Witnessing the Unseen

Liana Chua

doi:10.3167/cja.2021.390108

Abstract

Abstract This article draws on two research projects – one on orangutan conservation, and the other on religious change among indigenous Bidayuh communities – to reflect on the relations, technologies and processes involved in producing witnesses and witness-able truths. I compare two forms of witnessing: visualizations of environmental crisis and orangutan extinction, and modes of encountering invisible entities among Bidayuhs. Both involve the challenge of making the unseen visible or apprehensible and thus addressable. But whereas the first entails a crisis-laden visual imaginary that turns witnessing into a form of human stewardship over the environment, the second involves a more relational encounter involving mutual adjustment and responsivity to obligations and commitments. I suggest that this latter mode of witnessing invites us to reimagine both the crisis logic of environmental visualizations and ideals and practices of anthropological witnessing.

Highlights

This article draws on two research projects – one on orangutan conservation, and the other on religious change among indigenous Bidayuh communities – to reflect on the relations, technologies and processes involved in producing witnesses and witness-able truths
As our Introduction explains, the depiction of anthropology as a form of witnessing has a long, uneven genealogy – from Nancy Scheper-Hughes’ programme for an empathetic, morally committed anthropology-as-witnessing (1995) to George Marcus’s advocacy of detached, independent witnessing as activism in itself (2005). What all these interventions share, I suggest, is an ‘ennobling view’ (Reed-Danahay 2017: 59) of witnessing that revolves around the figure of the anthropologist as a dedicated but not dispassionate documenter: the eyewitness who sees, and who must bear witness to what she has seen through various testimonial forms
I want to both sound a note of caution and reimagine what anthropological witnessing could entail in the contemporary moment

Summary

Introduction

This article draws on two research projects – one on orangutan conservation, and the other on religious change among indigenous Bidayuh communities – to reflect on the relations, technologies and processes involved in producing witnesses and witness-able truths. I shall think through a heuristic contrast (Strathern 1988) between two forms of witnessing that I have encountered in my current research on orang utan conservation and earlier fieldwork with indigenous Bidayuhs in Borneo: first, the technologies through which orangutan extinction is made visualizable and alarmingly thinkable; and second, the sensory means through which Bidayuhs interact with unseen beings.

Results

Conclusion