Too Cute to Cuddle? “Witnessing Publics” and Interspecies Relations

on the Social Media-Scape of Orangutan Conservation

At the start of a volunteer-cum-fieldwork stint with a small orangutan charity in 2014, I sat

down to discuss my research with “Alice,” a new member of staff who had a background in

charity work. When I explained that I wanted to understand why people gave time and money

to orangutan causes, she nodded with immediate recognition. “I’ve been surprised,” she said,

“but it’s really easy to get people to donate. They all love cute orangutans!” A few weeks

later, however, we found ourselves staring at an email from a member of the public asking

how to obtain an orangutan as a pet. For once, Alice’s eloquence and unflappability deserted

her. Unsure if it was a hoax or a genuine enquiry, she spluttered, “B-but…how do I tell them

that it’s…just…not what we do?!”

These two moments cut to the ethnographic heart of my article: what I call the contradictions

of cuteness that get played out in popular engagements with orangutan conservation. As Alice

succinctly put it, cute animals are powerful hooks through which the public can be drawn to

orangutan and other conservation causes. But the orangutan-as-pet email highlighted another

issue with which orangutan organizations routinely grapple: the excesses of cuteness, and

what are construed as the inappropriate relational configurations to which it can give rise.

Whereas the desire to “give [orangutans] a huge cuddle!” (to quote one Facebook user) is

accepted and even encouraged by some organizations, actually cuddling an orangutan is

deemed beyond the pale: as unacceptable behaviour that threatens orangutans and must be

discouraged.

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What should we make of these apparently contradictory impulses? How is the perilously fine

line between them drawn and negotiated by various parties? This article addresses these

questions by exploring how such impulses are apprehended and (re)calibrated on the social

media-scape of orangutan conservation—a lively digital field that has given orangutan causes

unprecedented reach and visibility over the last decade. I shall argue that this field is framed

by a set of distinctive affects, sensibilities, and praxiological conventions through which

diverse internet users—mostly Euro-Americans living in the global North1—can not only

learn about but also participate in what is widely construed as an urgent, morally compelling

project of “saving the orangutan.”

Such participation, however, is not always straightforward. As we shall see, this social

media-scape is marked by a persistent tension between two contrasting models of human-

animal relations—interspecies intimacy on the one hand, and an inviolable species divide on

the other—which give rise to quite different politics and subjectivities. Attending to this

tension, I suggest, can reveal not only how orangutan causes are crafted and made publicly

legible, but also the complexities of digital “participation”—and more specifically, how

social media can exclude and hierarchize as much as they promise to foster inclusion and

democratization (see, e.g., Mason 2011, Shirky 2008).

Ethnographically, then, this article seeks to contribute to a growing corpus of work on the

multiple “practices and beliefs…at the very heart of Western naturalism,” which, as Candea

and Alcayna-Stevens (2012:37) point out, are often oversimplified and homogenized in

anthropological depictions of “other” ontologies. Following their counter-injunction to take

seriously rather than flatten out such diversity, I will foreground the fluctuating, contextual

nature of orangutan supporters’ conceptions of human-animal difference as they play out on

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social media. Doing so, however, raises a further question: just why are these conceptions, as

well as users’ interactions, often so morally, emotionally, and socially loaded? Addressing

this demands a broader analytical agenda that draws together the emergent anthropology of

social media and earlier work on rights-oriented media activism.

Figuring “witnessing publics” on social media

Since the mid-2000s, ethnographies of social media have largely clustered around two

contrasting approaches. Whereas the first treats social media as “contiguous with and

embedded in other social spaces” (Miller and Slater 2000:50) such as transnational diasporas

(e.g. McKay 2011), localities (e.g. Miller 2016, Postill 2011), and teenage lives (boyd 2014),

the second highlights social media’s relational and organizational novelty—their capacity to

generate and sustain new political arenas, revolutions, and forms of protest in an “age of viral

reality” (Postill 2014; see also, e.g., Gerbaudo 2012, Gerbaudo and Treré 2015, Juris 2012).

Between these two ends of the spectrum, however, lies a sizeable and relatively under-studied

gray area filled with issues, causes, and other projects that both assemble and produce

particular constituencies of participants (Warner 2005). It is here that we find “issue-specific

public[s]” (Yang and Calhoun 2007:212) such as the individual supporters who populate the

social media-scape of orangutan conservation. Neither interested in forging “strong” social

ties nor in full-bodied political activism, such users share only a common sense of investment

in the fate of orangutans in Borneo and Sumatra. Yet despite the seemingly impersonal,

incidental nature of their activities, their participation in this sphere is often highly “charged”

(Fattal 2014:322)—affectively, morally, politically.

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Part of my aim, then, is to shed light on that murky terrain between everyday sociality and

full-blown activism on social media, which has received relatively little anthropological

attention (but see, e.g., Postill and Pink 2012). More ambitiously, however, I also seek to

account for how the “digital socialities” (ibid.:127) that criss-cross this space become charged

with meaning and conviction, and what these processes imply for its political and relational

dynamics. To do so, I draw inspiration from an earlier body of scholarship—the anthropology

of rights- and cause-oriented media activism (e.g. Allen 2009, Gregory 2006, Keenan 2004,

Kocer 2013, McLagan 2003, 2005, 2006, McLagan and McKee 2012, Torchin 2006)—on

which I now briefly expound.

Broadly speaking, contributors to this field explore how certain narratives or images register

with and act on their audiences by tracing the media representations, technologies, and

circuits through which specific issues (e.g. famine, torture) are made visible to transnational

audiences in ways that spur them into taking alleviatory action. Arguing that “media are not

simply conduits for social forces, but rather are key sites for the definition of political issues

and communities and the making of active and attentive publics” (McLagan 2005:223), such

scholars foreground the “social labor” involved in making rights claims public (ibid.) and the

“political work” (Allen 2009:171, Keenan 2004:443) performed by films, photographs, and

other material in these processes.

Importantly, rather than only analyzing the substance of visual and discursive representations,

this approach maps the “circulatory matri[ces], or dedicated communications

infrastructure”—from organizational practices to film festivals to websites—“out of which

human rights claims are generated and through which they travel” (McLagan 2006:192). As

narratives and images of suffering move, McLagan argues,

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they have the potential to construct audiences as virtual witnesses, a subject position

that implies responsibility for the suffering of others. In this sense, human rights

images make ethical claims on viewers and cultivate potential actors in the global

arena (2003:609).

Many of these insights can be productively applied to digital manifestations of orangutan

causes, which are structured around similar media(tions), appeals, and communications

infrastructures. But whereas much earlier work centers on film, photography, and websites—

the preponderant channels of media activism in the early/mid-2000s—I focus here on social

media platforms, notably Facebook (f. 2004) and Twitter (f. 2006), which in the last decade

have joined, and arguably superseded, these media-forms as dominant cause-related outlets.

Like other “Web 2.0” technologies, these platforms are built around an infrastructure and

(idealized) culture of participation: of constant interaction, content-sharing, and “remixing”

(Shifman 2011) of material by individual users (see also Beer and Burrows 2010, Bennett and

Segerberg 2013).2 As such, they present anthropologists of media activism with intriguing

challenges and possibilities—key among which is the opportunity to examine how issues and

claims are apprehended, appropriated, reproduced, and personalized by their intended (and

possibly unintended) audiences. In exploring these processes, I thus pick up from where

earlier scholarship left off by tracing not only how rights media “make ethical claims on us”

(McLagan 2006:606), but also, crucially, what sorts of afterlives those claims can acquire as

they move.

Apes in cyberspace

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In this article, I use “orangutan conservation” to describe a broad spectrum of models,

projects, and mechanisms—many convergent, some conflictual—related to the survival and

well-being of orangutans. These include: 1) ongoing scientific research projects on wild

orangutans in Borneo and Sumatra; 2) various nongovernmental organizations that pursue

holistic conservation strategies, e.g. campaigns against deforestation or to secure protected

land for orangutans; and 3) rescue and rehabilitation centers that save displaced, injured, or

captured orangutans, treat and “rehabilitate” them, before ideally reintroducing them to the

wild.3

Despite their differing agendas and approaches, parties across this spectrum commonly—if

selectively—cooperate with each other. Such collaborative practices are mirrored and often

extended in the social media-scape of orangutan conservation: a loose and fast-evolving

cluster of images, videos, appeals, petitions, news-pieces, scientific publications, and other

digital artifacts that now forms a significant part of many organizations’ outreach and

publicity efforts. Cumulatively, these constitute a discernible field of activity that

encompasses a regular cast of players—orangutan bodies and their supporters—and a

recurrent set of tropes, narratives, and affective and praxiological conventions. It is further

strung together by the connections—and ethos of connectedness—between different

organizations, many of which “follow” each other on platforms like Facebook, Instagram,

and Twitter, and occasionally circulate the same material.4 While often extensions of offline

relationships, such connections can also engender new alliances and other possibilities that

could only exist online.

While informed by my volunteer stint as well interviews and discussions with orangutan

charities, scientists, and conservationists, most of the research for this article has taken place

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on social media. Conducting digital ethnography in this lively, profusive space entails a

peculiar form of participant-observation—one less like sitting in a village forging “deep”

social ties than like hopping erratically between public gatherings (in this case, comments

threads, strings of tweets, or virtual events like World Orangutan Day), occasionally meeting

the same digital faces and picking up certain sensibilities, ideas, turns of phrases, and

interactive conventions along the way. These features are not moored to particular groups or

individuals; rather, they are public, “persistent” (boyd 2014:11), acquirable, and shareable by

users dispersed across the world, and whose activities and interactions they frame.

Accordingly, this article does not claim to capture any one party’s perspective(s) on

orangutan conservation or to uncover hidden truths about supporters’ varied offline lives.

Instead, it strives to illuminate the distinctive affects, sensibilities, and subjectivities that are

produced and circulate within this digital space, as well as the ramifications of these

processes for its social and political dynamics. We begin, then, with an ethnographic

elaboration of Alice’s first point: the powerful draw of cute orangutans.

Eliding the species divide

Saving Budi and Jemmi

Although rescue and rehabilitation centers aim to “return” animals to “the wild,” their work

can be controversial and problematic. Various analysts, for example, have questioned the

long-term cost-effectiveness of reintroduction strategies, the capacity of post-release

orangutans to thrive in the wild, and the potential for such schemes to perpetuate misleading

impressions of orangutans and conservation.5 Standards and procedures, moreover, vary

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across centers, and many animals become lifelong residents because of their inability to

survive in the rainforest. Baby orangutans, however, bring a glimmer of hope to this picture.

Often arriving as orphans who lack basic survival skills, they remain on site for several years

while they are taught to live in the jungle in human-run “forest schools.” Unsurprisingly, such

orangutans—who quickly acquire names, biographies, and hopeful trajectories—make ideal

poster children for orangutan causes, often becoming linchpins of virtual adoption programs6

that several organizations run or support to raise funds for their efforts. And as this example

will reveal, posts and tweets about these orangutans are pivotal in shaping the affective and

ethical contours of the social media-scape as they circulate.

Budi and Jemmi are two of many orphaned orangutans at a rescue and rehabilitation center in

Ketapang, West Kalimantan, which is run by the Indonesian branch of International Animal

Rescue (IAR)—a charity dedicated to “saving animals from suffering around the world.”

IAR’s orangutan program (f. 2009) is one of its most prominent arms, regularly featuring in

major news outlets, from Britain’s Daily Telegraph to the Huffington Post online. IAR also

maintains an impressive everyday social media presence, with a dedicated YouTube channel,

Facebook page, Twitter feed, and Pinterest board. Its posts and tweets—curated by a team in

its UK office7—are among the most visible and popular features of the social media-scape of

orangutan conservation, accruing significantly more likes, tags, shares, and retweets than its

counterparts. These do not only cover stories about specific orangutans, but also highlight the

larger contextual challenges—such as deforestation and human-animal conflict—facing

orangutan populations today. In this capacity, such posts and tweets serve as prominent entry-

points into the world of orangutan-related causes, and are regularly (if selectively) shared by

other organizations in order to draw attention to wider conservation issues.

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Both Budi and Jemmi have tragic biographies, having lost their mothers (possibly to human-

orangutan conflict or poaching) and been kept by local people as pets—Budi in a chicken

cage, Jemmi in a cardboard box. Shortly after they were introduced in rehabilitation, IAR

posted a photo album of them on Facebook (April 6 2014),8 the caption to which read:

BUDI AND JEMMI ARE BEST FRIENDS!

Our two youngest rescued baby orangutans have developed a beautiful friendship!

They spend their days together in the day enclosure playing and climbing around on

the ropes and branches. If Budi is taken into the day enclosure first he will keep

looking back for Jemmi and, if left on his own, will cry until his new friend joins him!

At the end of the day they both make their way back to their shared hammock where

they spend the night together. […]

This album garnered over 6,400 likes, 2,427 shares and 352 comments, a small selection of

which include:

KA: How wonderful that they have found love and friendship after their lonely lives

in captivity - and it has come totally naturally. Just amazing.

GG: oh my goodness ... that is so so cute... look at the ickle pot bellies waiting to be

smushed x x x

EF: My heart just burst!!!! What a wonderful Easter treat to see these 2 BFFS [best

friends forever] together. Go Budi! Go Jemmi! X

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VF-H: My gosh, just like sibling love, amazing. Thank you

IK: I am glad those two take comfort in each other... They badly need this... being

orphaned and traumatized.

These are fairly representative responses to the many baby orangutan-related posts that

circulate on this social media-scape. Most appear to be off-the-cuff interjections,

exclamations, and affirmations in a digital love-fest in which everyone shares—or is assumed

to share—the same sentiment. Although many organizations take pains not to portray such

orangutans as variants of human children—IAR’s team, for example, studiously eschews

words like “cute” and “cuddly,” and avoids drawing attention to obviously babyish (if

practical) devices such as diapers and bottles—these stories and images nevertheless tend to

evoke overwhelmingly child-oriented responses on the part of their observers. Indeed, it is

not uncommon to see posters lapsing into baby-speak and saying how much they, like GG,

want to “smush” these little characters’ “ickle pot bellies”.

Such remarks may be seen, in part, as manifestations of a widespread human response to

“neotenous” bodily configurations—round heads, round cheeks, big eyes, and other baby-like

features—which, as ethologists and biological anthropologists have noted (e.g. Lorenz 1950,

Gould 1980), are evolutionarily designed to elicit feelings of tenderness among their adult

beholders. But these responses are also given shape and resonance by the connotations of

cuteness within their posters’ own socio-cultural milieus. As Merish (1996) and Ngai (2012),

among others, argue, cuteness in Western societies is often entwined with notions of

childhood and powerlessness on the one hand, and adulthood and protection on the other:

“what the cute stages is, in part, a need for adult care” (Merish 1996:187). Accordingly, Ngai

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writes, “cute things evoke a desire in us not just to lovingly molest but also to aggressively

protect them” (2012:4)—an experience that, she argues, “depends entirely on the subject’s

affective response to an imbalance of power between herself and the object” (2012:54).

Read through this lens, it is unsurprising that pictures of baby orangutans engender such

strong, “heart-bursting” reactions—that desire to cuddle them, or that inarticulable “aww”

feeling that some posters channel into emojis. Many users take unabashed pleasure in gazing

at these images and sharing them with others. But, as some of the comments above suggest,

their pleasure is also tinged with pain and pity. For many supporters, Budi and Jemmi are not

just cute babies but individuals with heart-rending stories: of “being orphaned and

traumatized” and spending “lonely lives in captivity”. Their status as such stems from their

embeddedness in a larger narrative about environmental destruction, political apathy, and

local ignorance—all of which make cute images and sad stories legible on social media as

conservation “issues.”

Producing “the plight of the orangutan”

The social media-scape of orangutan conservation is rife with villains, from corrupt

politicians to cruel villagers who kill orangutans or keep them as pets. However, the most

prominent of these is palm oil, a common ingredient in many consumer products and fuels.

Approximately 90% of this global commodity is produced by Indonesia and Malaysia, with

both Borneo and Sumatra serving as major oil palm frontiers (see, e.g., Sheil 2009). Over the

last decade, oil palm corporations have come under critical scrutiny by environmentalists and

conservationists, many of whom have harnessed the viral capacities of digital media to lay

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bare—and in some ways fashion—a causal link between palm oil production, deforestation,

and orangutan extinction.

An early, memorable example of this strategy was Greenpeace’s viral campaign against the

multinational food giant Nestlé, which it accused of “us[ing] palm oil from companies that

are trashing Indonesian rainforests, threatening the livelihoods of local people and pushing

orang-utans towards extinction”. In March 2010, the activist organization premiered a

Youtube advertisement entitled “Give the orang-utan a break”—a snide play on the slogan

associated with Nestlé’s popular Kit Kat bar.9 The video drew a startling visual link between

consuming Kit Kat (which contains palm oil) and killing orangutans by showing an office

worker blithely snapping off and biting into what turns out to be a bloodied orangutan finger.

Imploring viewers to “stop Nestlé buying palm oil from companies that destroy rainforests”,

it urged them to boycott the product and inundate Nestlé with messages. The video went

viral; in the acrimonious online battle that ensued, industry observers widely concurred that

Nestlé had “take[n] a beating” (Steel 2010). A few months later, Greenpeace claimed victory

when Nestlé suspended its relationship with a blacklisted palm oil supplier and reiterated its

commitment to buying only sustainable palm oil.

While not the first to propound the causal chain between oil palm, deforestation, orangutans,

and palm oil-containing products (see, e.g., Buckland 2005), this 2010 campaign appears to

have been remarkably effective in generating and consolidating what is now the orthodox

narrative throughout the social media-scape of orangutan conservation.10 Interestingly, this

narrative is seldom laid out in linear detail; rather, it gets disseminated in pithy fragments

that, over time, add up to much the same thing. A typical example of this occurs every Easter,

when organizations play on the occasion to hammer home their palm oil message. On March

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16 2016, for instance, the UK-based Orangutan Protection Foundation (OPF) posted a

winsome image of a baby orangutan peering over a log, and the words, “When buying your

Easter eggs, please think of me and buy PALM OIL FREE”. The caption added: “Please

choose the forests and those who dwell within them over chocolate this Easter. Thank you

#SaveTheOrangutan #ConflictPalmOil #Deforestation”.11

The invocation of the palm oil narrative gave emotive and political charge to what would

otherwise have simply been a charismatic image: this was not just a baby orangutan, but a

victim of human greed that viewers had the power to save by making the right consumer

choices. Like images of suffering children—that powerful motif around which many “deep,

transnationally circulating [humanitarian] imaginaries” (Malkki 2015:78) revolve—such

orangutans become incarnated on social media as embodiments of innocence and “pure need”

(ibid.:82; see also Bornstein 2001, Suski 2009). Strikingly, however, rather than spelling out

the link between palm oil, forests, chocolate eggs, and orangutans, OPF’s post presumed a

degree of extant knowledge—of complicity—on the part of its viewers, most of whom would

indeed have encountered fragments of the same narrative elsewhere on social media.

In the run-up to Easter, for example, OPF’s Facebook timeline alone contained several posts

alluding more or less directly to this narrative: a photograph of six orangutans in the OPF’s

sponsored “forest school” in Indonesia (“we may not have our mums, but at least we have

each other” ); two news-pieces about the devastating impact of Borneo’s annual forest fires,

which are often blamed on the land-clearing practices of oil palm corporations; and a link to

an activist film, Green (2009), about the tragic fate of an orangutan displaced by commercial

deforestation. More sober palm oil-related articles also featured on the Facebook and Twitter

feeds of OUTrop and the Orangutan Land Trust12 in the same period, while IAR—which also

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consistently flags the palm oil issue—took the opportunity to promote its virtual orangutan

adoption program as “an animal friendly” alternative to chocolate eggs.

These examples point to how the social media-scape of orangutan conservation operates as a

“circulatory” (McLagan 2006:192) space in which myriad elements—arresting images,

narratives of suffering and injustice, forms of moral praxis—are continually being drawn

together, made visible, “formatted into issues and circulated” (McLagan 2005:224). In this

space, the outputs of different orangutan bodies—even those with contrasting approaches—

are often mutually reinforcing, complementing and corroborating each other as they circulate

and overlap. Adding an extra layer of complexity to these processes, however, are the ways in

which such outputs are taken up and circulated by individuals. Many orangutan supporters,

for example, retweet or share specific posts to their own networks, often with personal

glosses. A lady who shared the OPF’s Easter egg post to her Facebook timeline thus wrote:

“Please, please read your labels carefully—so many chocolates and sweets contain palm oil.

Please, please only buy ones that don’t—for the sake of the human, animal and plant forest

dwellers”. In a further comment, she added a list of websites that outlined the link between

palm oil, deforestation, and orangutans.

At other times, comments threads and chains of tweets can themselves become sites of peer

exchange, as happened with IAR’s Easter post:

JB: Wait....palm oil is used in chocolate. Nooooooooooo! I love chocolate :(

SLF: It's used in everything from chocolate to shampoo, toothpaste to bread .There

are chocolates that are Palm Oil free & yummy ones too.You don't have to miss out

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just check all labels & check Palm Oil free web sites for clarification & examples of

Palm Oil free ones 😊

JB: Oh man! I had no idea! :(

SLF: To check the palm oil content of products on supermarket shelves, download our

free barcode scanner app for ios and Android.

http://www.palmoilinvestigationsapp.com/ 😉 Palm Oil Investigations is a great site,

Google Palm Oil & there are a few really good ones & they will be posting lots of

Palm Oil free Easter treat ideas for chocolate lovers.

TC: Great idea with the barcode scanner, but it's not available in the UK. Is there one

for the UK out there?

SLF: Check out some of the Palm Oil free sites & hopefully there is a UK one

available or in the works at least 😉

The interactive affordances of social media thus enable a disparate range of internet users to

not only learn about the threats facing orangutans, but also actively participate in efforts to

alleviate them. Such follow-on exchanges, to which orangutan organizations also contribute,

constitute the afterlives of original cause-related posts, which get disseminated,

(re)interpreted, and embellished as they move between users. Cumulatively, I suggest, all

these activities produce a specific online version of “the plight of the orangutan”: a multiply-

scaled story of individual tragedy and hope set within a context of rapid anthropogenic

environmental change. Replete with its own logics of culpability and responsibility, it forms

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the affective and political backdrop against which specific stories, appeals, campaigns, and

news-pieces are charged with meaning and urgency. The upshot of this is the transformation

—transfiguration, even—of the likes of Budi and Jemmi from merely cute orangutans into

innocent, deserving victims, and their social media viewers into “witnessing publics”

(McLagan 2003, Torchin 2006) who are morally, even viscerally, compelled to save them.

Producing “witnessing publics”

The process by which “witnessing publics” emerge on social media can be observed in

responses to a video that IAR posted about Udin, a baby orangutan who had been kept as a

pet by a villager, “locked up in a small, dark cage with nothing and no one to comfort him”. 13

Like others of its ilk, the video juxtaposes photographs, captions, and an evocative

soundtrack, chronicling Udin’s journey from his rescue—when he was described by the

Ketapang team as having “lost the will to live”14—through to his slow recovery, concluding

with an appeal for donations to “support the ongoing care of baby Udin and to help us save

others like him, before it’s too late”.

Responses flooded in instantly, with most posters professing to be horrified by what one

described as “unbelievable crimes by moronic heartless ‘humans’.” Like the comments on

Budi and Jemmi’s album, their remarks were expressly emotional, and further fuelled by

Udin’s cuteness and helplessness; as supporters often point out, orangutans should be

enjoying carefree childhoods in the forest, not enduring captivity, pain, and misery. One man

thus wrote, “My eyes immediately wanted to tear up when I watched this heart breaking

video of Udin,” while another poster commented: “I have never seen such sad eyes... Poor

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little one and shame on humans... ”. Meanwhile, many users drew an explicit link between

the distress elicited by the video and their decision to do something about it.

FH: I have just donated what I could for this baby. My heart breaks for him. Darling

one. Thank you for caring so well for him xxxx

LL: Oh God! How can people be SO CRUEL? My heart is breaking!! So very, very

sad 😢😢 will be donating as soon as I get home from work.

Such remarks were joined by several others that sought to channel the emotional surge

generated by Udin’s video into consumer action and awareness. Although oil palm was never

mentioned in the video, it is striking that these supporters joined the dots themselves by

linking Udin’s story to the dominant narrative. MW thus posted: “we must stop buying palm

oil. That is why the forests are disappearing and the orangutans in danger,” while LR wrote—

possibly with Greenpeace’s 2010 campaign in mind—

I hope everyone commenting on here makes a constant and full effort to avoid palm

oil because that is the direct cause of this […] [T]his little creature is the price paid for

you to enjoy a packet of biscuits or a chocolate bar. So if you're commenting on here

about how sad it is while regularly chowing down on a kitkat then take a look at what

YOU are funding.

These comments work on the same visual and affective logic that underlies rights media more

generally: that “seeing causes feeling, the prickling of conscience, and doing” (Allen

2009:169-70). Braided together with the palm oil narrative, such arresting images

“emotionally engage and persuade their audiences of a cause’s moral worth” (McLagan

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2003:606). But whereas human rights ideology incites empathy and action by appealing to a

common, shared humanness, the responses above are arguably driven by what Milton calls

“egomorphism”—that is, the perception of non-human animals as other selves, as “like me”

and not just human-like (2005:261; see also Alcayna-Stevens 2012, Candea 2010). Despite

IAR’s and other organizations’ efforts to avoid excessive anthropomorphism, many social

media users appear to perceive orangutans as, in effect, persons whose “inner world[s are]…

available and perceivable” (ibid.:265) to other persons. These babies, they thus write, are

traumatized, have “sad eyes,” “take comfort in each other,” must show “resilience”—just as

human subjects, not just human organisms, do.

Such perceptions do not dissolve posters’ awareness of human-animal difference—quite the

opposite, as suggested by scores of comments about how horrible humanity is—but they do

subsume it within a more encompassing framework of interspecies affect and moral

responsibility (see also Sowards 2006). In this way, they produce quite a different figure to

that of the generic orangutan victim: that of the orangutan as an individual person(ality) with

his/her own biography and character. The constant interplay between these two figures on

social media is, I suggest, what makes the likes of Budi, Jemmi, and Udin so appealing—and

so ethically demanding—to their human beholders. These charismatic apes render the palm

oil “problem” both intimate and immediate: pictured “at stroking distance” (Bousé 2003:124)

on users’ screens, they “charge” the social media-scape in which their images circulate,

turning it into a space not just of information but of moral intervention. In the process, they

produce a third crucial figure: the social media user as witness and not merely onlooker to

suffering, who is “morally oblig[ed] to act” (Torchin 2006:215).

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And act many social media users do. Apart from circulating organizations’ posts, supporters

can also donate money, adopt orangutans, purchase items for them,15 sign petitions, support

campaigns, fundraise, and even volunteer at certain centers and projects in Borneo and

Sumatra. All these actions, virtual and otherwise, are routinely posted on social media, not

simply as accounts of individuals’ activities, but often as ways of spurring others into action:

by calling attention to irresistibly cute orangutans with painful biographies, by asking

relatives and friends to donate to causes through strategic tags and shares, by challenging

networks of “followers” to match one’s own fundraising or awareness-generating efforts (see

Author n.d.).

Such activities pivot on the mechanics of visibility and the blurry “public/private” divide on

social media. In an (idealized) “private public sphere” where users routinely “engage in

practices of public ‘life streaming’” (Hirschkind et al. 2017:S7),16 orangutan supporters are

aware that what they post, like, and share will probably be seen by the other members of their

online networks. This awareness, I argue, gives rise to a small-scale, outward-facing,

personal politics (Author n.d.) that is fuelled by and seeks to kindle that same sense of

interspecies attachment and responsibility in others. Tellingly, most interventions on this

social media-scape are addressed not to fellow supporters, but to users’ personal contacts,

whom they often try to move with the same combination of pleasure, pain, and pity examined

earlier.

More than making “ethical claims” (McLagan 2006:606) on their supporters, orangutan-

related posts thus enable internet users to make claims on each other: to gather up more and

more participants into a buzzing hive of witnessing and moral praxis. Access and inclusivity

are central to this project, which is premised on the assumption that potentially anyone can

19

become an orangutan supporter. As the OPF tweeted: “What does it mean to be an Orangutan

Protector? Well, it starts with a little bit of knowledge...” (January 10 2016). But there is

another more complex side to the story. If interspecies attachment—that urge to cuddle and

protect—fuels the formation of “witnessing publics” online, it can sometimes become

dangerous. And as the next section reveals, the constant spectre of this possibility—and the

concomitant need to tame it—can give rise to quite different configurations of human-animal

relations, social dynamics, and politics on this social media-scape.

“Take your stinking paws off me”: re-erecting the species divide

In October 2015, the Indonesian Center for Orangutan Protection (COP)—which works with

organizations in the global North and has a large constituency of Australian supporters—

posted on Facebook a photograph of a baby orangutan being bathed in a sink by three white

women and the words,

“Take your stinking paws off me, you damn dirty ape!”

This sort of hands-on tourism is NOT for the benefit of the orangutan, it is for the

benefit of the human, is very detrimental to orangutans & is purely a revenue raiser.

PLEASE put the welfare of the orangutan over your desire to cuddle one. Do the right

thing.17

Its caption contained a web-link led to a longer document18 produced by the Orangutan

Project, which operates at a popular wildlife rehabilitation center in Malaysian Borneo.

Written for its international volunteers, the piece explains “why no contact [with orangutans]

is the best policy.” In brief, it argues that humans risk transmitting various potentially fatal

anthropozoonotic diseases to “to our primate cousins” through unprotected contact, and that

20

there will be “habituation and behavioural implications” for orangutans if they get too used to

humans while being prepared to return to the wild. As the narrative unfolds, it veers from

scientific into ethical territory:

You should always ask yourself – is touching the orang-utan something you feel will

benefit its life, or is it something that you wish to do simply for your own experience

and pleasure?

This post is on the more civil end of a gamut of messages that regularly surface on social

media to condemn similar instances of inappropriate contact, such as when orangutans are

kept as pets or used as performers in films and zoos. Such messages point to what we might

call the dark side of cuteness: the danger of taking the impulse to protect and cuddle, which

images of cute or suffering orangutans elicit, to its logical physical conclusion. For to do so is

to establish what these posts portray—and in many ways define—as inappropriate

interspecies interaction that may be tempting and gratifying for the human but disastrous for

the orangutan. In its stead, such posts advocate a necessary segregation of human and animal:

one styled as an unselfish act of love that puts orangutans’ welfare above people’s ignorant

fantasies. Crucially, this form of human-animal detachment is not the negation of a relation

but a cultivated, ethical stance (Candea 2010): a specific way of relating to orangutans that,

the messages imply, humans need to learn.

Such no-contact messages propound quite a different configuration of human-orangutan

relations to the manifestations of interspecies attachment examined earlier. Both are, of

course, premised on what may be seen as a quintessentially “Western naturalist” assumption

of the ontological partition between humans and animals. But whereas the latter constantly

elides that divide through the invocation of intersubjective intimacy, the former repeatedly,

21

insistently reinscribes it. These contrasting impulses, I argue, encapsulate a key, long-

standing tension that pervades orangutan conservation more generally:19 Although much of

the moral and affective “pull” of orangutan causes derives from romantic notions of

interspecies intimacy, love, and responsibility, the entire point of conservation is to save them

from humans; to keep them in “the wild”, where they can roam safe and free as “nature”

intended. While zoos and rehabilitation centers blur that line (see, e.g., Palmer et al. 2016,

Parreñas 2012, Russon et al. 2016), the ideal human-orangutan relationship—as defined

within orangutan conservation—is one of non-contact, whereby the two parties stay firmly on

their respective sides of the nature/culture, animal/human divide.

This tension permeates the social media-scape of orangutan conservation, where—thanks to

the spatio-temporal affordances of Web 2.0 technologies—cute images and no-contact

messages constantly jostle for space in the same corners of the internet. On sites such as

Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, the contradictory ethnographic moments that I experienced

weeks apart can easily be juxtaposed within seconds on a single thread, timeline, or playlist.

In this way, such digital spaces become sites for the ongoing (re)production of two opposing

impulses: one to cuddle, the other to draw back. If images of cute or suffering orangutans

momentarily draw users into a sense of interspecies intimacy, a “no-contact” post can sternly

jerk them back within minutes, re-erecting that all-important species divide.

The constant push-and-pull of such contrasting impulses resonates with Alcayna-Stevens’

observations in her ethnography of a Catalonian chimpanzee sanctuary (2012). Noting that

keepers routinely undertook what appeared to be starkly contrasting practices—treating

chimpanzees as fundamentally unknowable nonhuman others one minute and as knowable

selves the next (2012:92)—she asks: how should anthropologists deal with such apparent

22

paradoxes? Her response is not to resolve them by incorporating them into a single

(dominant) account, but, rather, to suspend these possibilities as distinct “worlds of intent”

(ibid.:88) between which keepers move, and about which they make epistemological and

ontological claims. To this end, she deploys the notion of “doublethink” as a heuristic

through which anthropologists can appreciate but not actualize the “comings-in and -out of

existence of what would appear (when placed side by side) to be incommensurable practices”

(ibid.:92).

“Doublethink” is in some ways a useful device for apprehending the dynamics of the social

media-scape of orangutan conservation. By framing interspecies intimacy and species

difference less as paradoxes to be tamed than as equivalent possibilities, it becomes easier to

see how and why many orangutan supporters often toggle unproblematically between the

impulses to cuddle and draw back. Both, I suggest, are distillations of disparate “worlds of

intent”, one presentist (to comfort and care for), the other prospective (to return to the wild).

Distinct but not incommensurable, these worlds are ordered around different temporal

orientations, with the first being seen as a non-ideal but necessary prelude to the second.

Here, Udin the orangutan, Udin the innocent victim, and Udin the wild orangutan(-to-be) are

not the same thing: they are different figures, implying different relations, that segue in and

out of prominence with the ebbs and flows of social media.

“Doublethink,” however, can only take us so far. While rendering different (possible) worlds

heuristically equivalent for the anthropologist, it does not account for how our subjects

themselves might order their worlds in various non-equivalent ways. Yet, as I shall now

suggest, some of these ordering efforts can have very real effects on the social and political

dynamics of social media.

23

Differentiating “witnessing publics”

The contrasting impulses that we have just examined adds a further layer to our

understanding of how “witnessing publics,” once produced, go on to interact, intervene, and

(re)constitute themselves on social media. As we have seen, a sense of interspecies empathy,

framed by the palm oil narrative, forms the baseline of many popular engagements with

orangutan causes. But what the simultaneous, if less frequent, circulation of no-contact

messages does, I suggest, is push orangutan supporters to cultivate a more reflexive

conservation sensibility through which they can tell what is right and wrong, appropriate and

inappropriate, in the context of human-orangutan relations. In effect, this means overcoming

the “difficulty of disentanglement” (Kelly and Lezaun 2014:369) and developing the capacity

to pull back: to know when to suppress that urge to cuddle and to re-erect the species

boundary and all that comes with it.

Not all orangutan supporters, however, appear to have grasped this sensibility. And it is here

that we can trace a more inward-folding, exclusionary form of social media politics. Consider

this short but illuminating exchange that ensued in response to COP’s “stinking paws” post.

Most responses were typically succinct affirmations of the no-contact message: “I am happy

to look not touch”; “Would love to cuddle an orang but know I can”t as it is the wrong thing

to do.” Soon after the post went live, however, a lady from Barcelona (CCV) wrote, “I would

to cuddle one in my arms with all my love 💕💕💕💕♥ ”. COP immediately responded with

an implicit rebuke: “Did you read the article [on non-contact] CCV????” Two further

comments followed:

24

CB [in response to COP’s question]: Im thinking NOT LOL [laughing out loud]

OB: 😡😡😡😡😡 [angry face]

A day later, CCV responded with two comments: “You are right, i love them, and dont want

to do anything for their detriment […]”; and “i want to say also, how sorry I feel. Look but

dont touch,💕💕”. This terse conversation was a telling but not unusual example of how

social media’s interactive affordances are deployed by certain orangutan supporters to

educate and ostracize ignorant others: a process that, like the peer exchanges discussed

earlier, can take place across time and space between individuals who have never met.

Although nobody told CCV why they thought her first comment was wrong, the snide,

disdainful responses she received—together, perhaps, with the link to the no-contact

document—had the effect of bringing her in line with the prevailing orthodoxy.

More than “educating” CCV, however, this exchange also postulated a momentary but

significant distinction between different members of orangutan conservation’s “witnessing

public”: that is, between a set of informed, reflexive orangutan supporters and relatively

ignorant would-be orangutan huggers—posters like CCV who didn’t know where to draw the

line between cuddling and drawing back. For CCV’s critics, these two impulses and the

“worlds of intent” that they represented were not equivalent but ordered in a clear moral

hierarchy.20 In this respect, this exchange serves as a lens onto another important feature of

this social media-scape: the alliances, enmities, and inequalities that striate it and, as my final

example shows, the larger arena of orangutan conservation.

25

In 2013, some orangutan conservation professionals and their supporters set up a public

Facebook group to challenge the claims and practices of an Australian reality television-style

film that followed the experiences of a group of young environmental activists in an

orangutan sanctuary—a place that group members condemned as corrupt, unscientific, and

unethical. Most of their posts adopted a “name and shame” approach, subjecting stories,

videos, or comments related to the film and sanctuary to unbridled criticism. In one instance,

a group member posted a photograph of a young female participant bottle-feeding a baby

orangutan at the sanctuary, with the caption: “[Name] handling a baby orangutan at the …

Prison [the sanctuary] without going through quarantine, and no gloves or mask”. The first

few responses revolved around how to post a critical question about this picture on the film’s

Facebook page. These were followed, however, by a query from a French user (F):

F: I see only the beauty of the picture of maternal gestures of the young girl for this

baby orangutan..... / I can download this photo?

F: < I think not having understood all the comments here > beacause my english is

very bad

The ensuing exchange is worth partially reproducing:

Group Administrator 1 [GA1]: F, that might be an acceptable interpretation had the

person in the photo taken the necessary precautions to protect the health of the baby in

her arms.

26

F: oh I understand better now .... ( in this case I do not download this photo ....)

thank you GA1

[…]

GA1: ok! Yes basically we are concerned that this movie they make with these

inexperienced young people do not take notice of experts who recommend that

between 10 and 14 days of quarantine should be observed during which time the

visitor has no contact with the animals (no closer than 5-7 meters). This is because the

orangutan can die from diseases caught by humans […] The film makers say that they

HAVE to be able to put these orangutans’ lives at risk...the word they used was that it

was "unavoidable”. We believe there is no justification for this behaviour.

F: you right..... totally ..

[…]

Group Administrator 2 [GA2]: furthermore, this woman-- along with several other

very naive individuals-- has been totally brainwashed by people who have their own

agenda...

no respectable conservationists will have anything to do with this awful project, this

orangutan prison or the ego-maniac in charge of it all....

F: i understand [...] this is really sad the risks taken for these babies.. :-(((

27

GA2: […] these selfish people are doing it for publicity for their ridiculous film... if

they truly cared about the orangutans they would be sent to [another center] so they

could receive professional care and rehabilitation.

F: absolutely ...... these photos act the wrong way on people’s minds ..... luckily you

are ALL here to “point the finger” the irréponsabilité of these people thank you for

it....

Like the curt interactions surrounding CCV’s post, this thread demonstrates in unusual detail

the pedagogical dynamics of the social media-scape of orangutan conservation: that process

by which individuals are taught to acquire a proper conservation sensibility. For these critics,

one of the show’s participants’ many sins was the failure, selfish or naïve, to pull back—to

preserve the human-orangutan divide where it was most needed. The center’s failure to

prevent such dangerous, ethically suspect interspecies contact was portrayed as further proof

of its immorality, illegitimacy, and profiteering agenda. This charge was often accentuated by

posts that extolled the virtues and accomplishments of what were styled “real” conservation

heroes.

Exchanges like these expose—but also publicly fan—the tensions that fissure the wider field

of orangutan conservation. In these moments, I argue, cuteness, the no-contact issue, human-

animal relations, and the entire normative framework of conservation become political. These

are instances in which different parties strive to delimit not only the “right” way of relating to

orangutans, but also who has the right to determine what that right way is. It is worth noting

that the film’s critics used their personal accounts, and that publicly reproaching one

organization in this way is not commonplace among orangutan conservation professionals.

28

However, my earlier point about the circulatory and combinatory effects of social media also

applies here. Just as different organizations’ images and narratives often produce a

cumulative and relatively coherent version of “the plight of the orangutan” as they travel

across social media, posts like the one above have the effect of hierarchizing this social

media-scape: by parsing, and in many ways producing, different morally-laden categories and

levels of privilege and legitimacy into which various players can (sometimes unwittingly)

become slotted.

The sort of online politics to which these activities give rise is as “charged” as the politics of

inclusivity and interspecies responsibility that we examined earlier. What it enacts, however,

is not an opening up but a closing off: of humans from animals, and of different (social

media-defined) types of orangutan supporters from each other. In this way, it tempers the

ethos of inclusivity through which orangutan conservation’s “witnessing publics” are

produced and enlarged. At the same time, it reveals how both posts and publics can acquire

afterlives of their own, in ways that exceed their original moral and praxiological remits as

well as the bounds of orangutan organizations’ control.

Conclusion

As recent “multispecies” scholarship (Kirskey and Helmreich 2010) has reiterated,

contradiction, tension, and ambiguity are endemic to human-animal relations—even in the

most familiarly “Western” of settings (see, e.g., Alcayna-Stevens 2012, Candea 2010, 2013,

Hinterberger 2016, Latimer 2013, Yates-Doerr and Mol 2012). My article adds to this

growing ethnographic pool by exploring how the long-standing, quintessentially “naturalist”

tension between “humans” and “animals” gets negotiated in a specific digital context: the

29

social media-scape of orangutan conservation. It does so not by tracing how such negotiations

unfold within specific groups (e.g. Spanish chimpanzee keepers), but by sketching the digital

infrastructures of feeling and praxis that shape how diverse individuals scattered across the

global North engage with orangutan causes—and occasionally, fleetingly, with each other. In

this milieu, the species divide never remains static but is constantly recalibrated by orangutan

supporters, who variously elide, uphold, and straddle it without fear of contradiction. Such

activities, I argue, are not merely idiosyncratic reactions, but manifestations of contrasting

regimes that give rise to morally and affectively laden figures—“humanity” and “the wild”,

saviors and innocent victims, mutually available selves, ignorant and informed orangutan

supporters, charlatans and “real” professionals—all engaged in an ongoing digital dance of

drawing together and pulling apart, opening up and closing off.

Such regimes and figures form the circulatory matrix through which orangutan causes—like

the human rights issues examined by anthropologists in the 2000s—are “charged” and made

publically visible on social media. In this article, however, I have tried to push beyond the

extant literature’s focus on production and circulation by examining how the “witnessing

publics” constituted by such media activism reproduce, extend, and personalize such causes.21

The distinctive affordances of social media—notably their mechanisms of participation,

visibility, and content-sharing—are pivotal to these processes, serving as means through

which orangutan supporters can participate in the project of “saving” this charismatic species.

In this capacity, I argue, social media are not simply digital glosses on the physical reality of

orangutan conservation, but constitutive of a potent “additional realit[y]” (Boellstorff 2016)

within this field.

30

Intrinsic to that reality, however, is the ever-present possibility of both causes and publics

taking on (after)lives of their own. And it is here, I suggest in closing, that the motifs of

“opening up” and “closing off” might also be brought to bear on the anthropology of social

media. Hirschkind et al. note that “today, new media bears the promise of universal political

enfranchisement in the form of ‘access,’ the term by which projects of democratic inclusion

are being reimagined and reengineered” (2017:S4). Like many ethnographies of social media

activism, these discourses center on the radical new—and, it is often assumed, progressive—

possibilities that such media can bring into being. What this article underscores, however, is

the need to attend simultaneously to the other side of such processes: to how the very same

affordances that open up causes and issues to wider public participation can also close things

off by forging of new differences and inequalities.22

Thinking in terms of opening up and closing off, I suggest, can undergird a much-needed

anthropological critique of social media’s “promise of the new” (Hirschkind et al. 2017:S4).

While not denying the very real, novel possibilities that social media can conjure into being,

such an approach mitigates against the “breathless optimism” (ibid.) that often infuses

contemporary discourses about them. It reminds us that—as Miller and his colleagues (e.g.

Miller 2016, Miller et al. 2016, Miller and Slater 2000) have consistently argued—the

anthropology of social media is in many ways the anthropology of everyday sociality, in all

its messy and not always pretty complexity. This is not to suggest, however, that

anthropologists of social media should therefore confine their analyses to its sociality—

particularly when contemplating those highly-charged digital gray areas around which this

article revolves. Rather, as I have tried to show, it is vital to also examine how relations and

realities on social media are variously forged, reworked, or broken over time—sometimes in

ways that cross-cut “old” and “new” social configurations. In this view, what matters are not

31

so much categories or modes of sociality, but the infrastructures and processes through which

they emerge, evolve, and unravel. And it is by taking these infrastructures and processes

seriously, I suggest, that we can develop nuanced and, importantly, critical understandings of

how online “publics” are produced, move, feel, and act—and not always in the most expected

of ways.

Acknowledgements

Research for this article was funded by a BRIEF Award from Brunel University London

(2013-16). Earlier incarnations of this piece were presented as part of an AAA 2015 panel on

The Charisma of Cute Animals and at departmental research seminars at the Universities of

Kent, Oxford Brookes, and St Andrew’s; I am grateful to participants at all these fora for

their comments and suggestions. Sincere thanks are also due to AQ’s anonymous reviewers,

Helen Buckland, Susan Cheyne, Mark Harrison, Lis Key and colleagues, Nayanika Mathur,

Erik Meijaard, Ally Palmer, John Postill and members of the EASA Media Anthropology

mailing list, and Alyrene Rosser for contributing to my research in different ways. All

shortcomings remain my own.

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1Notes

There are also a few Indonesian orangutan organizations that post in Malay and English for

Indonesian and Western supporters. While fascinating, they demand an entire article of their own.

2 Such platforms also come with problems and complications (see, e.g. Couldry 2015, Gillespie

2010), but these are not the focus of my article.

3 While oriented towards animal welfare, such bodies do have a stake in conservation strategies and

debates, and often help draw public attention to larger environmental challenges confronting

orangutan populations.

4 In practice, cooperation in this field is tempered by an awareness of the competition between

organizations for a limited pool of donations, sponsorship, and support. Consequently,

organizations try to avoid either promoting competitors’ causes to their own detriment or being seen

to poach others’ material for their benefit.

5 See, e.g., Russon 2009 and Wilson et al. 2014 for details.

6 Such programs enable supporters to “adopt” individual orangutans through a one-off or regular

monetary contribution to the centers where these animals live. In return, “adopters” get a package

containing (among other things) a certificate, a photograph and biography of “their” orangutan, and

updates on his or her progress.

7 The Ketapang team sends regular updates and footage to its UK counterpart, which then edits and

transforms selected material into discernible “stories” for IAR’s supporters—a complicated

translational process that often involves careful deliberations about ensuring accuracy and avoiding

sensationalism.

8https://www.facebook.com/internationalanimalrescue/photos/

pcb.10153201649784910/10153201633369910/?type=1. None of posts and comments featured here

have been edited for typos or other errors.

9 http://www.greenpeace.org/international/en/campaigns/climate-change/kitkat/

10 This powerfully simplified narrative frequently encompasses other related threats to orangutans,

including human-animal conflict, hunting, and poaching. These are often attributed to the effects of

oil palm-related deforestation, which is seen to push humans and animals into dangerous contact.

However, the narrative glosses over two important realities: 1) Western consumer action has only

limited utility since most palm oil is used domestically or exported to China and India, and 2) many

orangutan organizations do collaborate with oil palm companies in practice—albeit without much

fanfare. For fuller accounts of the drivers of orangutan extinction, see Davis et al. 2013, Marshall et

al. 2006, Meijaard et al. 2011.

11https://www.facebook.com/opfuk/photos/

a.197181683701442.50803.149160125170265/966668170086119/?type=3

12 OUTrop (now the Borneo Nature Foundation) is a conservation science outfit run mainly by

British scientists; the OLT is an NGO that channels donations to field projects and promotes

sustainable solutions for orangutans’ survival in the wild.

13 https://www.facebook.com/internationalanimalrescue/videos/10153493482269910/

14 The question of how to interpret animal behavior—and how much humans can understand

animals’ inner lives—is an ongoing concern in such translational and mediatory processes. IAR’s

media and PR team, for example, use phrases such as “lost the will to live” only when they come

directly from their Ketapang counterparts, and generally strive to avoid overly conjectural

statements about orangutans’ emotional or social states.

15 IAR’s online shop, for instance, includes wheelbarrows (£25.00) and “motherly love” (“constant

care from a human “babysitter” for a frightened and vulnerable orangutan orphan”, £50.00).

16 See also Miller et al. 2016’s analogous discussion of social media’s “scalable sociality.”

17

https://www.facebook.com/saveordelete/photos/a.133573248943.109013.21990433943/101537140

78383944/?type=3&theater

18https://www.facebook.com/notes/save-orangutans/why-no-contact-is-the-best-policy/

445910682156496

19 For earlier examples, see Russell 1995 on “Orangutan as Child” vs. “Orangutan as Pristine”

narratives, Siegel 2005 on the complexities of anthropomorphism, and Sowards 2006 on

orangutans’ consubstantiality and incongruity with humans. My discussions with conservationists

and charities also reveal how professionals themselves continually negotiate these tensions in their

everyday work (see, e.g., Russon et al. 2016 on debates about how much contact orangutans should

have with human “babysitters.”)

20 While prevalent, this hierarchy is not always clear-cut on social media. Some supporters, for

example, have complained about what they construe as unnecessarily clinical behavior on the part

of orangutan carers at rehabilitation centers.

21 This article thus contributes to a growing ethnographic corpus on how activist and other cause-

related media are responded to, appropriated, and disrupted as they move across different circuits

(e.g. Fattal 2014, Juris 2012, Postill 2014, Rasza 2014).

22 Although some have tackled these concerns (e.g. boyd 2014, Gerbaudo 2012, Miller 2016),

anthropologists have generally devoted less attention to them than counterparts in fields such as

gender and cultural studies (e.g. Brickell 2012, Gajjala 2014, Nakamura 2008).