[Un]becoming a Resource: Translating the Nature of Civets in Indonesia

The development of the civet coffee industry in Indonesia has drawn critical attention to how humans and civets live together in the shadow of the global coffee trade. Since 2006, coffee producers have been caging civets for coffee production, resulting in new ways of knowing and living with the arboreal, cat-like animals. In this article, I draw on Michel Callon’s use of ‘translation’ to examine how civets have become a natural resource within a partial genealogy of how civets have been known in Indonesia, from transnational colonial science-making to local conflicts over the regulation of their harvesting from the forests of Indonesia. By attending to the nuances of translation as a sensuous process, I show how becoming and unbecoming a resource is more than a process of classifying. I argue that what might seem like semantic conflicts over naming are actually conflicts over social relations and world-making.