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Paper short abstract:

Addressing the auditory dimensions of captive gibbon breeding, this paper investigates the ways in which the biopolitical emphasis on the species as locus of care is complicated and resisted through the listening practices conducted by skilled caretakers.

Paper long abstract:

This paper examines a set of listening practices encountered in the context of captive breeding programs meant to ensure the survival of various endangered species of gibbon, arboreal apes endemic to the shrinking rainforests of Southeast Asia who maintain their monogamous pair-bonds through the daily bouts of coordinated vocalization that primatologists term “duets.” Drawing on long-term ethnographic fieldwork at a dedicated gibbon conservation facility in Southern California, I show that for the skilled caretakers tasked with implementing breeding recommendations determined by an advisory body, auditory attention to the development and maintenance of these pair-bonds—without which reproduction in captivity will not occur—becomes a crucial site not only where concern is directed, but also where the biopolitical emphasis on the species as unit of conservation (e.g. Chrulew 2011; van Dooren 2014; Fredriksen 2016; Parrenas 2018) is complicated and resisted. At this facility the caretakers are perpetually torn between hearing vocalizations as the audible index of two incommensurable units and scales of conservation: one following the primatological emphasis on auditory species “stereotypes” (Geissmann 2002; cf. Mundy 2018) that reduce living organisms to generic tokens, and another grounded in their commitment to individual gibbons as radically unique beings and species as reductive abstractions. Addressing their aural negotiation of these conflicting pressures and obligations offers a way to listen beyond species that does not make audible an alternative unit, but rather hears the species itself as a single component in a fraught ethico-political assemblage of concepts and bodies perpetually in a process of aural reconfiguration.