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Pseudonyms have been issued for ethnographic interlocutors, monkeys, and locations.
In Polyphony, an urban neighborhood in Penang, Malaysia, a woman emerges from her house carrying a long bamboo stick. Above her, a group of free-ranging dusky langur monkeys perch on her roof. Instead of angrily confronting them or calling the authorities, she gently taps the roof and shakes a nearby mango tree, causing the monkeys to descend and move away. This scene represents a profound shift in human-monkey relations in urban Malaysia—one where “deterrence” is being reimagined not as conflict, but as a form of care.
The woman deployed what Monyet Interface Project (MIP) strongly encourages urban residents to do: Deterrence (the method of chasing away monkeys from one’s home without physically harming or killing them through ways such as spraying water or cultivating fruit trees). Deterrence is not the same as deterring care. Rather, deterrence extends care by promoting a healthier version of multispecies coexistence, especially in urban landscapes where human-monkey interfaces have been dominantly framed as inherently and innately antagonistic. A stark contrast to my previous summer of fieldwork, I was surprised the woman did not express any anger and did not attempt to hit the monkeys directly. A bigger surprise was that Tom, the monkey group’s leader, no longer had a tail as I saw him limping when leading his group away from the house.

The Tom I knew this summer was not the same Tom I first met. Last summer, the Tom I observed frequently leaped between trees and jumped from house to house, throwing his entire body at a vast distance. This time, as the dusky langurs jumped and crawled using Polyphony’s electric pole wires, Tom led them, limping, and dragging his body across the gap between the two wires. He relied more on his upper body strength, climbing using his two arms as his shortened tail stump recovered from a heavy wound.
In mid-July, as the sun rises, we reach Polyphony’s arboreal crossing. A river cuts through the middle and in the foreground a series of high-rise apartments and construction tower cranes surround nearby forested land, already zoned for urban expansion. The arboreal crossing is located in one of the monkey group’s usual sleeping sites. I am greeted by a bright red rope hoisted firmly between two metal poles nested above me. Made out of recycled firehose material, the newly constructed arboreal crossing was built to facilitate the mobility of free-ranging dusky langurs who previously braved crossing the road on foot, facing oncoming traffic or electrocution while dangling on wires. Polyphony’s arboreal crossing is a concrete example of how infrastructure enables “caring deterrence.”
Across Malaysia, human-monkey interfaces (interactions between groups) are becoming increasingly contentious as forest clearing for plantation agriculture and urban expansion fragment primate habitats. Traditional conservation approaches often frame these encounters through a lens of conflict, leading to “solutions” ranging from violent removal to complete avoidance. But through my work with MIP (Monyet Interface Project), I’ve observed how reframing deterrence as part of a continuum of care can transform these contentious interfaces into spaces of coexistence.
The transformation from conflict to care in Penang reveals how different groups view and value urban monkeys. Government officials, conservationists, urban residents, and food vendors I came across did not doubt the agency of monkeys. Rather, they contested which type of subject the monkey was. To the conservationists and citizen scientists, nonhuman primates were active co-producers of scientific knowledge and inhabitants novel to living in urban landscapes as they experienced forced displacement due to ongoing anthropogenic activities such as habitat fragmentation and urban expansion. On the other hand, government officials categorized monkeys as legal subjects of governance and recipients of uneven paternalistic stewardship. Some urban residents and food vendors perceived monkeys as “nuisances” or “pests” tied to home ownership or economic livelihood.

This past summer, I volunteered as a social scientist for MIP (Monyet Interface Project), a primate conservationist project with work spanning over the Malaysian state of Penang’s island and its mainland counterpart. As part of my fieldwork, I conducted qualitative interviews with urban residents and food vendors for policy reports measuring public awareness of a recently built arboreal crossing primarily for free-ranging dusky langurs in Polyphony (an urban neighborhood in Penang’s island). Sometimes, I also accompanied other citizen scientists on their behavioral fieldwork trips to Harmony (a community park in Penang’s mainland) where they routinely observed various macaque and dusky langur groups.
Monkeys in Malaysia are considered legal subjects of federal and state governance. Many university scientists and academic-adjacent researchers precariously navigate fieldwork access through applying for government permits as applications are analyzed by relevant departments, such as the Forestry Department or the Road and Transportation Department. As I navigate this bureaucratic process, I am reminded to distinguish the fact I am studying the social relations between humans and the monkeys they encounter, not engaging in collecting biological or physical samples.
In another field site, while observing Rover (the leader’s name) and his group of free-ranging macaques, a man came out of a gray car and carries a small red plastic bag of food waste. Despite posted warnings—and Sophie’s admonition—I watched as the man’s attempt at care through feeding actually triggered immediate aggression within the group. This seemingly kind act actually disrupted their social dynamics and natural foraging behaviors, reflecting recent researchhighlighting the complexity of how individual monkeys socialize and monkey group behaviors are always actively influenced by ongoing anthropogenic activities. This incident illustrates why deterrence promotes care at a distance, without worsening the social dynamics of local monkey groups.
“He said he wanted to throw the rubbish but he just left it on the floor,” Sophie stated as the rest of the group laughed and seemed perplexed by the contradiction. We weren’t sure if it was true because the man never bothered to open the dumpster and quickly drove off after Sophie spoke with him. Narrative frames situate the kinds of social relationships scientists have with communal groups in behavioral fieldwork sites and institutional spaces they navigate. A recent scientific paper emphasized the pivotal need for social and natural scientists to collaborate together as the social relations between concepts, data-collection processes, and other interactions are always relationally embedded. In this experience, this conflictual narrative materially impacted the monkeys. Primatologists have suggested that prevalent access to anthropogenic food resources in urban environments may exacerbate in-group competition over unequal food access. Particularly, high-ranking individual macaques were reportedly known for consuming higher proportions of anthropogenic food resources than their counterparts. This incident demonstrated how anthropocentric notions of caretaking such as force-feeding actually exacerbated in-group competition and worsened social conditions between the monkeys. The group of 20 macaques growled, chased each other, and fought with their hands in such a compact space over the man’s plastic bag of food waste. An hour or two later, Sophie amusingly pointed out how a long-tailed macaque stood up and hunched over its rear legs, eating and peeling peanut cases like humans do. The group also spotted a female macaque getting chased by three or four male macaques away from the rubbish bin area.

Besides observing monkeys, conducting behavioral fieldwork in urban areas came with its own set of unique challenges for citizen scientists and conservationists. MIP’s founder, Clarice, emphasized how commonplace perspectives influenced by development shape framings of animals in urban settings as “pests,” hindering meaningful conversations on conservationist solutions between scientists and the general public. Last summer, when I volunteered for the first time, several of Polyphony’s urban residents already expressed their initial sense of skepticism and distrust towards conservationist solutions. This collective sense of distrust emerged from past reliance on dominant frames of conflict and exploitation in primarily relating to monkeys as “colonial pests” or “nuisances” rather than as active co-inhabitants in the shared landscapes both humans and monkeys now lived in together. This is important for citizen scientists as they collect behavioral data and conduct interviews with Polyphony’s urban residents, they reframe these conversations to advocate for the inclusive and holistic wellbeing of humans and monkeys in urban landscapes. Overall, these initial conversations are also crucial for reframing monkeys as active beings who have their unique nonhuman community dynamics.
As citizen scientists evaluated urban residents’ viewpoints on the arboreal crossing’s efficiency, everyone had different perceptions of the same monkeys. Despite the monkeys living in the same neighborhood, it was how individuals encountered particular monkeys alone or as one social group that shaped their perceptions. For example, although Tom was positioned by the conservationists and Polyphony’s urban residents as the leader, there was a split perception in defining what type of leader he was. Some urban residents perceived Ah Tom as the “tua one” (meaning the big one in Malaysian Hokkien, due to his body size and dominant-looking posture) and criticized his leadership for crawling on rooftops too brashly. Polyphony’s urban residents described Tom’s climbing as loud and brash. This negative perception of Tom’s actions influenced many urban residents to advocate for more violent solutions such as translocation to curtail the mobility of the free-ranging monkeys.
This summer, in this continuum of care, both MIP’s citizen scientists and most recently Polyphony’s urban residents have begrudgingly described culling “as the easy way out” after the arboreal crossing was developed. During these interviews, both Clarice and Sophie pointed out how the anthropocentric framing of another primate species, such as the misunderstood long-tailed macaque (LTM), preconditioned specific judgements onto human and dusky langur interactions. The citizen scientists worked hard to dismantle the linear continuity between the care for a perceived “beloved” species such as the dusky langur monkeys at the expense of villainizing the long-tailed macaque. These presuppositions hindered initial fieldwork conversations about reframing perceptions and promoting sustainable solutions.
When MIP interviewed urban residents and food vendors running grocery stores or restaurants, some interviewees now distinguished between the dusky langurs and long-tailed macaques by their fur color and perception of behavioral attributes. For instance, several vendors have casually described the long-tailed macaque as jahat (a Malay word for naughty and aggressive) because they spotted macaques opening trash cans to scavenge for human food. “Tepi bo same” (but not the same), a grocery store owner described as she distinguished between the long-tailed macaques and dusky langurs in the laminated outreach photos we shared with her. She told us the macaque (laukau coco in Hokkien or monyet chocolat in Malay) who lived near her apartment across the street from Polyphony, was known for “tau chak ming kah from tongsampa” (eating things from the trash can) and described the macaque as “coco attack nan, wo kia” (the macaques attack people, I’m scared). Given her concrete experiences with macaques, the grocery store owner was more keen and concerned about protecting herself from physical harm when dealing with macaques rather than focusing on the arboreal crossing or dusky langurs during the interview.

On a significant note, urban residents who jogged Polyphony’s neighborhood park became friendlier with MIP throughout sustained fieldwork. As they became conversational partner regulars with us, they also reported their first real encounters were with monkeys at Penang’s Botanical Gardens, where long-tailed macaques were profound in scavenging food and exhibiting physical expressions of claiming space. It seemed that these gardens were an infamous referral point to the start of seeing relations with monkeys as conflictual.
After the arboreal crossing, some urban residents began to recognize the dusky langurs by their features and no longer seemed to exhibit any heightened anxiety whenever the monkeys visited. In small talk, MIP’s citizen scientists reframed mutual coexistence narratives as a way of conceiving human-monkey interfaces as collaboration rather than conflict. During our walks, when we showed laminated photos of Dayang (the name of a mother dusky langur) and her orange fur baby Lucy to educate residents about their endangered species status, many urban residents responded with chubi(cute), yi kao peh kao bu (she cries) and yi seh kia (she gave birth) when they saw Dayang carrying Lucy last year. Urban residents switched from scolding to paternalistic and pitiful judgments. Some even joked with SS, a local urban resident who proudly collaborated with MIP as other residents jokingly imitated his outgoing body language and his catchy phrases such as “cannot catch” and beh sah pak laukau (cannot beat the monkeys) whenever he advocated for deterrence.
This peculiar framing of anthropocentric and loosely Buddhist paternalistic language imposed onto dusky langur behavioral ecology was prevalent in our interviews. Biocultural constructs such as the family unit, I would argue, are a form of deterrence. Reflecting on the family as a particular kind of anthropocentric construct deployed to care for monkeys as new co-inhabitants, the anthropologist Juno Salazar Parreñas writes on the role of gender-neutral pronounsin Malay. Although the citizen scientists and urban residents conversed mostly in Hokkien, a Malaysian-Chinese local dialect, Malay words were also used. Yi, the Hokkien gender-neutral pronoun for singular she/he, was interchangeable with dia (singular she/he) in our daily conversations. Parreñas illustrates how gender is expressed through other means beyond grammar structure. In human-nonhuman encounters, language plays a part in sometimes pushing for or deterring the notion of care itself. In the case of intermixing Hokkien and Malay slang, gender expressions are relationally attributed through social and bodily actions in response to others.
When Dayang carried Lucy, older female urban residents commented on the gendered dimensions of baby-rearing and maternal aspects of childcare that gave way to nurturing the idea of multispecies coexistence with Tom, Lucy, and their local monkey family. For example, Lucy’s experiences are gendered through relational actions such as carrying her baby (poh eh kia), giving birth (yi seh kia), or even crying (kao peh kao bu) that defined Lucy as a mother through anthropocentric framings. These framings of seeing motherhood as relational acts made Polyphony’s urban residents feel pity and concern about Dayang and Lucy’s displacement from the nearby forest. When urban residents were made aware that the dusky langurs were given names by MIP or saw images of Dayang carrying Lucy, they were more open to conversations about deterring monkeys. The citizen scientists applauded the interactions if residents were convinced to use water or to shake fruit trees rather than violently harming the monkeys.
“If you beat them, the monkeys cannot produce the next generation (yi bo chen). They cannot have kids (yi bo seh kia). They are animals, but we humans are also animals, and we come from our mother’s wombs,” as a pair of urban residents put it during an interview.
During these interviews, both citizen scientists and urban residents debated the moral attribution of monkeys who conducted actions such as infrastructure destruction and noise pollution. These split perceptions, such as Tom’s leadership, reflected how the “urban monkey” is unique in requiring a shifting range of conservationist solutions based on how they were perceived, interacted with, and materially encountered by individual human subjects. This diverse continuum of care—as demonstrated through a range of solutions, such as installing arboreal crossings, reframing heuristic devices, and deterrence—is not a singular moral approach. Rather, citizen scientists and their everyday collaborators situate various types of ethical practices in response to diverse environments that feature shifting ecological relations and unsettle dominant framings of contentious human-monkey interfaces. By deploying care as a continuum, people collaborate with monkeys as mutual neighbors rather than working against monkeys dominantly viewed as pests with innate antagonistic qualities.