Pronouns for an apocalyptic future: asymmetrical terms for a new era

ABSTRACT Pronouns, particularly gendered pronouns, convey how apocalyptic futures are understood for differently positioned subjects. The “we” is not always about embracing a commons but can also be about extending exclusions. Drawing from social linguistics and the concept of shifters, science and technology studies and the ideas of symmetry, asymmetry, as well as the author’s ethnographic research at two orangutan rehabilitation centers on Borneo in present day Malaysia, this paper highlights the power of pronouns in imagining whose lives are at risk or endangered in a pending apocalypse, including the present Sixth Age of Extinction and popular fears about the end of the world.

The Chinese shopkeeper asked me, "Do you think the Mayans were right?" This was in late 2009. We were in the city of Kuching, capital of Sarawak, on Borneo, in Malaysia. At that time, I regularly waited in front of her shop for the van sapu that would take me back to the Iban longhouse where I lived with a family while I conducted my field research on orangutan rehabilitation, which served as the basis for my book Decolonizing Extinction (Parreñas 2018). The van was called a van "sapu" or sweep because it would "sweep up" people waiting along the road. For a small fare, it would slowly but surely whisk them to villages and settlements not serviced by the public bus system. I think the shopkeeper interpreted the surprise on my face to be confusion. She then elaborated how ancient Mayans predicted the end of the world in 2012-a matter of just 3 years from the time we were speaking. My confusion wasn't in the prediction. Rather, I was surprised to hear this idea circulating in Kuching. The film 2012 was circulating then in what was the city's thriving underground economy of pirated DVDs. Made by Hollywood's "Master of Disaster" Roland Emmerich, the film is premised on the end of the Mayan calendar cycle and "the end of the world as we know it." Kuching was certainly not immune to what anthropologists Comaroff and Comaroff (2000) have called "millennial capitalism," or the idea of salvation to be gained from lotteries, pyramid schemes, gambling, and other hopes for immediate returns in the midst of greater societal worries. The term has been useful for thinking about neoliberalism in South Africa, economic precarity in Iran, and mania characterizing the United States of America of the early 2000s (Ferguson 2010;Khosravi 2017;Martin 2007). Yet, I was caught off guard by the idea of Mayans as both a people belonging to the past and as a subject of small talk in Malaysia (Science X Staff 2012).
Around 2009, I am not sure if by then I had already come to associate apocalyptic fears with American white male Christian doomsday preppers, the kind who were interviewed by Tapia (2003) in 1999 and 2000 and the kind who began "prepping" in 2008 and who were ethnographically studied by geographer Bradley Garrett (2020). Performance studies scholar Casey Ryan Kelly (2016, 97) calls this phenomenon the Man-pocalypse, or a "warriorism … embattled by secularism, feminism, and multiculturalism." The Man-pocalypse serves as a spectacle in the National Geographic reality TV show Doomsday Preppers that began broadcasting in 2011.
Fears of dramatic apocalypse may stem from supposedly Mayan predictions, or from evangelical Christians like Harold Camping's prediction in 2005that rapture and the Day of Judgement were coming in the year 2011, or from Hollywood dramatizations of annihilation like those created by the likes of Roland Emmerich and James Cameron. As different as these narratives are, they all overshadow the uneventful planetary crisis of anthropogenic climate change and wildlife extinction.
By striking up conversation with me, the shopkeeper drew me into an inclusive sense of "we," a "we" that includes her as a speaker and me as a listener. This sense of we may be what de la Cadena (2019) would call a simple "we" and not a "complex we" that expansively includes nonhuman relations that constitute more than human worlds. Yet the simplicity of the shopkeeper's "we" was deceptively complex. Her inclusive sense of we that she used by positioning me as a "you" when she asked, "do you think the Mayans were right?" was not too far removed from an exclusive "we" that claims to know a secret truth belying conspiracy theories or predicted ends of the world, a kind of truth to which a privileged few are privy. An exclusive sense of we in such cases always hopes to include a growing group of select others into a private sphere of shared belief.
Science and Technology studies are particularly adept for understanding the proliferation of "post-truth" and what has been suggested as a technical term called "bullshit" (Holman 2020;Lynch 2017;Sismondo 2017). The era of "alternative facts" and popularized conspiracy theories like Q-Anon that are fueled through social media and the internet have offered up an opportunity to revisit older debates in the sociology of science. Should all ideas, including wild ideas, be thought through symmetrythe kind associated with the strong programme in the sociology of science that took off in the 1970s and 1980s? Or should the proliferation of ideas untethered to empirical observations but tethered to territories, following Hinterberger and Porter (2015) and their concept of tethering, be understood as expressions of epistemic democracy, following science studies scholar Fuller's (2017) recent argument that "instruments of knowledge production … will end up working for anyone with access to them" against which Sismondo (2017) argues would be a "wholesale cheapening" of technoscientific knowledge production?
Recently, Spencer, Dányi, and Hayashi (2019) have demonstrated how asymmetry is a useful analytic for understanding attempts to consider profound ontological differences between colonial or Western scientific frameworks on one hand and Indigenous, Amerindian, shamanistic, or Yolngu (aboriginal) frameworks on the other. An asymmetrical orientation, as opposed to a symmetrical one, would acknowledge both ways of knowing, even if unable to reconcile differences between the twosuch as in cases of "political ontology" described by de la Cadena and Blaser (2018).
Casual apocalyptic talk in Malaysia offers an opportunity to think of the strong programme in the context of Strong Men, in places where democracy is more aligned with the epistemic kind instead of the kind understood as a form of governance and political participation. The era of Strong Men never really ended in Malaysia and thus did not have a re-emergence as with Brazil's 2018 election of Jair Bolsonaro, the US's 2016 election of Donald Trump, The Philippines' election of Rodrigo Duterte in 2016, and India's 2014 election of Narendra Modi (Prashad 2018). Bloor's (1991) idea of the Strong Programme is committed to thinking of a sociology of scientific knowledge as causal, impartial, symmetrical, and reflexive. Critics such as Stephen Kemp (2005) accuse Strong Programme practitioners of both severing concepts from reality and for challenging scientific credibility. Bloor (2007) in response to his critics doubles down on the social construction of knowledge by emphasizing how concepts and language are socially learned.
All pronouns in a language are social concepts. And in the context of species extinction and dramatic climate change perceived among everyday people, including the shopkeeper, casual words highlight the power of pronouns in imagining whose lives are at risk or endangered. The pronouns of you, we, they, she, he, and it each carry a specific meaning and context. Pronouns are shifters, which is a technical term used by social linguists to discuss the nature of pronouns which shift what they reference in the context of a sentence or conversation (Benveniste 1971;Caton 1987;Fludernik 1991;Jakobson and Rudy 1962).
Drawing from both social linguistics and science and technology studies enables me to consider a question posed by Marcelo Ignacio Gonzalez Galvez, Marisol de la Cadena, and Manuel Tironi for a 4S panel that germinated this special issue of Tapuya: Which operations can enable the denunciation of capitalist territorial occupations and environmental harm in the so-called Anthropocene without rehearsing a common "we"? In this paper, I respond to this question by arguing that pronouns, particularly gendered pronouns, convey how apocalyptic futures are understood for differently positioned subjects. The "we" is not always about embracing a commons, but can, as the shopkeeper in Kuching conveyed, be about extending exclusions. The pronoun of "we" that is meant to include a chosen group of others does so at the expense of excluding others. Instead of resorting to a common "we" that (un)intentionally creates boundaries between insiders and outsiders, I argue for using singular pronouns that recognize unique and distinct experiences, including and especially pronouns that convey gender as socially constructed.
I am writing at a time in which pronouns and their gendered politics are widely recognized in North America as having significant power. The gender-neutral third person plural "they" is increasingly becoming a singular third-person pronoun. Those who are invested in a binary gender ideology interpret the growing usage of the gender neutral and inclusive "they" as a weapon against them in a culture war.
This particular culture war is global. One symbolic skirmish of this war was waged in Brazil, when far-right Christians burned an effigy of Judith Butler in 2017, calling her a witch, devil, and proponent of what they call the ideology of gender, which they base on a misunderstanding of her book originally published in 1989 and which they felt is anti-family (Butler 1999;Jaschik 2017). The symbolic fights of this culture war often allude to material violence perpetrated by far-right forces from past dictatorships and politically-motivated violence against women. Take for example the moment in 2016 when Bolsonaro cast his vote of impeachment against Dilma Roesseff in honor of the colonel who headed the military unit during the dictatorship that tortured Roesself and other leftists in the 1970s (Snyder and Wolff 2019).
Even though this cultural war concerning pronouns may feel contemporary, the Merriam-Webster dictionary has pointed out that English speakers have used "they" as a singular person pronoun since the 1300s. Yet, there is truth to the idea of pronouns as a bellweather of societal change: Spokespersons of the dictionary also point out that the use of "they" as a specifically gender-neutral pronoun is newly established in the dictionary as of September 2019 (see https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/ singular-nonbinary-they).
The wider adoption of "they" coincides with the growing practice of replacing gendered suffixes in Spanish with the letter -x, such as in Latinx (deOnís 2017). Originating in queer and trans online worlds, the -x suffix has come to serve as a gesture of inclusion for gender varianceeven as it threatens to presume a homogeneity that glosses over differences like previously used terms such as Hispanic and Latinidad (Salazar 2019).
While these debates about pronouns and suffixes are posed as a social and cultural need to increase sensitivity for diversity and inclusion in liberal democracy and liberal institutions, my focus on pronouns and inclusion is ultimately about environmental harm in illiberal contexts where a common "we" does not have significant purchase.
Who is endangered? Who feels responsible for that endangerment? The answer to these questions dovetails with my answer to the questions posed to me: one about the supposedly Mayan prediction of the end of the world and the other about the Anthropos, capitalist territorial occupations, and environmental harm in a moment of multiple kinds of "we" at stake. In what follows, I trace the generative power of shifting pronouns in what feels like an apocalyptic moment, one slowly unfolding in island Southeast Asia.
In the first part of this paper, I consider the role of the exclusive sense of we when imagining national ownership of wildlife. At a time when the era's most pressing problems are conceived as planetary and global in nature, whether through the conceptualization of the Anthropocene or climate change, nation-state frameworks continue to be the hegemonic force for determining courses of action (O'Reilly 2017). In the second and third parts, I consider the reasons why orangutans are never objectified pronouns of it but are addressed as third persons who cannot be owned like objects, property, or chattel. Orangutans are aptly understood by their caretakers as gendered third persons, he or she, even if they are spoken about in the nongendered third-person pronoun. Malay has only one third-person singular pronoun and it is gender-neutral: dia. By bringing these examples together, I am extending feminist perspectives on the strong programme, particularly lessons of partial perspective from Haraway's (1991) situated knowledges, along with Spencer, Dányi, and Hayashi's (2019) recent theorization of asymmetry to the work pronouns can accomplish for inclusion and exclusion when it comes to environmental harm and specifically who is harmed in what is being called the planet's Sixth Extinction.

Pronoun 1: we (third person exclusive plural)
Orangutans as a species may already long be acquainted with the threat of extinction. Evidence from the Pleistocene, around 500 thousand years ago, suggests that orangutans were dispersed throughout Asia (Arora et al. 2010;Harrison et al. 2014;Wang et al. 2014). It is suspected that glaciation pushed them to find refuge on Borneo and Sumatra, when a shelf connected the two landforms. Climate change and extinction are not new to the history of the planet when compared to the evolutionary history of orangutans, the past formation of landforms, or the five previous mass extinctions that have changed the composition of life whose debris is left in the layers of stratigraphy. What is a new element is that the island of Borneo today is divided into three nationstates: Indonesia, Malaysia, and Brunei. The matter of deep time emphasizes the lesson that borders are arbitrary and that migration is a state of being for all kinds of life, including life now considered endemic and only found in this particular part of the world.
The existence of wildlife precedes the existence of national borders. Yet, wild animals become emblematic of the nation-state boundaries that have been imposed upon them. Take for instance Africa's "big five game," even as the animals that comprise the big five live throughout southern as well as parts of east and central Africa (Brooks et al. 2011). Likewise, orangutans are endemic to contemporary Indonesia and Malaysia. Perhaps because most people associate orangutans with Indonesia, the nationwide Malaysian Tourism Board wanted to capitalize on the orangutans found within its national borders.
In the early 2000s, commercial volunteerism, or ecovolunteerism, emerged as an industry that commodified intimate encounters with wildlife, including orangutans. British and European tourists were willing to pay up to 6000 US dollars to spend a month tending to and cleaning after displaced orangutans in Sabah and 4000 US dollars in Sarawak, both on Malaysian Borneo (Parreñas 2016;Russon and Susilo 2014). Towards the end of the first decades of the 2000s, the Malaysian national tourism board wanted to further develop the commodity of commercial volunteerism. They had hopes that paying money to carry out manual labor for displaced orangutans was not merely "stuff that white people like" (Lander 2008). The national tourism board wanted to test out potential demand from elsewhere, specifically from emergent Asian markets.
Asian consumers potentially allowed a diversified source of income, especially as white commercial volunteers sometimes became disappointed when their ideas of rescue and liberal freedom were not sufficiently realized. White volunteers often came to witness and participate in exercises of freedom and rescue, but instead saw a lot of cages. The Malaysian Tourism Board invited tourism professionals from their counterpart agencies in Korea, India, and China to the site that I call Lundu Wildlife Center in Sarawak.
The Korean visit was said to have gone well. The Korean visitors cleaned very efficiently, thoroughly, and without complaint. The visit from the India Tourism Bureau was, however, a total bust: the white-collar tourism industry professionals on the visit complained about the mosquitoes. They were annoyed that the staff did not have chemical insect repellant readily available. As far as their encounters with wildlife were concerned, they were already satisfied about "being in the jungle" once they were at the entrance where they took photographs of each other. After cleaning just one out of eight cages, they all quit. As one complained, "I would never sell this; we already have enough wildlife in India." The Chinese tourism board had been invited to participate, but declined the invitation.
After these trials (and errors), the Malaysian Tourism Board concluded that they could not successfully commodify cleaning after members of a dwindling population of orangutans for Asian consumption. What they succeeded in showing, however, is how annihilation of unique life forms can be unspectacular, both in the space of the everyday work of care for survival and in the era of persistent national sovereignties. Like the work of cleaning sheets or treating bed-sores, custodial labor performed for those facing pending death on the scale of the species is far from glamorous (Parreñas 2016). Even when every encounter between a human and an orangutan might bridge millions of years of evolutionary departure from each other, the repetition and acclimation that characterizes custodial work can be boring and tedious. The Malaysian Tourism Board's failed attempts suggest that survival and maintenance cannot receive the fanfare welcoming new dams, new roads, and new buildings and the forms of destruction associated with such development projects.
While the story of Asian tourism professionals trying out commercial volunteerism may be funny for its performance of stereotypes, it highlights the exclusive and excluding power of pronouns: "I would never sell this. We already have enough wildlife in India." The "I" is the Indian tourism professionalurban and educated. But then she shifts to a plural pronoun, an exclusive "we" of the nation-state of India, an exclusive set of persons who determine the fate of wildlife found within its arbitrary borders. The "we" of her sentence is not a common "we." It is a capitalist, territorialized, and exclusionary "we" that has the power to count what is worth valuing, protecting, and eliciting care.
These words of an exclusionary we are, by far, not unique to its speaker. They evoke the language of Sarawak's Deputy Chief Minister, Dr. James Masing. Now that Indonesia will be moving its capital from a sinking Jakarta to a yet-to-be-built site on Borneo in East Kalimantan, the Deputy Chief Minister is advocating for Malaysian federal funding for the protection of the Sarawak-Kalimantan border (Goh 2019; Ten 2019). Meanwhile, Malaysia hopes to trade palm oil for upgraded military equipment with potential partners that include China and Indianow that palm oil in the European Union is associated with orangutan habitat destruction and deforestation (Sipalan 2019). When addressing critiques lobbed by environment NGOs towards Indonesia, Dr. Masing repeated an oftspoken line used in Sarawak: "The non-governmental organisations must be able to balance human needs with that of the wildlife" (Ten 2019). Human here becomes a metonym not for all of humankind, but for specific humans who have much to gain from decisions made by governors of the nation-state.
The shopkeepers' needs did not compete with the needs of wildlife, contrary to the minister's opinion. Her needs were situated in a longstanding relationship between Chinese urban shopkeepers and their patrons coming from villages west of the city. Indeed, shopping complex developments that displaced macaques and now cater to rural consumers in the "exoburbs" directly threatened her livelihood.
The anthropos represented by the Indian professional made uncomfortable by the mosquitos, the shopkeeper of a city center stall competing with shiny new shopping plazas built on destroyed macaque habitats, and the millions of humans subjected to Jakarta's rapid sinking, projected water shortages and who are set to colonize Borneo both show the fragility of human bodies and livelihoods. And it's perhaps this knowledge that human bodies are frail that the idea of fortifying borders in the contemporary context of climate breakdown appeals to Sarawak's Deputy Chief Minister. It doesn't matter to him that these borders are of very recent provenance, that they have been crossed within the lifetimes of orangutans like Lela, before she came into the circumstances that led to her confiscation by the state of Sarawak, and that they are crossed by diasporic subjects like a Chinese shopkeeper or me, a Filipina researcher.

Pronoun 2: dia or she (third person singular)
After an absence of 2 weeks, the 29-year-old Lela approached the feeding platform at the place that I call Batu Wildlife Center. Lela has lived there since the 1980s, when Sarawak's first large-scale dam was built. The wildlife ranger Nadim figured that her 2-week absence was because Lela, with her recently born infant clinging on to her, was attempting to forage on her own in the forest. She seemingly preferred to stay hungry, rather than getting a reliable source of food from the feeding platform. At the feeding site of the park, she was bound to encounter unfamiliar human visitors, familiar men working there, and all too familiar conspecifics. She frequently disappeared for weeks. The ability to hide was truly a feat. This was because the typical range of a single female orangutan in the wild is 7 square kilometers. With only 6.5 square kilometers available to her and more than 20 other orangutans, Lela was bound to fail at her attempts to forage.
Lela was not an it. When talking about her in Malay, those who knew her best used the word dia, the gender-neutral pronoun for agents and not objects. This was not anthropomorphism, but a recognition of animate agency.
Reflecting on what pronoun to use when describing Lela can be construed as espousing the position that grammar impacts social relations. This is an argument made by Chen (2012) in their book, Animacies. However, Chen's argument depends on a creative and to me unconvincing argument that ergative languages like Nepali, Basque, and Chinook impact social relations in societies that use a completely different category of languages, namely nominative-accusative languages, which include a wide array of unrelatedlanguages like English, Quechua, Miwok, and Malay. To assume that grammar impacts social relations would suggest that by virtue of not having a gendered pronoun, Austronesian languages spoken in Southeast Asia like Indonesian, Malay, and Tagalog are free of gender oppression. But that is not the case: neither Indonesia, nor Malaysia, nor the Philippines are exemplars for genderqueer liberation and gender-inclusive revolution, even as these places have long histories of gender variations and diversity (Boellstorff 2004;Tadiar 2004). In the case of Malay, gender is expressed through other means than grammar. And in the case of Lela and other orangutans with whom she co-habits, gender is imposed on her spatially and socially.
Even as a gender-neutral pronoun was the preferred way of talking about Lela, her experiences were gendered such that her sex affected her relationship to space: the physiological size differences between larger male and smaller female orangutans, the inability to escape social contact, the high frequency of pregnancies and births, and in Lela's particular case, the inability to sufficiently forage with her infant clinging to her and her 4year old daughter accompanying her, are experienced through her female body. She is subject to human ideals for how she ought to be and how she ought to live. These ideals, imposed as they are by people, are gendered.
Thinking about Lela offers an opportunity to try to "symmetrically" consider another kind of episteme, namely the experiences of an individual nonhuman animal. If we take seriously exclusionary senses of "we" denoted and connoted by the shopkeeper, the Indian tourism professional, and the state minister, Lela allows us to think about the possibilities of plural subjecthood that are conveyed when we talk of multiple actors as gendered subjects who are both individuals and part of a discrete group. Lela and her experiences demonstrate an answer to the question of how to denunciate capitalist territorial occupations and environmental harm in the so-called Anthropocene without rehearsing a common "we." Yet, just as with a simple "we," any attempt to understand Lela symmetrically cannot really work, because our knowledge of her is limited to conjecture. At least, I can offer an asymmetrical view into her life as mediated as it was to me through conversations about her with those who knew her best and my participant observation as a field worker.
The possibilities of Lela's day-to-day life in the constraints of open-air captivity are anthropogenic through acts of deforestation caused by road building, timber industrialization, monocrop plantations, and acts of consumption through tourism in which orangutan survival is put on display (Parreñas 2018). What makes Lela's pending extinction so attractive to human visitors in this moment of the Anthropocene, a moment marked by anthropogenic change at the expense of so many different kinds of lives?
Her failure to be able to forage on her own is photogenic for the hundreds of daily visitors who come from near and far to see what will likely be the last of her kind in the twenty-first century. Held captive within the boundaries of the park, these orangutans are more likely to be caught on photograph than their conspecifics in the 'wild,' who spend most of their lives high above in rainforest tree canopy, living in isolation kilometers away from each other. These orangutans congregate en masse and are drawn to the only regular food source.
An hour's drive away upon the newly laid road lies Batu Wildlife Center's sister site, Lundu Wildlife Center. It holds the surplus population of displaced orangutans, those that came into custody of the state of Sarawak after Batu Wildlife Center's population exceeded the site's carrying capacity. The orangutans held captive here are kept in less photogenic conditions, behind tall concrete walls and iron bars.
The orangutan rehabilitation center, as exhibited by the places that I call Lundu Wildlife Center and Batu Wildlife Center, work as hospices for a dying species. The animals held here are subjected to fatal fights that will be explained away as death by natural causes, even when the conditions under which they are kept are far from natural. As the manager of the commercial volunteering effort at one of the sites explained to me, "We don't sell 'you'll be saving a species from extinction.' That's way beyond what they can do. They [the commercial volunteers who come from abroad and pay thousands of dollars to assist in rehabilitation efforts] can help in just small ways." Such "small ways" were likely on a volunteer mind when he suggested to me that the rehabilitation center was "like a nursing home." The volunteer's description of the nursing home offers an apt comparison: they are ultimately commercial enterprises that need to stay afloat, if not profitable, if they are to continue offering care in the face of deathwhether at the level of individual or species. As I learned from Lochlann Jain (2013), care that is no longer towards a cure is palliative.
Leaders of the institution responsible for the care of these displaced orangutans concede that the populations they handle are small when compared to those in the wild. Yet wildlife center ticket admissions and commercial volunteering efforts involving them are a greater source of revenue than their elusive, wild conspecifics. Terminal care here comes in the form of feeding these institutionalized orangutans industrialized foods, like white bread and reconstituted milk (Parreñas 2019). Terminal care also comes in the form of mediating between safe and unsafe contact with visitors, and keeping orangutans under a state of arrest. The frequent orangutan births in the center, which are far more frequent than in the wild, balance out their deaths within the park, which can never keep up with the scale of death experienced by their species well beyond the boundaries of the wildlife center.
The threat of apocalypse for Lela's species is gendered because the response to that potential apocalypse is in creating a reserve for her and other female orangutans to reproduce. The space constrains Lela to the site, such that she is unable to escape acts of copulation, such that she and her female conspecifics are subjected to the space's pronatalist design and are induced to give birth and mother multiple generations of captive orangutans. The human actions that gender orangutans do not impose gender on just the female orangutans held at the site. It also genders Lela's male conspecifics, like Edwin. He, like Lela, help me think through the asymmetries of taking into account individuated and gendered subjectivities.

Pronoun 3: dia or he (third person singular)
Quintessential narratives about orangutans often begin by explaining that orangutan translates as "man of the forest" (Cribb, Gilbert, and Tiffin 2014;Thompson and Masson 2010). In the nineteenth-century Anglophonic world, orangutans served as stand-ins for all great apes. The representation of orangutans, and not necessarily orangutans themselves, were crucial in racist arguments that supported polygenism and enslavement. For instance, a U.S. "Founding Father" Thomas Jefferson writes of "oranootan" in his Notes on the State of Virginia and the animal's desire for African women (Fielder 2013). Literary scholars point out that the nineteenth-century fiction writer Edgar Allen Poe's crime story "Murders in the Rue Morgue" has a male juvenile orangutan violently murdering women in Paris and that the orangutan serves as a proxy for the danger of "Asiatic" and "African" manliness (Peterson 2010;Poe 2006). In the 1870s, a colonial officer reporting from an "outstation" of upland Sarawak published a story of an orangutan stealing away a Dayak maiden (Harrisson 1955). 1 When an orangutan commits harm, how is culpability evaded? And how might this evasion of culpability relate to the lack of culpability in illiberal contexts where "Strong Men" lead the state of affairs? I turn to an incident during my fieldwork involving Lela and Edwin. It is just one example of the everyday almost noneventful nature of annihilation for displaced wildlife: Edwin, a subadult male orangutan, approaches the feeding platform. He makes a raspberry sound. Lela appears and her five-year old offspring Roxanne too I'd never actually seen Roxanne. She's tiny. She follows Lela. Roxanne is crying a high-pitched squeal. Lela still eats and Edwin pursues her. Roxanne stays high above, away from the food and away from the larger orangutans. Lela chews a coconut given to her by the ranger Nadim. Edwin and Lela are on the same tree. He tries to pull the coconut away from her. She gives him a piece. Edwin grasps it, chews it. Lela looks at him, moves to another tree, one closer to the platform. Nadim tells me that Lela has been gone for a month. Roxanne drops a handful of brittle leaves. Like confetti it falls from far up, behind Lela and Edwin, but drops in all of our fields of vision. Edwin comes to Lela. He tries to grab away the rest of her food. This time, it is a raw sweet potato she got from Nadim. She gives it to Edwin and Nadim offers her another raw sweet potato while this happens. She takes it. She chews it. Edwin drops the sweet potato he was chewing so that it lands at the bottom of the trees and he tries to grab the new one from her, grabbing her wrist. She takes a bite and gives it to Edwin. (fieldnotes June 18, 2010) Assuming a sense of fairness between these orangutans would be an anthropocentric and culturally specific mistake. It is not because Edwin and Lela are animals. The category "animal" obfuscates important differences. For instance, in captive experimental conditions capuchin monkeys, which are sometimes known as sapajou or carablanca, do not tolerate inequity when it comes to food, but orangutans do (Brosnan et al. 2011;Brosnan and de Waal 2003). Edwin and Lela are orangutan and so does that make Edwin inculpable for taking food away from Lela who has not eaten in weeks?
Edwin may be behaving the way that can be expected of his kind, yet the conditions of his life are bound within an anthropogenic space. His contact with Lela and other orangutans is both constant and contrived by their spatial conditions. Beyond the 6.5 square kilometers of their shared habitat lay a cement factory, a sand mine, a police training facility, a hospital, and housing developments. All of these are not generically anthropogenic or man-made, but are directly occupied by capitalist territorial interests.
Edwin may be inculpable. But what about the occupations of space that brought him and other orangutans to this habitat? Are they culpable for Lela's inability to forage on her own?
If charged with such blame, I can already anticipate a response from the Deputy Chief Minister of Sarawak: We "must be able to balance human needs with that of the wildlife." Culpability remains evadedjust as it is wished by "Strong Men" who think they act with impunity.

Conclusion: an exclusionary we, the anthropos, at a pending apocalypse
In conclusion, I want to directly answer the question that sparked this reflection: Which operations in the so-called Anthropocene can enable the denunciation of capitalist territorial occupations and environmental harm without rehearsing a common "we"? The answer for me is in the usage of third-person singular pronouns that convey particular and specifically gendered experiences. Doing so recognizes a foundational asymmetryan impossibility of ever being able to fully capture all that occurs in a particular time and place. The orangutans Lela and Edwin show that both symmetrical and asymmetrical approaches in STS help engage epistemic questions of how different subjects might grasp their material realities. Thinking about these particular orangutans and their living conditions as I have done here differs from an attempt to reckon with their states of being (or ontologies). Recognizing fundamental asymmetry rejects the possibility of ever confidently being able to speak for them. Instead, my confidence is in recognizing the physical, material, and political conditions of how they might live and die. Confidence in such matters especially feels urgent when epistemic democracy is the main kind of democracy available.
In response to the shopkeeper, I accepted the invitation into a temporary "we" with her by virtue of carrying on our conversation, but I nevertheless maintained a distance by using a singular first-person pronoun. I said something that is probably predictable for someone of my generation, having been 20 years old at the time of Y2K and its unrealized anticipation for total global electronic and economic system collapse (Edwards 1998;Loeb 2019;Tapia 2003). I said to her, "I don't think it means the end of the world. I think it means that there will be a new era." That pending and perhaps apocalyptic era contains the promise of all kinds of pronouns.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Funding
This work was supported by Fulbright Association to Program.