Asian Transformations in Action - Api-fellowships.org

REFIGURATION OF IDENTITIES AND FUTURES IN TIMES OF TRANSFORMATION 117CULTURAL ATTITUDES TO ANIMALS IN SOUTHEAST ASIA:HUMAN-ANIMAL RELATIONS AS A DIMENSION OF CULTURALIDENTITY FORMATION AND DYNAMICSMyfel Joseph PalugaBanga man ug tadyaw kon singkion sila,/Dayag nga madaut angbanga, dili ba? …[When an earthen jar and a large stonewarevessel are struck together,/The earthen jar will certainly break,won’t it?...]—Emiliano Batiancila, “Lawa-Lawa” [SpiderWeb] (1938)IntroductionImaginative markers between humans and animals areseen in the everyday moves of a language. This pointwas driven home to me, one day, in the flow of a casualconversation in the gria (priestly house) of the ratu(traditional chief) in Sangeh village (Bali), where mywife and I stayed. Recalling that the watchdog barkedalmost regularly at two or three o’clock early eachmorning, usually waking me up, I asked the question ofwhether ‘Browny garap’ (‘the dog Browny works’) was agood sentence. I was then beginning to pick up bits ofworking Balinese phrases. A quick ‘no’ was the response,coupled by some laughter. Browny makan (eats), theratu inserted a point, joining the conversation whileironing his clothes. Eating, not working, is Browny’smain activity and garap (work) is only for humans. Iagain got a ‘no’ when I mentioned that dogs also ‘work’by actively guarding the gria every night. However,after a brief silence, someone said, ‘Sapi garap, yeah,okay,’ (the cow works) resulting in some merriment tothe household to what appeared like an insight.Some basic life-acts, reflected in a language, certainlyserve as distinctions in the divide between humansand animals. In the everyday lives of people, there aremundane practices that show ‘us humans’ busily puttingup markers of distinctions, and therefore identifications,from ‘them animals.’ The ‘animal’ seems to constantlyre-insert itself via the backdoor every time one opensthe front door to announce ‘the human’ and its properlimits. How this taken-for-granted dialectic betweenhumans and animals is played in Southeast Asiancontexts, both in ordinary talk or in broad historicalpatterns, is the interest of this paper.SitesThe descriptions and reflections in this paper were madepossible by a series of fieldwork that we undertookin the Philippines 1 (mountain settlements of Mt.Apo, Mindanao) and outside, in Java (Depok), Bali(Denpasar and Sangeh), and parts of southern (SuratThani and Nakhon Sri Thammarat), central (Bangkokand Lopburi), and northern (Chiang Dao) Thailand. 2ObjectivesThe paper presents ethnographic and ethologicaldescriptions on selected aspects of human-animalrelations in Southeast Asia, specifically in Indonesia,Thailand, and the Philippines. A sampling of theseanimal-relating practices and attitudes, happening invarying ecological and cultural contexts, shows theextent of diversity Southeast Asians have woven as aresult of their long-term interactions with nonhumananimals. The modes of interaction are both complexand patterned. While we cannot give a single unifyinglabel to the phenomena, we cannot also discount thebroad themes that emerge in these dynamic practices.This paper wants to highlight both the dynamics andpatterns in human-animal relations and pinpoint, asemerging from such relations, aspects that are explicitlylinked to notions of identities.SignificanceA basic premise of this paper, one that it wants toendorse as a way of seeing, is to look at the ethnographicand ethological descriptive bits as constitutive elementsin the formation of how we construe ourselves—aswell-marked and bounded “human” entities—as welive in a wider, more-than-human world. Whether realor imagined, animals figure well in the making of ourdaily lives and self-understandings in this interwovenworld of life-forms. More than being actively political,every identity-making act is part of daily existence. Itis, in philosophical terms, flatly ontological, a basicand everyday question on the ‘who’ and the ‘what’:one that is always already-there and, without muchfanfare, constantly re-asserted and re-figured in ourdaily transactions in, and with, the world. While notbeing able to give full flesh to a demanding claim, thispaper might be significant in opening up and exploringon this note—animals and identities—in a SoutheastAsian context. 3Asian Transformations in ActionThe Work of the 2006/2007 API Fellows