Asian Transformations in Action - Api-fellowships.org

120 REFIGURATION OF IDENTITIES AND FUTURES IN TIMES OF TRANSFORMATIONsacred ground, also became home to about six or seventroops of monkeys, which we were able to document.In the relatively more natural settings of Mt. Apo, aten-hectare area is only fit for one troop, which isstrongly territorial and prevents other troops fromentering its vicinities. The Sangeh macaques managedto accommodate each other, the six eager troops, intaking advantage of the rationed food from the people(financed by tourism earnings) by evolving a kind offluid territoriality. In such an emergent design, thehierarchy of troops cycles (the stronger troop first, thenthe second, and so on) in sequence, from the first tothe last hour of the day, in taking their share of thefood placed in the feeding area. 12 At the biogeographiclevel, an interesting long-term collaborative study ofboth Balinese and non-Balinese primatologists suggeststhat for hundreds of years, Balinese macaques have beenexploiting the “mosaic of riparian forest” carved outby Balinese farmers over the last few millennia. Thesepatches are now counted at almost fifty in the mostrecent inventory. Macaques inhabiting these areas,mostly associated also with temples and shrines, existin “fairly high density.” Religious protection from theseareas, the recent emphasis on tourism, and the increasedprovisioning of tourism monkeys have even acceleratedtheir growth. 13A close study of how monkeys in differing contexts(in Lopburi, in Mt. Apo, in Surat Thani’s mangroveareas) show diverse strategies of living would itself formanother paper. A quite dramatic case might be given as aparadigmatic example. Carrion crows in Sendai, Japan 14harvest walnuts each autumn and place them in frontof cars stopping at traffic signals. When the cars move,the nuts are crushed, and the birds fly down to eat thenutritious nutmeats. The city crows’ food niche hasexpanded, perhaps due to less availability of naturallyeatennuts, to those that are unbreakable by their beaks.The solution lies itself in the context of urbanity.(3) Globalizing forces, eco-tourism, and the disciplining ofanimals by modularizing their spacesIt is quite eye-opening to see the strong contrasts whenone reads the many European travelers’ accounts ofSoutheast Asia even up to the early 20 th century. Theyalways noticed the many animals—dogs, chickens,pigs, and transport animals—allowed to freely roam thepublic spaces, in both villages and cities. As modernityand its modular and sanitizing ethos strengthened itsgrip on public administrators, animal spaces becamesubjected to strict regulation and regimentation. Adramatic case can be seen when hundreds, perhapsthousands, of street dogs in Bangkok were rounded upand transferred to the city’s margins to clean the city ofeye-sores during the APEC meeting of 2003. The same“cleaning” of street dogs also happens in Bali whenAsian Transformations in ActionThe Work of the 2006/2007 API Fellows