Session Name: [Humanities Across Borders] Care, Custody, Conservation II
1 - Maluku Bird Walk: Resisting extinction through modes of engagements with landscapes
Monday, July 29, 2024
16:15 – 18:00 (GMT+7)
Presentation Abstract In recent years, the name Alfred Russel Wallace, the 19th century British naturalist who contributed to Darwin's theory of natural selection and author of the book documenting species diversity throughout Indonesia, The Malay Archipelago (1859), has regained significance in the place where he did his research: Ternate, North Moluccas, Eastern Indonesia. The scientific work of Wallace himself is well-recognized: From bird species bearing his name in biology textbooks to an area of mega-biodiversity known as Wallacea in central-eastern Indonesia for its high number of endemic species, identified and made known to Western science by Wallace's expedition and writings. Today, in the very places and landscapes where Wallace constructed his science, local communities are discussing the legacy of his works, employing parallel methods of observation, documentation, and archiving, but for a very different sense of purpose, concerns, effects, and visions. My ethnography discusses the ways in which documentary practices and knowledge formation in and of the environment might unsettle dominant notions of "conservation", disentangling its colonial undertones in order to envision a more sustainable multispecies co-existence. These media practices repurpose historical narratives so as to address contemporary needs and concerns rooted in a sense of urgency to raise environmental awareness in the age of extinction.
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