Paper short abstract:

My paper attends to the vernacular fascination of cat metaphors intersecting occult, spatial, animal and political realms emerging as an occult diagnostic of being human in the city among young lower class civil society activists.

Paper long abstract:

Among my interlocutors, young lower class civil society activists, in Kuching, Sarawak, Malaysia, the cat haunts, in Derrida's (2008) sense, reflexive discourse serving at various conjunctions as descriptive metaphor for interpersonal dynamics, economic exploitation, magical efficacy, city-life and human fickleness. My paper ethnographically engages this fascination with the cat as a vernacular metaphor mobilized in reflecting on contemporary conditions of life. I read my interlocutors reflective invocations of the cat as an occult theorization of a situated humanity. This diagnostic of felinity exposes, by way of metaphorical occultation, an entwined isomorphic configuration of microsociality and politics. Drawing on Mbembe (2001) and Asad (2015) I situate this emergent self-diagnosis in the sociopolitical space of Kuching and within the intellectual tradition of Bornean animal tales. Based on this, I ask if we also can, in contextually bounded ways, cathect the 'human' through animal figuration and deepen our attention to the insights produced through violation of category boundaries.