FRONTIERS OF FEAR
Tigers and People in the Malay World 1600-1950
By PETER BOOMGAARD
New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001. 320 pages, $37.50

reviewed by John Day

Frontiers of Fear provides an eccentric, occasionally plodding, but ultimately enriching history of the relationship between large cats (primarily tigers, but also leopards and clouded leopards) and the indigenous and colonial societies in Malaya, Sumatra, Java, and Bali. Peter Boomgaard, a senior researcher at the Royal Institute of Linguistics and Anthropology, Leiden, and professor of economics and environmental history of Southeast Asia at the University of Amsterdam, was first inspired when visiting an area near the Meru Betiri reserve in southeastern Java, one of the few places where the probably extinct Javanese subspecies of tiger might still exist.

In 1988, Boomgaard began research for an article on people killed by tigers and tigers killed by people in Java between 1850 and 1900. Intrigued, he enlarged the study over the next ten years, systematically taking notes on accounts of tigers in hundreds of historical sources (detailed on twenty-seven pages of references at the end of the book) while researching other topics. His "sideline" expanded to include anthropological literature on tigers, the rituals and beliefs that flavor the broader scientific and historical context.

Through the accretion of this historical detail, Boomgaard develops new insights. Tigers benefited from transitional zones, especially those disturbed by man, finding their favorite preywild pigs and deermore readily there than in dense forests. Higher per capita killings of tigers occurred in areas of lower human population density. In Java (where tigers were destroyed more quickly and bounties were offered in response to their predation), responses differed from those in Sumatra and Malaya, where contrasting patterns of local beliefs and Dutch/British economic and administrative penetration prevailed. Throughout the book, people-tiger interactions highlight often intriguing aspects of colonial and local societal development and control.

For example, likely influenced by Moghul Indian examples, the sultanate of Aceh, in northern Sumatra, and the central Javanese courts began tiger-buffalo fights and tiger-sticking ritual ceremonies in the seventeenth century, which continued into the late nineteenth century, when large cats became too scarce for such practices. During the British interregnum in Java (1811-16), Thomas Stamford Raffles observed that the tiger, fierce and dangerous (symbolic of Europeans), was often worn out by the buffalo's formidable staying power (with which the Javanese identified). If the tiger survived the bull, it was often released into an area surrounded by court lancers and speared as it attempted escape. For peasants, the ceremonies could also be seen "as an encounter between agriculture (the buffalo, a plow animal to many Javanese) and wild' nature (the tiger) . . . almost always resolved in their [the peasants' agricultural] favor."

Yet many Malays viewed tigers as animals inhabited by human spirits, often ancestrally linked (especially in Balinese Hindu beliefs), who helped and protected the village and shouldn't be destroyed unless they "sinned" by killing livestock or humans. In one chapter, Boomgaard describes Malay shaman-based beliefs on "shape-shifting" weretigers and compares them to European beliefs in werewolves and witches, as well as to the Mayan and Aztec jaguar deities.

Concluding his historical themes, Boomgaard documents the reasons for the extinction of tiger subspecies on Bali and Java, and their highly threatened status in Sumatra and Malaysia, a loss cutting through not just the frontiers of fear, but those of nature and culture. Numerous historical photographs and illustrations, most apparently published for the first time in an English-language text, enhance the book. Yet the writing and presentation occasionally suffer in comparison with other recent books on tigers.

Frontiers of Fear is neither as elegant nor as conceptually informative a literary exercise as Peter Matthiessen's masterful Tigers in the Snow, which contrasts his Siberian tiger field experiences in Russian Ussuriland with scientific, historical, and cultural observations on tigers there and elsewhere in Asia. Nor is it as pressingly immediate and vivid an account as Stanley Breeden and Belinda Wright's Through the Tiger's Eyes: A Chronicle of India's Wildlife, a memoir of their documentary filmmaking and courage in fighting to protect Indian tigers and other endangered species from poaching for the East Asian traditional medicine trade. That leads to one of the surprises turned up by Boomgaard's research: he finds little evidence before 1940 of pressure on tigers from the major Chinese commercial communities in the Malay world.

Through such detail, postulates, and conclusions, Frontiers of Fear fills a unique and important gap in our understanding of the tiger's relationship to man in Southeast Asia and the reasons influencing the species' (and implicitly our own) now critical status.