Too Cute to Cuddle? “Witnessing Publics” and Interspecies Relations

on the Social Media-Scape of Orangutan Conservation

At the start of a volunteer-cum-fieldwork stint with a small British orangutan charity in 2014,

I sat down to discuss my research with the acting office manager. “Alice” had a background

in charity work and had herself recently arrived to cover the director, who was on leave.

When I explained that I wanted to understand why people gave time and money to orangutan

causes, she nodded with immediate recognition. “I’ve been surprised,” she said, “but it’s

really easy to get people to donate. They all love cute orangutans!” A few weeks later,

however, we found ourselves staring at an email from a member of the public asking how to

obtain an orangutan as a pet. For once, Alice’s eloquence and unflappability deserted her.

Unsure if it was a hoax or genuine enquiry, she spluttered, “B-but…how do I tell them that

it’s…just…not what we do?!”

These two moments cut to the ethnographic heart of my article: what I call the contradictions

of cuteness that get played out in popular engagements with orangutan conservation. As Alice

succinctly put it, cute animals are powerful hooks through which the public can be drawn to

orangutan and other conservation causes. But the orangutan-as-pet email highlighted another

issue with which orangutan organizations routinely grapple: the excesses of cuteness, and

what are construed as the inappropriate relational configurations to which it can give rise.

Whereas the desire to “give [orangutans] a huge cuddle!” (to quote one Facebook user) is

accepted and even encouraged by some organizations, actually cuddling an orangutan is

deemed beyond the pale: as unacceptable behaviour that threatens orangutans and must be

discouraged.

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What should we make of these apparently contradictory impulses? How is the perilously fine

line between them drawn and negotiated by various parties? This article addresses these

questions by exploring how such impulses are apprehended and (re)calibrated on the social

media-scape of orangutan conservation—a lively digital field that has given orangutan causes

unprecedented reach and visibility over the last decade. I shall argue that this field is framed

by a set of distinctive affects, sensibilities, and praxiological conventions through which

diverse internet users—mostly Euro-Americans living in the global North1—can not only

learn about but also participate in what is widely construed as an urgent, morally compelling

project of “saving the orangutan.”

Such participation, however, is not always straightforward. As we shall see, this social

media-scape is marked by an persistent tension between two contrasting models of human-

animal relations—interspecies intimacy on the one hand, and an inviolable species divide on

the other—which give rise to quite different forms of politics and subjectivities. Attending to

this tension, I suggest, can reveal not only how orangutan causes are crafted and made

publicly legible, but also the complexities of digital “participation”—and more specifically,

how social media can exclude and hierarchize as much as they promise to foster inclusion

and democratization (see, e.g., Mason 2011, Shirky 2008).

Ethnographically, then, this article seeks to contribute to a growing corpus of work on the

multiple “practices and beliefs…at the very heart of Western naturalism,” which, as Candea

and Alcayna-Stevens (2012:37) point out, are often oversimplified and homogenized in

anthropological depictions of “other” ontologies. Following their counter-injunction to take

seriously rather than flatten out such diversity, I will foreground the fluctuating, contextual

nature of orangutan supporters’ conceptions of human-animal difference as they play out on

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social media. Doing so, however, raises a further question: just why are these conceptions, as

well as users’ interactions, often so morally, emotionally, and socially loaded? Addressing

this demands a broader analytical agenda, which draws together the emergent anthropology

of social media and earlier work on rights-oriented media activism.

Figuring “witnessing publics” on social media

Since the mid-2000s, ethnographies of social media have largely clustered around two

contrasting approaches. Whereas the first treats social media as “contiguous with and

embedded in other social spaces” (Miller and Slater 2000:50) such as transnational diasporas

(e.g. McKay 2011), physical localities (e.g. Miller 2016, Postill 2011), and teenage lives

(boyd 2014), the second highlights social media’s relational and organizational novelty—

their capacity to generate and sustain new political arenas, revolutions, and forms of protest

in an “age of viral reality” (Postill 2014; see also, e.g., Gerbaudo 2012, Gerbaudo and Treré

2015, Juris 2012). Between these two ends of the spectrum, however, lies a sizeable and

relatively under-studied gray area filled with issues, causes, and other projects that not only

assemble but also produce context-specific constituencies of participants (Warner 2005). It is

here that we find “issue-specific public[s]” (Yang and Calhoun 2007:212) such as the

individual supporters who populate the social media-scape of orangutan conservation.

Neither interested in forging “strong” social ties with each other nor in full-bodied political

activism, such users share only by a common sense of investment in the fate of orangutans in

Borneo and Sumatra. Yet despite the seemingly impersonal, incidental nature of their online

activities, their participation in this sphere is often highly “charged” (Fattal 2014:322)—

affectively, morally, politically.

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Part of my aim, then, is to shed light on that murky terrain between everyday sociality and

full-blown activism on social media, which has received relatively little anthropological

attention (but see, e.g. Postill and Pink 2012). More ambitiously, however, I also seek to

account for how the “digital socialities” (ibid.:127) that criss-cross this space become charged

with meaning and conviction, and what these processes imply for its political and relational

dynamics. To do so, I draw inspiration from an earlier body of scholarship—the anthropology

of rights- and cause-oriented media activism (e.g. Allen 2009, Gregory 2006, Keenan 2004,

Kocer 2013, McLagan 2003, 2005, 2006, McLagan and McKee 2012, Torchin 2006)—on

which I now briefly expound.

Broadly speaking, contributors to this field explore how certain narratives or images register

with and act on their audiences by tracing the media representations, technologies, and

circuits through which specific issues (e.g. famine, torture) are made visible to transnational

audiences in ways that spur them into taking alleviatory action. Arguing that “media are not

simply conduits for social forces, but rather are key sites for the definition of political issues

and communities and the making of active and attentive publics” (McLagan 2005:223), such

scholars foreground the “social labor” involved in making rights claims public (ibid.) and the

“political work” (Allen 2009:171, Keenan 2004:443) performed by films, photographs, and

other material in these processes.

Importantly, rather than only analyzing the substance of visual and discursive representations,

this approach maps the “circulatory matri[ces], or dedicated communications

infrastructure”—from organizational practices to film festivals to websites—“out of which

human rights claims are generated and through which they travel” (McLagan 2006:192). As

narratives and images of suffering move, McLagan argues,

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they have the potential to construct audiences as virtual witnesses, a subject position

that implies responsibility for the suffering of others. In this sense, human rights

images make ethical claims on viewers and cultivate potential actors in the global

arena (2003:609).

Many of these insights can be productively applied to digital manifestations of orangutan

causes, which are structured around similar media(tions), appeals, and communications

infrastructures. But whereas much earlier work centers on film, photography, and websites—

the preponderant channels of media activism in the early/mid-2000s—I focus here on social

media platforms, notably Facebook (f. 2004) and Twitter (f. 2006), which in the last decade

have joined, and arguably superseded, these media-forms as dominant cause-related outlets.

Like other “Web 2.0” technologies, these platforms are built around an infrastructure and

(idealized) culture of participation: of constant interaction, content-sharing, and “remixing”

(Shifman 2011) of material by individual users (see also Beer and Burrows 2010, Bennett and

Segerberg 2013).2 As such, they present anthropologists of media activism with intriguing

new challenges and possibilities—key among which is the opportunity to examine how issues

and claims are apprehended, appropriated, reproduced, and personalized by their intended

(and possibly unintended) audiences. In exploring these processes and, I thus pick up from

where earlier scholarship left off by tracing not only how rights media “make ethical claims

on us” (McLagan 2006:606), but also, crucially, what sorts of afterlives those claims can

acquire as they move.

Apes in cyberspace

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In this article, I use “orangutan conservation” to describe a broad spectrum of models,

projects, and mechanisms—many convergent, some conflictual—related to the survival and

well-being of orangutans. These include: 1) ongoing scientific research projects on wild

orangutans in Borneo and Sumatra; 2) various nongovernmental organizations located across

the global North that pursue holistic conservation strategies, e.g. campaigns against

deforestation or efforts to secure protected land for orangutans; and 3) rescue and

rehabilitation centers that save displaced, injured, or captured orangutans, treat and

“rehabilitate” them, before ideally returning them to the wild.3

Despite the diversity of (and, some conservationists would argue, disparity between) these

myriad agendas and approaches, parties across this spectrum commonly, if selectively,

cooperate and collaborate with each other. Such practices are mirrored and often extended in

the social media-scape of orangutan conservation—a loose and fast-evolving cluster of

images, videos, appeals, petitions, news-pieces, and other posts that now forms a significant

part of many organizations’ outreach and publicity efforts. Cumulatively, these constitute a

discernible field of activity that encompasses a regular cast of players—orangutan bodies and

their supporters—and a recurrent set of tropes, narratives, and affective and praxiological

conventions. It is further strung together by the connections—and ethos of connectedness—

between different organizations, many of which “follow” each other on Facebook and

Twitter, and occasionally circulate the same material.4 While often extensions of offline

relationships, such connections can also engender new alliances and other possibilities (such

as a number of annual virtual events) that could only exist online.

While informed by the volunteer stint mentioned earlier, as well interviews and discussions

with orangutan charities, scientists, and conservationists, the bulk of the research for this

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article has taken place on social media. Conducting digital ethnography in this lively,

profusive space entails a peculiar form of participant-observation—one less like sitting in a

village forging “deep” ties with social others than like hopping erratically between public

gatherings (in this case, comments threads, strings of tweets, or virtual events like World

Orangutan Day), occasionally meeting the same digital faces and picking up certain

sensibilities, ideas, turns of phrases, and interactive conventions along the way. These

features are not moored to certain groups or individuals; rather, they are public, “persistent”

(boyd 2014:11), acquirable, and shareable by different users dispersed across the world,

thereby framing their often ephemeral online activities and interactions. Accordingly, this

article does not claim to capture any one party’s perspective(s) on orangutan conservation or

to uncover hidden truths about supporters’ varied offline lives. Instead, it strives to illuminate

the distinctive affects, sensibilities, and subjectivities that are produced and circulate within

this digital space, as well as the ramifications of these processes for its social and political

dynamics. We begin, then, with an ethnographic elaboration of Alice’s first point: the

powerful draw of cute orangutans.

Eliding the species divide

Saving Budi and Jemmi

Although rescue and rehabilitation centers aim to “return” animals to “the wild,” their work

can be controversial and problematic, for reasons on which I cannot expound here (but see,

e.g., Russon 2009, Wilson et al. 2014). Standards and procedures vary across centers, and

many animals become lifelong residents because of their inability to survive in the rainforest.

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Baby orangutans, however, bring a glimmer of hope to this picture. Often arriving as orphans

who lack basic survival skills, they remain on site for several years while they are taught to

live in the jungle in human-run “forest schools.” Unsurprisingly, such orangutans—who

quickly acquire names, biographies, and hopeful trajectories—make ideal poster children for

orangutan causes, often becoming linchpins of virtual adoption programs5 that several

organizations run or support to raise funds for their efforts. And as this example will reveal,

posts and tweets about these orangutans are pivotal in shaping the affective and ethical

contours of the social media-scape as they circulate.

Budi and Jemmi are two of many orphaned orangutans at Ketapang, a rescue and

rehabilitation center in West Kalimantan run by the Indonesian branch of International

Animal Rescue (IAR), a charity dedicated to “saving animals from suffering around the

world.” IAR’s orangutan program (f. 2009) is one of its most prominent arms, regularly

featuring in major news outlets, from national broadsheets like Britain’s Daily Telegraph to

the Huffington Post. IAR also maintains an impressive everyday social media presence, with

a dedicated YouTube channel, Facebook page, Twitter feed, and Pinterest board. Its

orangutan-related posts and tweets—curated and disseminated by a dedicated team in its UK

head office6—are among the most visible and popular features of the social media-scape of

orangutan conservation, accruing significantly more likes, tags, shares, and retweets than

many of its counterparts. As such, they serve as prominent entry-points into the world of

orangutan-related causes, and are regularly (if selectively) shared by other organizations in

order to draw attention to larger conservation issues.

Both Budi and Jemmi have, to use IAR’s language, tragic biographies, having lost their

mothers, possibly to human-orangutan conflict or poaching, and been kept by local people as

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pets—Budi in a chicken cage, Jemmi in a cardboard box. Shortly after they were introduced

in rehabilitation, IAR posted a photo album of them on Facebook (April 6 2014), 7 the caption

to which read:

BUDI AND JEMMI ARE BEST FRIENDS!

Our two youngest rescued baby orangutans have developed a beautiful friendship!

They spend their days together in the day enclosure playing and climbing around on

the ropes and branches. If Budi is taken into the day enclosure first he will keep

looking back for Jemmi and, if left on his own, will cry until his new friend joins him!

At the end of the day they both make their way back to their shared hammock where

they spend the night together. […]

This album garnered over 6,400 likes, 2,427 shares and 352 comments, a small selection of

which include:

KA: How wonderful that they have found love and friendship after their lonely lives

in captivity - and it has come totally naturally. Just amazing.

GG: oh my goodness ... that is so so cute... look at the ickle pot bellies waiting to be

smushed x x x

CE: putting them together was the best idea ever!! look at their eyes. true happiness

EF: My heart just burst!!!! What a wonderful Easter treat to see these 2 BFFS [best

friends forever] together. Go Budi! Go Jemmi! X

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VF-H: My gosh, just like sibling love, amazing. Thank you

IK: I am glad those two take comfort in each other... They badly need this... being

orphaned and traumatized.

These are fairly representative responses to the many “cute” posts that circulate on the social

media-scape of orangutan conservation. Most appear to be off-the-cuff interjections,

exclamations, and affirmations in a digital love-fest in which everyone shares—or is assumed

to share—the same sentiment. The objects of their admiration, whose lives are chronicled

through regular updates, are carefully framed to accentuate their cuteness, playfulness, and

cuddleability—in short, what their mostly Western audiences are likely to associate with

innocent, loveable children. Although organizations largely try to avoid portraying such

orangutans as variants of human children, such stories and images nevertheless tend to evoke

child-oriented responses from their observers. Indeed, it is not uncommon to see posters

lapsing into baby-speak and saying how much they, like GG, want to “smush” these little

characters’ “ickle pot bellies”.

Such remarks may be seen, in part, as manifestations of a widespread human response to

“neotenous” bodily configurations—round heads, round cheeks, big eyes, and other baby-like

features—which, as various ethologists and biological anthropologists have noted (e.g.

Lorenz 1950, Gould 1980), are evolutionarily designed to elicit feelings of tenderness among

their adult beholders. But these responses are also given shape and resonance by the

connotations of cuteness within their posters’ own socio-cultural milieus. As Merish (1996)

and Ngai (2012), among others, argue, cuteness in Western societies is often entwined with

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notions of childhood and powerlessness on the one hand, and adulthood and protection on the

other: “what the cute stages is, in part, a need for adult care” (Merish 1996:187).

Accordingly, Ngai writes, “cute things evoke a desire in us not just to lovingly molest but

also to aggressively protect them” (2012:4)—an experience that, she argues, “depends

entirely on the subject’s affective response to an imbalance of power between herself and the

object” (2012:54).

Read through this lens, it is unsurprising that pictures of cute orangutans engender such

strong, “heart-bursting” reactions—that desire to cuddle them, or that inarticulable “aww”

feeling that some posters channel into emojis. Many users take an unabashed pleasure in

gazing at these images and sharing them with others. But as some of the comments above

suggest, their pleasure is also tinged with pain and pity. For many supporters, Budi and

Jemmi are not just cute babies but individuals with heart-rending stories: of “being orphaned

and traumatized” and spending “lonely lives in captivity”. Their status as such stems from

their embeddedness in a larger narrative about environmental destruction, political apathy,

and local ignorance—all of which make cute images and sad stories legible on social media

as conservation “issues.”

Producing “the plight of the orangutan”

The social media-scape of orangutan conservation is rife with villains, from corrupt

politicians profiting from commercial deforestation to cruel villagers who kill orangutans or

keep them as pets. However, the most prominent of these is palm oil, a common ingredient in

many consumer products and fuels. Approximately 90% of this global commodity is

produced by Indonesia and Malaysia, with both Borneo and Sumatra serving as major oil

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palm frontiers (see, e.g., Sheil 2009). Over the last decade, oil palm corporations have come

under critical scrutiny by environmentalists and conservationists, many of whom have

harnessed the viral capacities of digital media to lay bare—and in some ways fashion—a

causal link between palm oil production, deforestation, and orangutan extinction.

An early, memorable example of this strategy was Greenpeace’s viral campaign against the

multinational food giant Nestlé, which it accused of “us[ing] palm oil from companies that

are trashing Indonesian rainforests, threatening the livelihoods of local people and pushing

orang-utans towards extinction”. In March 2010, the activist organization premiered a

Youtube advertisement entitled “Give the orang-utan a break”—a snide play on the slogan

associated with Nestlé’s popular Kit Kat bar.8 The video drew a startling visual link between

consuming Kit Kat (which contains palm oil) and killing orangutans by showing an office

worker blithely snapping off and biting into what turns out to be a bloodied orangutan finger.

Imploring viewers to “Stop Nestlé buying palm oil from companies that destroy rainforests”,

it urged them to boycott the product and inundate Nestlé with messages. The video went

viral; in the acrimonious online battle that ensued, industry observers widely concurred that

Nestlé had “take[n] a beating” (Steel 2010). A few months later, Greenpeace claimed victory

when Nestlé suspended its relationship with a blacklisted palm oil supplier and reiterated its

commitment to buying only sustainable palm oil.

While not the first to propound the causal chain between oil palm, deforestation, orangutans,

and palm oil-containing products (see, e.g., Buckland 2005), this 2010 campaign appears to

have been remarkably effective in generating and consolidating what is now the orthodox

narrative throughout the social media-scape of orangutan conservation.9 Interestingly, this

narrative is seldom laid out in linear detail; rather, it gets disseminated in pithy fragments

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that, over time, add up to much the same thing. A typical example of this occurs every Easter,

when organizations play on the occasion to hammer home their palm oil message. On March

16 2016, for instance, the UK-based Orangutan Protection Foundation (OPF) posted a

winsome image of a baby orangutan peering over a log, and the words, “When buying your

Easter eggs, please think of me and buy PALM OIL FREE”. The caption added: “Please

choose the forests and those who dwell within them over chocolate this Easter. Thank you

#SaveTheOrangutan #ConflictPalmOil #Deforestation”.10

The invocation of the palm oil narrative gave emotive and political charge to what would

otherwise have simply been a cute image: this was not just a baby orangutan, but a victim of

human greed that viewers had the power to save by making the right consumer choices. Like

images of suffering children—that powerful motif around which many “deep, transnationally

circulating [humanitarian] imaginaries” (Malkki 2015:78) revolve—such orangutans become

incarnated on social media as embodiments of innocence and “pure need” (ibid.:82; see also

Bornstein 2001, Suski 2009). Strikingly, however, rather than spelling out the link between

palm oil, forests, chocolate eggs, and orangutans, OPF’s post presumed a degree of extant

knowledge—of complicity—on the part of its viewers, most of whom would indeed have

encountered fragments of the same narrative elsewhere on social media.

In the run-up to Easter, for example, OPF’s Facebook timeline alone contained several posts

alluding more or less directly to this narrative: a photograph of six orangutans in the OPF’s

sponsored “forest school” in Indonesia (“we may not have our mums, but at least we have

each other” ); two news stories about the devastating impact of Borneo’s annual forest fires,

which are often blamed on the land-clearing practices of oil palm corporations; and a link to

an activist film, Green (2009), about the tragic fate of an orangutan displaced by commercial

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deforestation. More sober palm oil-related articles also featured on the Facebook and Twitter

feeds of OUTrop and the Orangutan Land Trust11 in the same period, while IAR took the

opportunity to promote its virtual orangutan adoption program, which it styled as “an animal

friendly” alternative to chocolate eggs.

These examples point to how the social media-scape of orangutan conservation operates as a

“circulatory” (McLagan 2006:192) space in which myriad elements—arresting images,

narratives of suffering and injustice, forms of moral praxis—are continually being drawn

together, made visible, “formatted into issues and circulated” (McLagan 2005:224). In this

space, the outputs of different orangutan bodies—even those with contrasting approaches—

are often mutually reinforcing, complementing and corroborating each other as they circulate

and overlap. Adding an extra layer of complexity to these processes, however, are the ways in

which such outputs are taken up and circulated by individuals. Many orangutan supporters,

for example, retweet or share specific posts to their own networks, often with personal

glosses. A South African lady who shared the OPF’s Easter egg post to her Facebook

timeline thus wrote: “Please, please read your labels carefully—so many chocolates and

sweets contain palm oil. Please, please only buy ones that don’t—for the sake of the human,

animal and plant forest dwellers”. In a further comment, she added a list of websites that

outlined the link between palm oil, deforestation, and orangutans.

At other times, comments threads and chains of tweets can themselves become sites of peer

exchange, as happened with IAR’s Easter post:

JB: Wait....palm oil is used in chocolate. Nooooooooooo! I love chocolate :(

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SLF: It's used in everything from chocolate to shampoo, toothpaste to bread .There

are chocolates that are Palm Oil free & yummy ones too.You don't have to miss out

just check all labels & check Palm Oil free web sites for clarification & examples of

Palm Oil free ones 😊

JB: Oh man! I had no idea! :(

SLF: To check the palm oil content of products on supermarket shelves, download our

free barcode scanner app for ios and Android.

http://www.palmoilinvestigationsapp.com/ 😉 Palm Oil Investigations is a great site,

Google Palm Oil & there are a few really good ones & they will be posting lots of

Palm Oil free Easter treat ideas for chocolate lovers.

TC: Great idea with the barcode scanner, but it's not available in the UK. Is there one

for the UK out there?

SLF: Check out some of the Palm Oil free sites & hopefully there is a UK one

available or in the works at least 😉

The interactive affordances of social media thus enable a disparate range of internet users to

not only learn about the threats facing orangutans, but also actively participate in efforts to

alleviate them. I suggest that these follow-on exchanges, to which orangutan organizations

themselves also contribute, constitute the afterlives of original cause-related posts, which get

disseminated, (re)interpreted, and embellished as they move between users. Cumulatively, all

these activities produce a specific online version of “the plight of the orangutan”: a multiply-

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scaled story of individual tragedy and hope set within a context of rapid anthropogenic

environmental change. Replete with its own logics of culpability and responsibility, it forms

the affective and political backdrop against which specific stories, appeals, campaigns, and

news-pieces are charged with meaning and urgency. The upshot of this is the transformation

—transfiguration, even—of the likes of Budi and Jemmi from merely cute orangutans into

innocent, deserving victims, and their social media viewers into “witnessing publics”

(McLagan2003, Torchin 2006) who are morally, even viscerally, compelled to save them.

Producing “witnessing publics”

The process by which “witnessing publics” emerge on social media can be observed in

responses to a video that IAR posted about Udin, a baby orangutan who had been kept as a

pet by a villager, “locked up in a small, dark cage with nothing and no one to comfort him”. 12

Like others of its ilk, the video juxtaposes photographs, captions, and an evocative

soundtrack, chronicling Udin’s journey from his rescue, when he had “lost the will to live,”

through to his slow recovery at IAR’s center, concluding with an appeal for donations to

“support the ongoing care of baby Udin and to help us save others like him, before it’s too

late”.

Responses flooded in instantly, with most posters professing to be horrified by what one

described as “unbelievable crimes by moronic heartless ‘humans’.” Like the comments on

Budi and Jemmi’s album, their remarks were expressly emotional, and further fuelled by

Udin’s cuteness and helplessness; as supporters often point out, orangutans should be

enjoying carefree childhoods in the forest, not enduring captivity, pain, and misery. One man

thus wrote, “My eyes immediately wanted to tear up when I watched this heart breaking

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video of Udin,” while another poster commented: “I have never seen such sad eyes... Poor

little one and shame on humans... ”. Meanwhile, many users drew an explicit link between

the distress elicited by the video and their decision to do something about it.

FH: I have just donated what I could for this baby. My heart breaks for him. Darling

one. Thank you for caring so well for him xxxx

LL: Oh God! How can people be SO CRUEL? My heart is breaking!! So very, very

sad 😢😢 will be donating as soon as I get home from work.

Such remarks were joined by several others that sought to channel the emotional surge

generated by Udin’s video into consumer action and awareness. Although oil palm was never

mentioned in the video, these supporters joined the dots themselves by linking Udin’s story to

the dominant narrative. MW thus posted: “we must stop buying palm oil. That is why the

forests are disappearing and the orangutans in danger”, while LR wrote—possibly with

Greenpeace’s 2010 campaign in mind—

I hope everyone commenting on here makes a constant and full effort to avoid palm

oil because that is the direct cause of this […] [T]his little creature is the price paid for

you to enjoy a packet of biscuits or a chocolate bar. So if you're commenting on here

about how sad it is while regularly chowing down on a kitkat then take a look at what

YOU are funding.

These comments work on the same visual and affective logic that underlies rights media more

generally: that “seeing causes feeling, the prickling of conscience, and doing” (Allen

2009:169-70). Braided together with the palm oil narrative, such arresting images

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“emotionally engage and persuade their audiences of a cause’s moral worth” (McLagan

2003:606). But whereas human rights ideology incites empathy and action by appealing to a

common, shared humanness, the responses above are arguably driven by what Milton calls

“egomorphism”—that is, the perception of non-human animals as other selves, as “like me”

and not just human-like (2005:261; see also Alcayna-Stevens 2012, Candea 2010). Despite

organizations’ (somewhat uneven) efforts to avoid the pitfalls of excessive

anthropomorphism, many social media users appear to perceive orangutans as, in effect,

persons whose “inner world[s are]…available and perceivable” (ibid.:265) to other persons.

These babies, we thus read repeatedly, are traumatized, have “sad eyes,” “take comfort in

each other,” must show “resilience”—just as human subjects, not just human organisms, do.

Such perceptions do not dissolve posters’ awareness of human-animal difference—quite the

opposite, as suggested by scores of comments about how horrible humanity is—but they do

subsume it within a more encompassing framework of interspecies affect and moral

responsibility (see also Sowards 2006). In this way, they produce quite a different figure to

that of the generic orangutan victim: that of the orangutan as an individual person(ality) with

his/her own biography and character. The constant interplay between these two figures on

social media is, I suggest, what makes the likes of Budi, Jemmi, and Udin so appealing—and

so ethically demanding—to their human beholders. These charismatic apes render the palm

oil “problem” both intimate and immediate: pictured “at stroking distance” (Bousé 2003:124)

on users’ screens, they “charge” the social media-scape in which their images circulate,

turning it into a space not just of information but of moral intervention. In the process, they

produce a third crucial figure: the social media user as witness and not just onlooker to

suffering, who is “morally oblig[ed] to act” (Torchin 2006:215).

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And act many social media users do. Apart from circulating organizations’ posts, supporters

can also donate money, adopt orangutans, purchase items for them,13 sign petitions, support

campaigns, fundraise, and even volunteer at certain centers and projects in Borneo and

Sumatra. All these actions, virtual and otherwise, are routinely posted on social media, not

simply as accounts of individuals’ activities, but often as ways of spurring others into action:

by calling attention to irresistibly cute orangutans with painful biographies, by asking

relatives and friends to donate to causes through strategic tags and shares, by challenging

networks of “followers” to match one’s own fundraising or awareness-generating efforts (see

Author n.d.).

Such activities pivot on the mechanics of visibility and the blurry “public/private” divide on

social media. In an (idealized) “private public sphere” where users routinely “engage in

practices of public ‘life streaming’” (Hirschkind et al. 2017:S7),14 orangutan supporters are

aware that what they post, like, and share will probably be seen by the other members of their

online networks. This awareness, I argue, gives rise to a small-scale, outward-facing,

personal politics (Author n.d.) that is fuelled by and seeks to kindle that same sense of

interspecies attachment and responsibility in others. Tellingly, most interventions on this

social media-scape are addressed not to fellow supporters, but to users’ own personal

contacts, whom they often try to move with the same combination of pleasure, pain, and pity

examined earlier.

More than making “ethical claims” (McLagan 2006:606) on their supporters, orangutan-

related posts thus enable internet users to make claims on each other: to gather up more and

more participants into a buzzing hive of witnessing and moral praxis. Access and inclusivity

are central to this project, which is premised on the assumption that potentially anyone can

19

become an orangutan supporter. As the OPF tweeted: “What does it mean to be an Orangutan

Protector? Well, it starts with a little bit of knowledge...” (January 10 2016). But there is

another more complex side to the story. If interspecies attachment—that urge to cuddle and

protect—fuels the formation and intervention of “witnessing publics” online, it can

sometimes become dangerous. As the next section reveals, the constant spectre of this

possibility—and the concomitant need to tame it—can give rise to quite different

configurations of human-animal relations, social dynamics, and politics on this social media-

scape.

“Take your stinking paws off me”: re-erecting the species divide

In October 2015, the Indonesian Center for Orangutan Protection (COP)—which works with

various organizations in the global North and has a large constituency of Australian

supporters—posted on Facebook a photograph of a baby orangutan being bathed in a sink by

three white women and the words,

“Take your stinking paws off me, you damn dirty ape!”

This sort of hands-on tourism is NOT for the benefit of the orangutan, it is for the

benefit of the human, is very detrimental to orangutans & is purely a revenue raiser.

PLEASE put the welfare of the orangutan over your desire to cuddle one. Do the right

thing.15

Its caption contained a web-link led to a longer document16 produced by the Orangutan

Project, which operates at a popular wildlife rehabilitation center in Malaysian Borneo.

Written for its international volunteers, the piece explains “why no contact [with orangutans]

is the best policy.” In brief, it argues that humans risk transmitting various potentially fatal

20

anthropozoonotic diseases to “to our primate cousins” through unprotected contact, and that

there will be “habituation and behavioural implications” for orangutans if they get too used to

humans while being prepared to return to the wild. As the narrative unfolds, it veers from

scientific into ethical territory:

You should always ask yourself – is touching the orang-utan something you feel will

benefit its life, or is it something that you wish to do simply for your own experience

and pleasure?

This post is on the more civil end of a gamut of messages that regularly surface on social

media to condemn similar instances of inappropriate contact, such as when orangutans are

kept as pets or used as performers in films and zoos. Such messages point to what we might

call the dark side of cuteness: the danger of taking the impulse to protect and cuddle, which

images of cute or suffering orangutans elicit, to its logical physical conclusion. For to do so is

to establish what these posts portray—and in many ways define—as inappropriate

interspecies interaction that may be tempting and gratifying for the human but ultimately

disastrous for the orangutan. In its stead, such posts advocate a necessary segregation of

human and animal: one styled as an unselfish act of love that puts orangutans’ welfare above

people’s ignorant fantasies. Crucially, this form of human-animal detachment is not the

negation of a relation but a cultivated, ethical stance (Candea 2010): a specific way of

relating to orangutans that, the messages imply, humans need to learn.

Such no-contact messages propound quite a different configuration of human-orangutan

relations to the manifestations of interspecies attachment examined earlier. Both are, of

course, premised on what may be seen as a quintessentially “Western naturalist” assumption

of the ontological partition between humans and animals. But whereas the latter constantly

21

elides that divide through the invocation of intersubjective intimacy, the former repeatedly,

insistently reinscribes it. These contrasting impulses, I argue, encapsulate a key, long-

standing tension that pervades orangutan conservation more generally:17 Although much of

the moral and affective “pull” of orangutan causes derives from romantic notions of

interspecies intimacy, love, and responsibility, the entire point of conservation is to save them

from humans; to keep them in “the wild”, where they can roam safe and free as “nature”

intended. While zoos and rehabilitation centers blur that line (see, e.g., Palmer et al. 2016,

Parreñas 2012, Russon 2009), the ideal human-orangutan relationship—as defined within

orangutan conservation—is one of non-contact, whereby the two parties stay firmly on their

respective sides of the nature/culture, animal/human divide.

This tension permeates the social media-scape of orangutan conservation, where—thanks to

the spatio-temporal affordances of Web 2.0 technologies—cute images and no-contact

messages constantly jostle for space in the same corners of the internet. On sites such as

Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, the contradictory ethnographic moments that I experienced

weeks apart can easily be juxtaposed within seconds on a single thread, timeline, or playlist.

In this way, such digital spaces become sites for the ongoing (re)production of two opposing

impulses: one to cuddle, the other to draw back. If images of cute or suffering orangutans

momentarily draw users into a sense of interspecies intimacy, a “no-contact” post can sternly

jerk them back within minutes, re-erecting that all-important species divide.

The constant push-and-pull of such contrasting impulses resonates with Alcayna-Stevens’

observations in her ethnography of a Catalonian chimpanzee sanctuary (2012). Noting that

keepers routinely invoked and undertook what appeared to be starkly contrasting practices—

treating chimpanzees as fundamentally unknowable nonhuman others one minute and as

22

knowable selves the next (2012:92)—she asks: how should anthropologists deal with such

apparent paradoxes? Her response is not to resolve them by incorporating them into a single

(dominant) anthropological account, but, rather, to suspend these possibilities as distinct

“worlds of intent” (ibid.:88) between which keepers move, and about which they make

epistemological and ontological claims. To this end, she deploys the notion of “doublethink”

as a heuristic through which anthropologists can appreciate, but not actualize, the “comings-

in and -out of existence of what would appear (when placed side by side) to be

incommensurable practices” (ibid.:92).

“Doublethink” is in some ways a useful device for apprehending the dynamics of the social

media-scape of orangutan conservation. By framing interspecies intimacy and species

difference less as paradoxes to be tamed than as equivalent possibilities, it becomes easier to

see how and why many orangutan supporters often toggle unproblematically between the

impulses to cuddle and draw back. Both, I suggest, are distillations of disparate “worlds of

intent”, one presentist (to comfort and care for), the other prospective (to return to the wild).

Distinct but not incommensurable, these worlds are ordered around different temporal

orientations, with the first being seen as a non-ideal but necessary prelude to the second.

Here, Udin the orangutan, Udin the innocent victim, and Udin the wild orangutan(-to-be) are

not the same thing: they are different figures, implying different relations, that segue in and

out of prominence with the ebbs and flows of social media.

“Doublethink,” however, can only take us so far. While rendering different (possible) worlds

heuristically equivalent for the anthropologist, it does not account for how our subjects

themselves might order their worlds in various non-equivalent ways. Yet, as I shall now

23

suggest, some of these ordering efforts can have very real effects on the social and political

dynamics of social media.

Differentiating “witnessing publics”

The contrasting impulses that we have just examined adds a further layer to our

understanding of how “witnessing publics,” once produced, go on to interact, intervene, and

(re)constitute themselves on social media. As we have seen, a sense of interspecies empathy,

framed by the palm oil narrative, forms the baseline of many popular engagements with

orangutan causes. But what the simultaneous, if less frequent, circulation of no-contact

messages does, I suggest, is push orangutan supporters to cultivate a more reflexive

conservation sensibility through which they can tell what is right and wrong, appropriate and

inappropriate, in the context of human-orangutan relations. In effect, this means overcoming

the “difficulty of disentanglement” (Kelly and Lezaun 2014:369) and developing the capacity

to pull back: to know when to suppress that urge to cuddle and to re-erect the species

boundary and all that comes with it.

Not all orangutan supporters, however, appear to have grasped this sensibility. And it is here

that we can trace a more inward-folding, exclusionary form of politics on this social media-

scape. Consider this short but illuminating exchange that ensued in response to COP’s

“stinking paws” post. Most responses were typically succinct affirmations of the no-contact

message: “I am happy to look not touch”; “Would love to cuddle an orang but know I can”t

as it is the wrong thing to do. Just be happy to see them alive forever.” Soon after the post

went live, however, a lady from Barcelona (LB) wrote, “I would to cuddle one in my arms

24

with all my love 💕💕💕💕♥ ”. COP immediately responded with an implicit rebuke: “Did

you read the article [on non-contact] LB????” Two further comments followed:

CB [in response to COP’s question]: Im thinking NOT LOL [laughing out loud]

OB: 😡😡😡😡😡 [angry face]

A day later, LB responded with two comments: “You are right, i love them, and dont want to

do anything for their detriment […]”; and “i want to say also, how sorry I feel. Look but dont

touch,💕💕”. This terse conversation was a telling but not unusual example of how social

media’s interactive affordances are deployed by certain orangutan supporters to educate and

ostracize ignorant others: a process that, like the peer exchanges discussed earlier, can take

place across time and space between individuals who have never met. Although nobody told

LB why they thought her first comment was wrong, the snide, disdainful responses she

received—together, perhaps, with the link to the no-contact document—had the effect of

bringing her in line with the prevailing orthodoxy.

More than “educating” LB, however, this exchange also postulated a momentary but

significant distinction between different members of orangutan conservation’s “witnessing

public”: that is, between a set of more informed, reflexive orangutan supporters and relatively

ignorant would-be orangutan huggers—posters like LB who didn’t know where to draw the

line between cuddling and drawing back. For LB’s critics, these two impulses—and the

“worlds of intent” that they represented—were not equivalent but ordered in a clear moral

hierarchy.18 In this respect, this exchange serves as a lens onto another important feature of

25

this social media-scape: the alliances, enmities, hierarchies, and exclusionary practices that

striate it and, as my final example shows, the larger arena of orangutan conservation.

In 2013, a handful of orangutan conservation professionals and their supporters set up a

public Facebook group to challenge the claims and practices of an Australian reality

television-style film that followed the experiences of a group of young environmental

activists in an orangutan sanctuary—a place that group members condemned as corrupt,

unscientific, and unethical. Most of their posts adopted a “name and shame” approach,

subjecting stories, videos, or comments related to the film and sanctuary to unbridled

criticism. In one instance, a group member posted a photograph of a young female participant

bottle-feeding a baby orangutan at the sanctuary, with the caption: “[Name] handling a baby

orangutan at the … Prison [the sanctuary] without going through quarantine, and no gloves or

mask”. The first few responses revolved around how to post a critical question about this

picture on the film’s Facebook page. These were followed, however, by a query from a

French user (F):

F: I see only the beauty of the picture of maternal gestures of the young girl for this

baby orangutan..... / I can download this photo?

F: < I think not having understood all the comments here > beacause my english is

very bad

The ensuing exchange is worth partially reproducing:

26

Group Administrator 1 [GA1]: F, that might be an acceptable interpretation had the

person in the photo taken the necessary precautions to protect the health of the baby in

her arms.

F: oh I understand better now .... ( in this case I do not download this photo ....)

thank you GA1

[…]

GA1: ok! Yes basically we are concerned that this movie they make with these

inexperienced young people do not take notice of experts who recommend that

between 10 and 14 days of quarantine should be observed during which time the

visitor has no contact with the animals (no closer than 5-7 meters). This is because the

orangutan can die from diseases caught by humans […] The film makers say that they

HAVE to be able to put these orangutans’ lives at risk...the word they used was that it

was "unavoidable”. We believe there is no justification for this behaviour.

F: you right..... totally ..

[…]

Group Administrator 2 [GA2]: furthermore, this woman-- along with several other

very naive individuals-- has been totally brainwashed by people who have their own

agenda...

no respectable conservationists will have anything to do with this awful project, this

orangutan prison or the ego-maniac in charge of it all....

27

F: i understand [...] this is really sad the risks taken for these babies.. :-(((

GA2: […] these selfish people are doing it for publicity for their ridiculous film... if

they truly cared about the orangutans they would be sent to [another center] so they

could receive professional care and rehabilitation.

F: absolutely ...... these photos act the wrong way on people’s minds ..... luckily you

are ALL here to “point the finger” the irréponsabilité of these people thank you for

it....

Like the curt interactions surrounding LB’s post, this thread demonstrates in unusual detail

the pedagogical dynamics of the social media-scape of orangutan conservation: that process

by which individuals are taught to acquire a proper conservation sensibility. For these critics,

one of the show’s participants’ many sins was the failure, selfish or naïve, to pull back—to

preserve the human-orangutan divide where it was most needed. The center’s failure to

prevent such dangerous, ethically suspect interspecies contact was portrayed as further proof

of its immorality, illegitimacy, and profiteering agenda. This charge was often accentuated by

posts that extolled the virtues and accomplishments of what were styled “real” conservation

heroes.

Exchanges like these expose—but also publicly fan—the politics and tensions that fissure the

wider field of orangutan conservation. In these moments, I argue, cuteness, the no-contact

issue, human-animal relations, and the entire normative framework of conservation become

political. These are instances in which different parties fight to delimit not only the “right”

28

way of relating to orangutans, but also who has the right to determine what that right way is.

It is worth noting that the film’s critics used their personal accounts, and that so publicly

reproaching one organization is not commonplace among orangutan professionals. However,

my earlier point about the circulatory and combinatory effects of social media also applies

here. Just as different organizations’ images and narratives often produce a cumulative and

relatively coherent version of “the plight of the orangutan” as they travel across social media,

posts like the one above have the effect of hierarchizing this social media-scape: by parsing,

and in many ways producing, different morally-laden categories and levels of privilege and

legitimacy into which various players can (sometimes unwittingly) become slotted.

The sort of online politics to which these activities give rise is as “charged” as the politics of

inclusivity and interspecies responsibility that we examined earlier. What it enacts, however,

is not an opening up but a closing off: of humans from animals, and of different (social

media-defined) types of orangutan supporters from each other. In this way, it tempers the

ethos of inclusivity through which orangutan conservation’s “witnessing publics” are

produced and enlarged. At the same time, it reveals how both posts and publics can acquire

afterlives of their own, in ways that exceed their original moral and praxiological remits and

the bounds of orangutan organizations’ control.

Conclusion

As recent “multispecies” scholarship (Kirskey and Helmreich 2010) has reiterated,

contradiction, tension, and ambiguity are endemic to human-animal relations—even in the

most familiarly “Western” of settings (see, e.g., Alcayna-Stevens 2012, Candea 2010, 2013,

Hinterberger 2016, Latimer 2013, Yates-Doerr and Mol 2012). My article adds to this

29

growing ethnographic pool by exploring how the long-standing, quintessentially “naturalist”

tension between “humans” and “animals” gets negotiated within a specific digital context: the

social media-scape of orangutan conservation. It does so not by tracing how such negotiations

unfold within specific groups (e.g. Spanish chimpanzee keepers, British behavioural

scientists), but by sketching out the digital infrastructures of feeling and praxis that shape

how diverse individuals scattered across the global North engage with orangutan causes—and

occasionally, fleetingly, with each other. In this milieu, the species divide never remains

static but is constantly recalibrated by orangutan supporters, who variously elide, uphold, and

straddle it without fear of contradiction. Such activities, I argue, are not merely idiosyncratic

reactions, but manifestations of contrasting regimes that give rise to morally and affectively

laden figures—“humanity” and “the wild”, saviors and innocent victims, mutually available

selves, ignorant and informed orangutan supporters, charlatans and “real” professionals—all

engaged in an ongoing dance of drawing together and pulling apart, opening up and closing

off.

Such regimes and figures form the circulatory matrix through which orangutan causes—like

the human rights issues examined by anthropologists in the 2000s—are “charged” and made

publically visible on social media. In this article, however, I have tried to push beyond the

extant literature’s focus on production and circulation by examining how the “witnessing

publics” constituted by such media activism reproduce, extend, and personalize such causes.19

The distinctive affordances of social media—notably their mechanisms of participation,

visibility, and content-sharing—are pivotal to these processes, serving as means through

which orangutan supporters can participate in the project of “saving” this charismatic species.

In this capacity, I argue, social media are not simply digital glosses on the physical reality of

30

orangutan conservation, but must be understood as constituting a potent “additional realit[y]”

(Boellstorff 2016; see also Gerbaudo 2012:13) within this field.

Intrinsic to that reality, however, is the ever-present possibility of both causes and publics

taking on (after)lives of their own. And it is here, I suggest in closing, that the motifs of

“opening up” and “closing off” might also be brought to bear on the nascent anthropology of

social media. Hirschkind et al. have recently noted that “today, new media bears the promise

of universal political enfranchisement in the form of ‘access,’ the term by which projects of

democratic inclusion are being reimagined and reengineered” (2017:S4). Like many

ethnographies of social media activism, these discourses center on the radical new—and, it is

often assumed, progressive—possibilities that such media can bring into being. What this

article underscores, however, is the need to attend simultaneously to the other side of such

processes: to how the very same affordances that open up causes and issues to wider public

participation can also close things off by forging of new differences and inequalities.20

Thinking in terms of opening up and closing off, I suggest, can undergird a much-needed

anthropological critique of social media’s “promise of the new” (Hirschkind et al. 2017:S4).

While not denying the very real novel possibilities—even ontologies—that social media can

conjure into being, such an approach mitigates against the “breathless optimism” (ibid.) that

often infuses contemporary discourses about them. As Miller and his colleagues (e.g. Miller

2016, Miller et al. 2016, Miller and Slater 2000) have consistently reminded us, the

anthropology of social media is, in many ways, simply the anthropology of everyday sociality

in all its messy and not always pretty complexity. This is not to suggest, however, that

ethnographers of social media should therefore confine their analyses to their “sociality”—

particularly when contemplating those digital gray areas that generate highly charged affects,

31

moralities, and sensibilities without ever creating strong or enduring socialities. What I have

tried to foreground in this article, rather, is the need to appreciate the temporal and processual

fluctuations of social media: how relations and realities are variously forged, reworked, or

indeed broken over time, sometimes in ways that cross-cut “new” and “old” social

configurations. In this view, what matters are not so much categories or modes of “the

social,” but the processes by which they emerge, evolve, and unravel. And as I have tried to

show, it is by taking these processes seriously that we can develop a nuanced and,

importantly, critical understanding of how online “publics” are produced, move, feel, and act

—but not always in the most expected of ways.

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1Notes

There are also a few Indonesian orangutan organizations that post in Malay and English for

Indonesian and Western supporters. While fascinating, they demand an entire article of their own.

2 Such platforms also come with problems and complications (see, e.g. Couldry 2015, Gillespie

2010), but these are not the focus of my article.

3 While oriented towards animal welfare, such bodies do have a stake in conservation strategies and

debates, and often help draw public attention to larger environmental challenges confronting

orangutan populations.

4 In practice, cooperation in this field is tempered by an awareness of the competition between

organizations for a limited pool of donations, sponsorship, and support. Consequently,

organizations try to avoid either promoting competitors’ causes to their own detriment or being seen

to poach others’ material for their benefit.

5 Such programs enable supporters to “adopt” individual orangutans through a one-off or regular

monetary contribution to the centers where these animals live. In return, “adopters” get a package

containing (among other things) a certificate, a photograph and biography of “their” orangutan, and

updates on his or her progress.

6 The Ketapang team sends regular updates and footage to its UK counterparts, who then edit and

transform selected material into discernible “stories” that will appeal to their supporters—a

complicated process that I lack room to discuss here.

7https://www.facebook.com/internationalanimalrescue/photos/

pcb.10153201649784910/10153201633369910/?type=1. None of posts and comments featured here

have been edited for typos or other errors.

8 http://www.greenpeace.org/international/en/campaigns/climate-change/kitkat/

9 This powerfully simplified narrative frequently encompasses other related threats to orangutans,

including human-animal conflict, hunting, and poaching. These are often attributed to the effects of

oil palm-related deforestation, which is seen to push humans and animals into dangerous contact.

Moreover, the narrative glosses over two important realities: 1) Western consumer action has only

limited utility since most palm oil is used domestically or exported to China and India, and 2) many

orangutan organizations do collaborate with oil palm companies in practice—albeit without much

fanfare. For fuller accounts of the drivers of orangutan extinction, see Davis et al. 2013, Marshall et

al. 2006, Meijaard et al. 2011.

10https://www.facebook.com/opfuk/photos/

a.197181683701442.50803.149160125170265/966668170086119/?type=3

11 OUTrop (now the Borneo Nature Foundation) is a conservation science outfit run mainly by

British scientists; the OULT is an NGO that channels donations to field projects and promotes

sustainable solutions for orangutans’ survival in the wild.

12 https://www.facebook.com/internationalanimalrescue/videos/10153493482269910/

13 IAR’s online shop, for instance, includes wheelbarrows (£25.00) and “motherly love” (“constant

care from a human “babysitter” for a frightened and vulnerable orangutan orphan”, £50.00).

14 See also see also Miller et al. 2016 for an analogous discussion of social media’s “scalable

sociality.”

15

https://www.facebook.com/saveordelete/photos/a.133573248943.109013.21990433943/101537140

78383944/?type=3&theater

16https://www.facebook.com/notes/save-orangutans/why-no-contact-is-the-best-policy/

445910682156496

17 Well before the advent of social media, scholars were already identifying similar tensions and

contrasts in both scientific and popular engagements with orangutans (see, e.g., Russell 1995 on

“Orangutan as Child” vs. “Orangutan as Pristine” narratives, Siegel 2005 on the complexities of

anthropomorphism, and Sowards 2006 on orangutans’ consubstantiality and incongruity with

humans). My conversations with conservationists and charities also reveal how professionals

themselves continually negotiate these tensions in their everyday work (see, e.g., Russon et al. 2016

on internal debates about how much contact orangutans should have with human “babysitters.”)

18 While prevalent, this hierarchy is not always clear-cut on social media. Some supporters, for

example, have complained about what they construe as unnecessarily clinical behavior on the part

of orangutan carers at rehabilitation centers.

19 This article thus contributes to a growing ethnographic corpus on how activist and other cause-

related media are responded to, appropriated, and disrupted as they move across different circuits

(e.g. Fattal 2014, Gray 2016, Juris 2012, Postill 2014, Rasza 2014).

20 Although some have tackled these concerns (e.g. boyd 2014, Gerbaudo 2012, Miller 2016),

anthropologists have generally devoted less attention to them than counterparts in fields such as

gender and cultural studies (e.g. Brickell 2012, Gajjala 2014, Nakamura 2008).