• Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Sensing Others: Voicing Batek Ethical Lives at the Edge of a Malaysian Rainforest

Sensing Others: Voicing Batek Ethical Lives at the Edge of a Malaysian Rainforest

Hardcover

AnthropologyGeneral Racism & Ethnic StudiesIndigenous Studies

ISBN10: 1496235460
ISBN13: 9781496235466
Publisher: University of Nebraska Press
Published: Oct 1 2023
Pages: 326
Weight: 1.43
Height: 0.88 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
Sensing Others explores the lives of Indigenous Batek people in Peninsular Malaysia amid the strange and the new in the borderland between protected national park and oil palm plantation. As their ancestral forests disappear around them, Batek people nevertheless attempt to live well among the strange Others they now encounter: out-of-place animals and plants, traders, tourists, poachers, and forest guards. How Batek people voice their experiences of the good and the strange in relation to these Others challenges essentialized notions of cultural and species difference and the separateness of ethical worlds.

Drawing on meticulous, long-term ethnographic research with Batek people, Alice Rudge argues that as people seek to make habitable a constantly changing landscape, what counts as Otherness is always under negotiation. Anthropology's traditional dictum to make the strange familiar, and the familiar strange creates a binary between the familiar and the Other, often encapsulating Indigenous lives as the archetypal Other to the modern worldview. Yet living well amid precarity involves constantly negotiating Otherness's ambivalences, as people, plants, animals, and places can all become familiar, strange, or both. Sensing Others reveals that when looking from the boundary, what counts as Otherness is impossible to pin down.

Also in

Anthropology