Departmental Seminars is organised by the Research Programme of Anthropology (RPA) and features lectures in contemporary ethnography. All are welcome!

The event can be attended in-person or online.
Sign-up here: https://events.au.dk/departmental-seminar/signup

Responses and conversation is led by Professor Heather Swanson (Anthropology), leading to more open questions and discussion.

The RPA is hosting a small reception afterwards to celebrate the Autumn break!

Abstract: At least 65 million birds are kept as pets in Indonesia. Living in cages suspended from the roof of the verandah or inside courtyard of houses on the islands of Java and Bali, they are valued aesthetically for their song, socially as status symbols, and culturally as signs of refined masculinity.  In towns and districts across Java and Bali there are weekly songbird tournaments sponsored by politicians and other figures of power who offer cash prizes to the owner of the best performing songbirds.  These prizes fuel dreams of quick futures for many young men.  Domestic songbirds have in the last two decades become a full-blown “mania” in Indonesia that reaches from the poor to the Indonesian President and which is driven by the same heady mix of cultural, political, social, economic, and affective imaginaries that Clifford Geertz described for fighting cocks in Bali forty years ago (Geertz 1972). But there is a catch, an ecological catch: Many of the domesticated songbirds are native or endemic to Indonesia, and there are now probably more songbirds in captivity than in the wild on the island of Java. More than a dozen species of Javanese songbirds are on the brink of extinction as a result of the capture of and trade in wild songbirds.  I am interested in the ambiguities of care and multispecies love involved in this ethnographic case - the intimate care for birds that threatens the species but also the statistical care for species that is critical of such intimate form of multispecies love.  "Care" is a difficult term and a trending term in both anthropology and multispecies ethnography.  I have a sense that my ethnographic case upsets most uses of the term "care". But I need your help to figure out if I am right.