<![CDATA[This article discusses the categorisation of non-human life and the biopolitics of wildlife conservation by examining the case of saltwater crocodiles in a wildlife rescue centre on Bangka Island, Indonesia. Through lively ethography, I will show how crocodiles unsettle the idea of species—a scientific technology used to categorise living beings based on biological features—by actualising their bodily power. In the conservation landscape, crocodiles interact with each other within spaces bounded by cages—infrastructures intended to control animals during rehabilitation—which give way to lively actions: killing, mating, and even idling. I argue that these actions force humans to think about new ways to categorise crocodiles. I call this vernacular category, a mode of categorisation that is co-shaped by the entanglements between humans and non-human others, and mediated by the technoscientific infrastructures that encompass them. Vernacular categories operate outside the state’s logics and are always in constant political dialogue with the state’s desire to keep saltwater crocodiles alive because of their protected status, which demands the use of species-based category in the first place. The vernacular categories, in turn, create new, mutated practices of rehabilitation, which simultaneously serve and contradict the state’s imagination of wildlife conservation.]]>
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