Frontiers of Fear: Tigers and People in the Malay World, 1600-1950 (review)

This extraordinarily rich and original work is largely a detailed historical analysis of tiger-people interactions in Java, Sumatra, Malaya, and Bali. Although the title suggests a 350-year time span, the early sources apply only to seventeenth-century Java. They nevertheless add temporal depth to the more detailed coverage of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, evoking a period in Java when tigers were still widespread. The author also attempts to combine the approaches of the biologist and anthro-pologist.

As environmental history, the work aims to re-create past landscapes, particularly those features of the natural environment that would favor tigers and their prey. As settlement frontiers expanded, the replacement of dense tropical forests by secondary forests and grasslands created more attractive ecotones for wild boar, deer, and tiger, inevitably increasing human-animal contact. The tiger (and in Java, to a lesser extent, the leopard) was a dangerous predator to humans. The animal also became a symbol of "wild nature" that had to be ordered, a symbol of evil power that had to be eliminated or controlled, and a symbol of the supernatural, the reincarnation of a dead ancestor. The author used historical anthropological narratives to explore various beliefs about tigers held by rulers, peasants, and forest-dwelling minorities.

The author also provides statistical comparisons, both over time and between different locations (relative to size of population and land mass), of people killed by tigers, tigers killed by people, and the tiger's inexorable decline. The statistics, although imperfect, form a compelling demonstration of the variability in human-tiger interaction.

The first two chapters lay out the main themes and then describe the characteristics, distribution, and habitats of the Malay world's three big cats—tiger, leopard, and clouded leopard. The next two chapters contain statistics and stories of man-eaters to prove that, contrary to modern beliefs, tigers were indeed an implacable enemy. Chapters 5 and 6 detail the more obvious methods of control, through bounties or hunting and trapping. Chapter 7 describes the evolution of the curious tiger rituals at the Javanese courts, involving "tiger sticking" by massed lancemen and tiger-buffalo fights (which the tiger usually lost). The fights were eventually credited with both symbolic and political significance; Javanese identified with the buffalo, whereas Europeans were vilified as "tigers." In Chapter 8, the narrative shifts to the attitudes of villagers, especially in Sumatra and Malaya, who, believing a tiger to be a reincarnated ancestor or village guardian, resisted killing it. The topic of Chapter 9 is a mythical figure—the weretiger. People in certain mountain areas of Sumatra were feared as weretigers, a reputation that they probably exploited. Chapter 10 returns to statistics and to modeling the tiger's differential rates of decline in Java, Sumatra/Malaya, and Bali. A final chapter, "Living Apart Together," summarizes the relationships between people and tigers, especially their symbolic nature.

Although the book is basically successful, the large amount of detail—especially of locations in Java and to a lesser extent, Sumatra—might prove difficult to those unfamiliar with the region. The maps are a weak point, lacking scales, and are inconsistent in the relative sizes and positions of place names. The twenty-four plates, however, add immeasurably to the impact and help clarify the descriptions.