights their access to their customary land to their livelihoods because what you tend to Find. Um, in these spaces is that you know conservation programs will come in and in the name of saving orangutans will demarcate certain areas that they see as theirs. You know their customary lands as protected forests in order to save Orangutans and this means restrictions on Livelihood so you can't. You know, stopping people doing Swindden cultivation because you know there's a lot of burning going on stopping people logging trees in their own forests restricting people's access to their customary lands and so On. So So the problem here is that you know conservation doesn't only kind of Pluck orangutans out of this. 23:05.28 Liana Chua Wider Moral fabric. It also does so at the expense of indigenous people's well-being and rights and access to land and and that causes tremendous problems in these spaces and a lot of resentment about what exactly these conservationists are doing in these spaces. So. You know, another interesting thing that we found is that um for many of our indigenous interlocutors you know conservationists are very often not seen as any different to other external players. Ah you know like companies or the state or tourists or whatever. You know they're all seen as these quite powerful and well-resourced outsiders that have some sort of vested interest in indigenous people's lands just for different reasons so you know companies might want to extract stuff from it. Um, and conservationists might want to protect it. But in both cases local Communities. You know. Just ah, end up losing out. So yeah, it's it's It's not very cheerful but there you go. That's um, that's the reality on the ground at the moment. 24:07.40 heritagevoices Well on on that cheerful note we're we're right at the end um was there any last you know little things that you wanted to share make sure that our our listeners understood before we go. 24:19.91 Liana Chua Um, yeah I mean I guess I I don't want to end on too depressing a note so you know what? I well I think it's really important to be aware of of the many historical and contemporary problems that conservation has caused um, you know I think I think there are also. Various organizations and individuals who are working very hard to make conservation better and to improve their engagements with local communities. You know, make sure that what they're doing doesn't only benefit a particular species but but can also work to benefit humans and their environments. It's it's a very very difficult balancing act. But you know there are there are openings and there are possibilities. Um, and there are people who are really trying to make that change on the ground many of whom are kind of from you know from the region from Borneo and sumatra themselves. And who have a very different kind of vested interest in in what goes on in these spaces and so I think what we're seeing emerging at this point is um, you know, kind of new ways of doing conservation that are relatively unusual but that I hope will. Ah, kind of create more room for you know the coexistence of different values different methods and yeah, different different ways of relating to both humans and non-humans. 25:40.62 heritagevoices All right? Well thank you so much for for coming on and and sharing really appreciate you taking the time, especially since you're in the U K So it's much later. What where you are right now. So. 25:53.20 Liana Chua Ah, yeah, it's getting dark now. 25:57.84 heritagevoices But yeah, thank you, Thank you. 25:58.30 Liana Chua Thank you very much.