Wild Man from Borneo: A Cultural History of the Orangutan

Notes

251  Notes INTRODUCTION 1. Tyson, “A Philological Essay” (1699), 1. 2. Gimma, Dissertationum Academicarum (1714), 145. 3. Le Comte, Nouveaux mémoires (1696), 502. 4. CITES, “Enforcement Efforts.” See also Ancrenaz et al., “Aerial Surveys.” 5. “Orangutan Population Down 50 Percent,” March 9, 2010, http://naturealert.blog spot.com/2010/03/orangutan-population-down-50-percent.html, accessed April 16, 2011. 6. Janson, Apes and Ape Lore, 199–326. Monkeys had a similar range of cultural meanings in Japan and China; see Ohnuki-Tierney, The Monkey as Mirror, and Van Gulik, The Gibbon in China. 7. Variants of the phrase include “Wild Man from Borneo.” 8. DeGenaro, “The Little Men,” 34. 9. Australian National Dictionary Centre, “Word of the Month Nov 2012: Ranga,” http://andc.anu.edu.au/sites/default/files/WOTM%20-%20Nov.%202012.pdf, accessed Dec. 22, 2012. 10. Lévi-Strauss, Totemism, 89. 1. FROM SATYR TO PONGO 1. Tulp, Geneeskundige Waarnemingen (1740 [1641]), 371–372. 2. Scientific opinion in modern times has been sharply divided over the identification of Tulp’s ape. The often authoritative Yerkes and Yerkes, for instance, describe the ape unambiguously as a chimpanzee (The Great Apes, 103). Montagu, Edward Tyson, 253,suggeststhatthepictureisofachimpanzeemodifiedbyartisticlicense.Reynolds, “On the Identity of the Ape Described by Tulp 1641,” suggests that it was a bonobo. 252  Notes to Pages 12–17 Rijksen and Meijaard, by contrast, argue forcefully that Tulp’s picture agrees in most respects with the orangutan. Much less plausibly, they suggest that Tulp’s mention of the creature’s place of origin as Angola actually referred to the Sumatran region of Angkola. Whereas Angola was a well-known geographical location in Tulp’s time, we have been unable to find a contemporary map of Sumatra that shows Angkola as a location. See Rijksen and Meijaard, Our Vanishing Relative, 424–425. Groves, Extended Family, 68–69, regards the issue as unresolved. 3. In this book, we follow the convention of referring to the island as a whole as Borneo, usingtheIndonesiantermKalimantantodenotetheIndonesianportionoftheisland. 4. Tulp, Geneeskundige Waarnemingen, 373–374. Bloemaart’s own account does not include any hint of this story. See Bloemaart, “Discourse ende ghelegentheyt van het Eylandt Borneo” (1646), 98–107. 5. Malay Concordance Project, http://www.anu.edu.au/asianstudies/ahcen/proud foot/MCP_/tapis.pl. 6. Bowrey, A Dictionary English and Malayo, Malayo and English, n.p. 7. Abdullah, The Hikayat Abdullah, 77. 8. See Yule and Burnell, Hobson-Jobson, 643–644; Scott, “Malayan Words in English, Part II,” 86–89. 9. The word wurangutan appears, evidently as a loan word from Malay, in the ninth century Javanese poem, Ramayana Kakawin, where it seems to refer to some kind of ape; Zoetmulder and Robson, Old Javanese-English Dictionary, part 2, 2333. The section of the text in which the word appears, however, is considered by specialists to be a later interpolation. We are grateful to Helen Creese and Ben Arps for their assistance on this point. 10. For detailed accounts of what is known of Bontius’ life, see Von Römer, “Dr. Jacobus Bontius,” and Van Andel, “Introduction,” ix–xlii. 11. Bontius, On Tropical Medicine (1642), 285. 12. Maple, Orang-utan Behavior, 35. 13. Groeneveldt, Notes on the Malay Archipelago. 14. Genesis 2:16–25, 3:1–7. 15. Janson, Apes and Ape Lore, 261–276. For a single, ambiguous exception, see p. 75. 16. Bontius also fails to note that the hair of his “ourang outang” was red, but he lived in an age when red-green color-blindness, which affects 5–10 percent of the male population, was not recognized as a condition. There is no other reason to suppose that Bontius was color-blind, but we cannot assume that any early male observer of an orangutan had sufficient color vision to be struck by the redness of its hair. 17. Fissell, “Hairy Women and Naked Truths,” 43–74. 18. Janson, Apes and Ape Lore, 332–334. Indeed, as early as the late seventeenth century, one observer suggested that Bontius’ illustration had little basis in direct observation and that it might be derived from Reuwich’s drawing. See Tyson, Orang-Outang sive Homo Sylvestris (1699), 19. Notes to Pages 17–25  253 19. See Spencer, “From Pithekos to Pithecanthropus,” in Corbey and Theunissen, Ape, Man, Ape-Man, 25. 20. This conclusion has been suggested in Lach, Asia in the Eyes of Europe, though the cataloguedoesnotsuggestsourcesfortheillustration.ItwasalsosuggestedbyRijksen and Meijaard, Our Vanishing Relative...