Sensing Others: Voicing Batek Ethical Lives at the Edge of a Malaysian Rainforest

Sensing Others explores the lives of Indigenous Batek people in Peninsular Malaysia amid the strange and the new in the borderland between protected national park and oil palm plantation. As their ancestral forests disappear around them, Batek people nevertheless attempt to live well among the strange Others they now encounter: out-of-place animals and plants, traders, tourists, poachers, and forest guards. How Batek people voice their experiences of the good and the strange in relation to these Others challenges essentialized notions of cultural and species difference and the separateness of ethical worlds. Drawing on meticulous, long-term ethnographic research with Batek people, it is shown that as people seek to make a habitable, ever-changing landscape, what counts as Otherness is always under negotiation. The work questions the traditional anthropological notion to “make the strange familiar, and the familiar strange,” highlighting that living well amid precarity involves constantly negotiating the ambivalence of Otherness, as people, plants, animals, and places can all become familiar, strange, or both. The book reveals that what counts as Otherness is impossible to pin down when viewed from the boundary.