Not victims nor zoo exhibits: the film My Long Neck and listening to the 'other

Ethics in Science and Environmental Politics

Wildlife conservation seems unaffected by decolonization movements that recently led to removing or vandalizing several statues of geographers and colonizers worldwide. Instead, we observe an increased emphasis on total protection of species and habitats that, although strategic in a period of environmental crisis, may have grossly negative impacts on living standards of local indigenous communities. In this regard, we should decolonize society, and specifically conservation, by adding new metaphoric statues to the old ones, preferably of those living side by side with wildlife. In this essay, we suggest that zoos, as popular places where urbanized people meet biodiversity, should change their messages that too often reinforce the subtle colonial ideology pervading international environmentalism and often driven by increasing animal rights activism. For example, a new storytelling ethos in zoos should communicate that, in some sensitive contexts (e.g. most tropical countries), the c...

2009

Animals

Civets belong to the family Viverridae, an ancient line of ‘cat-like’ animals. Despite their large geographic distribution across southeast Asia and parts of Africa, little scientific attention has been attributed to Viverrids or Viverrid–human relations. This paper applies the lens of civets to explore the tensive intersection between animal welfare, conservation, and colonialism within the tourism landscape. Through thinking with civets, this paper brings two forms of animal commodification into dialogue: (1) the management of civets in zoos around the globe and (2) the rising trend in civet coffee production and tourism in Asia. By qualitatively analysing the entanglements between colonialism, animal welfare, and conservation and how each impacts the lives and treatment of civets in tourism, this paper calls for enhanced reflexivity and thus the decolonisation of animal-based tourism. Suggestions are made on how zoos may progress towards the decolonisation of animal tourism, and ...

Screen, Vol.62.4, Special Dossier on “Tracing the Anthropocene in Southeast Asian Cinemas.”, 2021

Focusing on Gabrielle Brady Island of the Hungry Ghosts (2018, Germany, UK, Australia) , this presentation highlights multispecies coexistence and examines how the documentary sets in a Southeast Asian island depicts human and nonhuman displacements in the Anthropocene epoch in innovative ways. The film shows us three contrasting impressions of Christmas Island, each presenting one form of “displaced subject”: the asylum seekers, the local islanders of Chinese descent, and the 50 million red crabs migrating from the jungle to the coastline to lay their eggs. Together these displaced subjects inhabit the small island and represent imaginatively a world of entanglement that is characterized by the multi-ethnic, cross-cultural, cross-species kinships that transcend race, species and time. However, this presentation also aims to demonstrate how an ecocritical, intersectional film analysis could expose our persistent anthropocentric tendency that refrains us from thinking beyond our geopolitical scope; and the challenge in adopting “a planet-centered mode of thinking”(Chakrabarty 2021) that promotes indiscriminatory care and empathy towards the vulnerable humans and nonhuman beings. It argues that unless we could finally resist the seduction of “Anthropocene’s visualization of itself and its aesthetic anaesthesia of the senses” (Mirzoeff 2014), to see beyond the beauty of the natural world, and confront the horror of the many layers of environmental realities; that we could begin to extend our indiscriminatory care, empathy and compassion to all vulnerable and precarious beings in the Anthropocene.

Studies in Documentary Film, 2019

Syrian documentary filmmaker, poet, playwright and translator Liwaa Yazji’s long-form documentary ‘Haunted’ (2014) follows nine individuals’ experiences of home, including a couple in Damascus that remain trapped in their house surrounded by snipers, a Syrian of Palestinian descent who fled from Syria to Lebanon and a Syrian refugee family temporarily inhabiting a former prison. Similar to a multi-sited ethnography (Marcus, George. 1995. “Ethnography in/of the World System: The Emergence of Multi-Sited Ethnography.” Annual Review of Anthropology 24 (1995): 95–117), Yazji guides viewers through multiple digital, geographical and affective spaces. This article demonstrates Yazji’s documentary as concerned with longstanding anthropological questions about possession, kinship, remains, the everyday and the temporal and as a work of ‘accented cinema’ (Naficy, Hamid. 2001. An Accented Cinema: Exilic and Diasporic Filmmaking. Princeton: Princeton University Press) that emerges from the filmmaker’s personal experience of displacement and migration, and focuses on journeying, home-seeking, homelessness, rootedness and dislocation. It argues her film’s ethnographic way of seeing and sensing problematizes categories of poetic documentary and visual and sensory ethnography. The article explains its importance for scholars of forced migration, conflict and the after-effects of violence and for problematizing the definition of ethnographic film and its power in conveying the plurality of the world (Hastrup, Kirsten. 1992. “Anthropological Visions: Some Notes on Visual and Textual Authority.” In Film as Ethnography, edited by Film as Ethnography. Manchester: Manchester University Press), one currently largely inaccessible to ethnographers, filmmakers and journalists.

This article explores the social and cultural production of indigeneity in a wildlife sanctuary on the Australian Gold Coast. We note that the human and animal characters that form the displays of the sanctuary work towards the assemblage of a largely consistent underlying theme. The latter reproduces commensurability between two main figures associated with Australian settler history, namely the country’s precolonial indigenous species of animals and plants and the human Aboriginal population. We argue that the theatre produced in the park’s highly sanitized visitor contact zone has wider social and political ramifications for Australian society and modern society in general. By ceremonially re-enacting the historical myth of separation between modern civilization and primordial indigeneity, through a tourist enterprise, the sanctuary produces ambivalent meanings about the relation between ‘nativeness’ in nature and society. Our analysis addresses the simultaneous emancipation of contemporary human indigeneity as a revitalized cultural value together with the social distancing of Aboriginal people as one-dimensional caricatures of primordial nature.

2019

In recent years, human rights film festivals have proliferated across the globe. Often co-sponsored by human rights organizations like Amnesty International or Human Rights Watch. While human rights documentaries are not a widely identified subgenre of nonfiction film, they can be situated within a wider tradition of non-fiction filmmaking that engages in social and political issues, motivated by the underlying premise that films can effect change. Human rights documentary are often auto-denominations based on filmmaker intent, political engage¬ment, or topical focus. Although human rights documentaries should be disquieting, their aesthetic form ends up conforming to what will be shown in the article to be a problematic aesthetic and narrative template at odds with their aims. This article will offer a critique of this dominant representational style through an analysis of China Blue, directed by Micha Peled. China Blue will then be contrasted with Last Train Home, a 2009 film on t...

Continent, 2016

What to do with a narrative that lingers in one’s memory, surfacing again and again, without ever revealing its identity. I still remember so well the account of a journey a member of the Zurich Zoo told me about in an interview some years ago: the account revealed a key moment in his trip to a nature reserve in Brasil. Why do I think there must be something special about it? Is it just because I have such a vivid memory of the way it was told, how my interlocutor changed his voice, introducing a very personal part of his story? Or is it due to the particularity of that key moment that I cannot forget? In this article I will show how I realised that these questions can only be answered by considering his ‘key moment’ as an artefact; an artefact that helped me in bridging the gap between two realities that I encountered in a process of enactment during my research on human-animal relations in zoos.

Academic Quarter, 2012

In recent years, human rights film festivals have proliferated across the globe. Often co-sponsored by human rights organizations like Amnesty International or Human Rights Watch. While human rights documentaries are not a widely identified subgenre of nonfiction film, they can be situated within a wider tradition of non-fiction filmmaking that engages in social and political issues, motivated by the underlying premise that films can effect change. Human rights documentary are often auto-denominations based on filmmaker intent, political engage¬ment, or topical focus. Although human rights documentaries should be disquieting, their aesthetic form ends up conforming to what will be shown in the article to be a problematic aesthetic and narrative template at odds with their aims. This article will offer a critique of this dominant representational style through an analysis of China Blue. China Blue will then be contrasted with Last Train Home, a 2009 film on the same topic, which adopts a representational style that contrasts sharply with China Blue.

Touring responsibility: The trouble with ‘going local’ in community-based tourism in Thailand, 2014

This paper discusses the question of responsibility with reference to community-based tourism. Local communities are often presented by the tourist industry as an inherent value to recognize and protect. Tourists visiting distant places are thus frequently exhorted to ‘go local’ through having a ‘real’ experience with local people and communities; they are also invited to behave responsibly and to appreciate the value of responsible management. In this article, we reflect on the consequences of the ‘contact zone’ produced by these trends and, more in general, on the rapid changes that the label ‘responsible tourism’ is generating in the ways that many travelers approach the experience of local communities and their lifestyles. We do so, by analyzing an Elephant Camp in Thailand, where tourists spend periods being involved in life of the camp and the management of the elephants. The tourists at the Elephant camp indeed show how this approach to travel often becomes an imbroglio of detachment and involvement, of paternalistic protection and mutual exploitation, of generosity and hospitality, but also of corruption and self-interest. All in all, we present the Elephant Camp as a laboratory for reflecting on how questions of responsibility towards distant people and places, especially when actually enacted in place – which is what tourism does – often become a complicated affair, which is at the origin of new opportunities but also new tensions, of learning and but also misunderstandings, of neo-colonial practices but also of actual support to the local economy.