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Death, eschatology and exotic indigenous deathways have long held a privileged position in the ethnographic and popular literature on Borneo. Until the publication of this study, however, ancestors have remained a strangely neglected topic. Differing from classic ethnographic representations of ancestor worship based on Sino-African material, this volume will be not just of interest to regional specialists; it will also enrich the general anthropological theory of ancestors, kinship and religion.

In Decolonizing Extinction Juno Salazar Parreñas ethnographically traces the ways in which colonialism, decolonization, and indigeneity shape relations that form more-than-human worlds at orangutan rehabilitation centers on Borneo. Parreñas tells the interweaving stories of wildlife workers and the centers' endangered animals while demonstrating the inseparability of risk and futurity from orangutan care. Drawing on anthropology, primatology, Southeast Asian history, gender studies, queer theory, and science and technology studies, Parreñas suggests that examining workers’ care for these semi-wild apes can serve as a basis for cultivating mutual but unequal vulnerability in an era of annihilation. Only by considering rehabilitation from perspectives thus far ignored, Parreñas contends, could conservation biology turn away from ultimately violent investments in population growth and embrace a feminist sense of welfare, even if it means experiencing loss and pain.