Birds after Geertz: The Rise and Fall of Songbirds in Indonesia

Abstract

Abstract: In the fifty years since Geertz described the “popular obsession” with fighting cocks in Bali, a new obsession with birds has grown to eclipse it: the keeping and training of endemic species of songbirds to enter them into song competitions. Songbird competitions are at the vortex of a “songbird craze” that has spread from Java to much of Indonesia. Propelled by the intense love that Indonesian men harbor for birds with beautiful song, and a mix of multispecies affects and imaginaries stretching across avian natural history, bird aesthetics, multispecies sociality, money politics, divination, and the law, the huge demand for songbirds now threatens dozens of endemic songbird species with extinction. I describe the political-ecological history of this multi-species but also “non-innocent” care that is driving what has been called “the Asian songbird crisis.” I show how Geertz is useful to understand this multispecies love, which environmental concerns about extinction mostly fail to appreciate. At the same time, I also highlight that a Geertzian approach “cages” birds in universes of symbolic meaning that fails to appreciate the ecological, biological, and political lives of birds. In a spirit of anti-anti-Geertzianism that seeks to strike a balance between defending and disavowing Geertz’s insights into why Indonesians care so intensely about birds, the paper describes the cosmo-ecology, cosmo-sociality, cosmo-aesthetics, cosmo-politics, cosmo-legality, and cosmo-economics of songbirds in contemporary Indonesia. Along the way, it also traces what has happened to birds, to Indonesia, and to anthropology since Geertz.