Lively gifts and exclusive commodities: Rethinking encounter value in orangutan conservation

Orangutans serve as popular flagships for international conservation campaigns, which increasingly draw on digital communication and engagement technologies to mobilise support. Building on scholarship concerning the commodification of nature and digitalisation of conservation, this paper asks how orangutans produce value, for whom and to what end? It unpacks the frictions and tensions in how orangutans accumulate encounter value or fail to do so across diverse conservation contexts. Drawing upon interviews with orangutan conservation supporters in the United Kingdom and ethnographic research conducted at a rehabilitation centre and release sites in Indonesia, it reveals how orangutans become lively gifts, exclusive commodities, and entangled in unwanted encounters. By illuminating the varying, contrasting ways in which different audiences engage with one popular conservation species, our paper expands the concept of “encounter value”, troubling some of its underlying assumptions, particularly its commodity logics and intimate character. As the paper shows, encounter value is never fixed or prescribed, but contingent and, at times, even contested.