[Linganth] Alice Rudge's new book

[Ilana Gershon]

Dear Colleagues,
Steve Feld interviews Alice Rudge on CaMP anthropology blog today -- her
new book is Sensing Others: Voicing Batek Ethical Lives at the Edge of a
Malaysian Rainforest.

https://campanthropology.org/

Best,
Ilana

Press blurb:  *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.
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