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Animals

From Munshipedia, the MBRAS digital historical encyclopedia

Animals

The study of animals in the scholarly literature of the Malay Peninsula and Borneo spans a remarkable range of disciplinary concerns, from the practical management of captive collections to the symbolic deployment of fauna in vernacular literature, from the intimate communication systems of nomadic peoples and their dogs to the contemporary politics of orangutan rehabilitation. Across these diverse engagements, animals function simultaneously as objects of scientific observation, vehicles of cultural meaning, and sites of ethical contestation, revealing how the region’s human communities have understood their place within the broader web of species relations.

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Animals in Malay Vernacular Literature

The most extensive literary treatment of animals in the Society’s journal appears in H. O. Overbeck’s 1934 article on Malay animal and flower shaer (verse romances), which argues that these poems are not mere fables or erotic verse but veiled accounts of real human love-tragedies and court intrigues, composed in the Malay tradition of allusion to avoid naming real persons [1]. Overbeck draws on manuscripts in Batavia, Leiden, and London, as well as lithographed editions from Singapore, to demonstrate that the non-human characters in these poems map onto recognizable social types—travelling merchants, court retainers, princesses, and their duennas—and that the genre fills a gap in classical Malay literature by revealing the emotional life of ordinary Malays [1].

Overbeck’s central thesis is that, with the exception of didactic poems such as the Shaer Unggas (which he acknowledges imitates the Persian Makamat of Hariri), the animal and flower shaer are based on real or plausible incidents of Malay life, told through the conventional veil of animal and flower names drawn from pantun (quatrains) and proverbs [1]. He supports this by analogy with Captain R. S. Rattray’s observation on Akan beast-fables as “apologies” in which animal names substitute for real individuals whose naming would be impolitic, extending the argument to the Malay context where, in “Affairs of State” and “Love-Intrigues in Higher Circles,” it was dangerous to name names [1].

The article is organized into thematic categories—An Affair of State, Love in Higher Circles, The Loves of the Travelling Merchant, Didactic Shaer, and Malay Shaer from Java—each containing detailed plot summaries with extensive quotation from the Malay texts [1]. Overbeck identifies recurring narrative patterns: the dream that initiates the love, the go-between (often a bird or insect of lower rank), the use of love-charms (ilmu ma’rifat, esoteric knowledge), the refusal or obstacle (difference in rank, an existing marriage, the lady’s master), and the tragic or bittersweet resolution [1]. He notes that the shaer were often composed orally and transcribed carelessly by scribes, which accounts for the frequent incoherence, missing passages, and abrupt endings [1].

Among the specific works examined, the Shaer Ikan Terubok (Singapore lithographed edition, A.H. 1320) contains 255 quatrains and narrates the love of a Hilsa fish (a young ruling prince at Tanjong Tuan) for a Climbing Perch princess in a riverpool near Tanjong Padang; Klinkert identified it as a skit on a refused marriage proposal by a Malacca prince for a princess of Siak [1, p. 115]. The Shaer Burong Ponggok exists in manuscripts at Batavia and Leiden (one dated Tanjong Pinang 1865), with a zincographic edition from Padang (A.H. 1301) and a lithographic edition from Singapore (A.D. 1910); Overbeck interprets Ponggok as a court retainer in love with his master’s daughter, killed by her father’s men and denied a funeral [1, pp. 117–118]. The Shaer Kumbang Chumbuan Sakti (Bumble-Bee and Jasmine) survives in five manuscripts, all fragments; the most coherent version (Batavia No. 477) contains 124 quatrains and ends with the Bumble-Bee’s visit to the sage Cricket for a love-charm [1, p. 122]. The Shaer Unggas (The Birds), a didactic poem of 325 quatrains, is a Malay imitation of the Persian Mantik at-tajr (c. 1230 A.D.) by Muhammad bin Ibrahim al-Nishapuri, as established by Dr. van Ronkel; manuscripts are dated as early as 1257 A.H. [1, p. 137]. Overbeck also distinguishes between the refined “true” Malay shaer and the cruder Batavia-Malay versions produced by penny-a-liner scribes such as Muhammad Bakr for circulating libraries, whose Shaer Buah-Buahan (dated 22 November 1896) contains 542 quatrains plus a second poem of 400 quatrains [1, p. 139].

Captive Collections and Tropical Zoology

H. N. Ridley, Director of the Singapore Botanic Gardens, published an extensive account of the Gardens’ menagerie in 1906, three years after its abolition by government order in 1903 [2]. Writing from the position of the man who had overseen the collection through its most productive decades, Ridley’s overarching argument is that Singapore possessed unique climatic and economic advantages for maintaining a tropical zoological collection, and that its suppression represented a significant loss to science and public education [2].

The menagerie’s history is framed within the broader institutional trajectory of the Botanic Gardens, which passed from the Agri-Horticultural Society to government control in 1874 [2]. The zoological component, initially managed by Mr. Krohn, grew from a modest collection of donated animals into a representative assemblage of Malay fauna by the 1890s, sustained almost entirely by donations and a modest annual expenditure drawn from the Gardens Vote [2]. The collection’s abolition in 1903 followed a failed attempt to secure government funding for improved enclosures, a decision Ridley implicitly criticises by demonstrating the collection’s scientific value and public appeal [2].

The bulk of Ridley’s article is a species-by-species account of animals kept, organised taxonomically from primates through birds to reptiles and amphibians [2]. He draws on his own direct observation and keeper records to document breeding successes, causes of death, behavioural observations, and the practical challenges of tropical captivity [2]. A recurring theme is the argument against anthropomorphic assumptions about animal welfare: Ridley marshals numerous anecdotes—pelicans refusing to leave their enclosure, lovebirds dying in ornamental cages, civets requiring darkness—to demonstrate that animals in the Gardens generally thrived and that their preferences often contradicted European expectations [2].

Ridley records several firsts in captive breeding, including the Indian jackal (Cyon aureus, a pair presented in 1895 producing five pups), the kijang (Cervulus muntjac, a pair producing eight young), the napu (Tragulus napu), hybrid Macacus cynomolgus × M. nemestrinus (first produced 1895), and the green viper (Lachesis wagleri, producing five to nine live young per litter), none of which he believes had previously been achieved elsewhere [2, pp. 134]. The first Macacus hybrid (male K’ra × female Berok, born 1895) was transferred to the London Zoological Gardens in 1905 and was still alive at eleven years old in fine condition [2, p. 140]. A python approximately 22 feet long was observed to fast for six months after consuming three chickens, then ate a pariah dog which sustained it for nine months; large pythons over 20 feet typically fed only once every six to nine months [2, p. 189]. The practical difficulties of tropical zoology are also documented: the expense of big cats (a tiger costing approximately fifty dollars monthly in food), the vulnerability of marsupials to the damp climate, the prevalence of distemper in canids, and the constant threat of escape or predation within the enclosures themselves [2].

Animals in Nomadic and Contemporary Contexts

Tom Harrisson’s 1965 article examines three “secret” communication systems among Borneo nomads and their dogs, documenting the practical and social dimensions of human-animal relationships in the highland communities of the region [3]. The work contributes to the ethnographic record of how nomadic peoples in Borneo integrated dogs into their systems of signalling and coordination, revealing the animal not merely as a companion or working beast but as an active participant in a structured communicative practice [3].

In a more recent engagement, a 2021 roundtable in the Society’s journal critically analyzes Juno Salazar Parreñas’ monograph Decolonizing Extinction: The Work of Care in Orangutan Rehabilitation (Duke University Press, 2018), which is based on over a year of ethnographic fieldwork at the Batu and Lundu Wildlife Centres in Sarawak [4]. The central problem the book addresses is how colonial-era modernization embedded asymmetrical power relations into the very infrastructure of orangutan conservation, producing what Parreñas terms “arrested autonomy” for both the orangutans and the low-wage Sarawak workers charged with their care [4, pp. 205–206]. The roundtable contributors each isolate a distinct analytical thread: Alicia Izharuddin examines how gendered care is defamiliarized in a bio-emergency context, where “tough love” and forced breeding invert the softness typically associated with caregiving; Monamie Haines explores the book’s treatment of nature-culture as an inseparable entanglement; Faizah Zakaria situates the work within environmental history and questions why its radical politics remain implicit rather than explicit; and Robert Cribb interrogates the multiple meanings of the Malay term bebas (freedom) as it applies to both human and non-human subjects in captivity [4].

The discussion collectively reveals that the rehabilitation centres operate within a paradox: programs designed to make solitary, reclusive orangutans “wild” and “independent” are themselves products of the habitat destruction that made rehabilitation necessary, and the economic logic of ecotourism that funds the centres simultaneously confines large communities in spaces too small for their needs [4, pp. 206–207]. The local rehabilitation worker Layang died of melioidosis contracted through direct contact with orangutans, illustrating the bodily risks borne by the lowest-ranked humans in the care hierarchy [4, p. 209]. Nineteen-seventies development initiatives and 1980s dam building in Sarawak directly displaced two orangutans and their caretaker at the site that became Lundu Wildlife Centre, linking infrastructure projects to the very conditions requiring rehabilitation [4, p. 214]. Sarawak’s former Chief Minister Taib Mahmud accumulated a fortune in the timber industry that decimated orangutan forest habitat during his thirty-year tenure, while the state remained among the poorest in Malaysia [4, p. 210]. The colonial-era origin of orangutan conservation in Sarawak is traced to Barbara Harrisson, wife of the curator of the Sarawak Museum of Natural History and Ethnology, whose “ape motherhood” established a template of interspecies power relations that persisted into the post-colonial period [4, pp. 206]. Parreñas’ reply to the discussants clarifies her refusal to offer prescriptive solutions, arguing that doing so would replicate the colonial gesture of planning another’s liberation, and instead positions uncertainty itself as generative—a space in which new modes of relation might emerge before the window of coexistence closes entirely [4, pp. 213–214].

Research and Documentation

The Society’s literature on animals reveals a clear evolution in disciplinary priorities and methodological approaches across the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. The earliest substantial treatment, Ridley’s 1906 account of the Singapore Botanic Gardens menagerie, is fundamentally a first-person institutional memoir: Ridley wrote as the sitting Director (1887–1913) and the de facto custodian of the collection, drawing on his own observation, keeper records, and correspondence with donors and government officials [2]. Its historiographical value lies primarily in preserving operational details of a collection that no longer exists, and its argumentative force is that of an advocate defending a suppressed institution against what he perceived as short-sighted fiscal policy [2].

Overbeck’s 1934 article represents a shift toward philological and interpretive method, treating animals not as biological specimens but as literary signifiers within a system of Malay allusion [1]. His contribution is historiographical in a different sense: he establishes the shaer as a distinct genre of Malay vernacular literature with a social function (veiled commentary on real events) rather than dismissing them, as earlier catalogues had done, as mere “erotic verses put into the mouths of two fishes” [1]. The primary archival collections he consulted—the Koninklijk Bataviaasch Genootschap voor Kunsten en Wetenschappen (Batavia), the Leiden University Library, and the Raffles Collection in the R.A.S. Library, London—anchor his readings in material texts, though he is candid about the obscurities that remain and acknowledges that some interpretations are conjectural [1].

Harrisson’s 1965 study of nomadic communication systems and their dogs marks a further disciplinary turn toward ethnography and the documentation of living practices, situating the animal within a specific social and linguistic context rather than treating it as a literary or zoological object [3].

The 2021 roundtable on orangutan rehabilitation represents the most recent phase, characterized by explicit engagement with postcolonial theory, feminist anthropology, and multispecies studies [4]. The article positions itself within the emerging “animal turn” in Southeast Asian studies, identifying a gap between Peter Boomgaard’s Frontiers of Fear (2001) and Cribb, Gilbert and Tiffin’s Wild Man from Borneo (2014) on one hand, and the lived-experience ethnography that Parreñas’ work introduces on the other [4, p. 205]. The roundtable draws on Parreñas’ ethnographic fieldwork in Sarawak and engages with secondary sources including the Bruno Manser Fonds investigative reports (Switzerland) and the Sarawak Report by Clare Rewcastle Brown (UK), which document environmental and human rights violations in the state [4, p. 214]. The monograph itself received the 2019 Michelle Z. Rosaldo Prize from the Association for Feminist Anthropology, recognizing its contribution to feminist and multispecies scholarship [4, p. 204].

Taken together, these four works trace a trajectory from the practical and institutional (Ridley’s menagerie), through the literary and philological (Overbeck’s shaer), to the ethnographic (Harrisson’s nomads) and finally to the critical-theoretical (the Parreñas roundtable), each phase expanding the question of what animals mean and how they are known within the scholarly traditions of the region.

Human relations with animals

MBRAS Sources

Human relations with animals

References

  1. H. Overbeck (1934). Malay animal and flower shaers JMBRAS 12(2): 108–148. Read on JSTOR
  2. H.N. Ridley (1906). The menagerie at the Botanic Gardens JSBRAS 46: 133–194.
  3. Tom Harrisson (1965). Three “secret” communication systems among Borneo nomads (and their dogs JMBRAS 38(2): 37–86.
  4. Alicia Izharuddin et al. (2021). Power, Care and Species Difference in Orangutan Rehabilitation in Sarawak: A Roundtable. J.S. Parreñas, Alicia Izharuddin, M.B. Haines, Faizah Zakaria, and R. Cribb JMBRAS 94(1): 203–215.