Introduction: Using case-studies researched among Bateks (indigenous people of Peninsula Malaysia), this paper explores transformations in the relations between tigers, elephants and forest peoples. Recasting theoretical developments from new animism and multispecies ethnography within a framework in which animals and humans are equally considered as ethically significant beings, I discuss how environmental degradation and poaching threaten both the biological diversity of the rainforest and the ontological security of indigenous peoples.
Methodology: The paper draws upon extensive interviews with Batek men and women during twenty-months of anthropological fieldwork carried out in forest communities between 2007 and 2014. Interviews focussed on multi-species interactions between community members and tigers and elephants. Additional data were gathered in interviews with park rangers and non-governmental organisations working toward the conservation of tigers and elephants in and around the Taman Negara National Park.
Main Findings: For millennia, Bateks have shared their rainforest homes with tigers, elephants and countless other species. In the Bateks’ relational ontology, elephants and tigers are considered as powerful but benevolent other-than-human persons whose bodily forms are seen as cloaks within which the human-like souls of shamans and creator beings are concealed. Recent Batek discourses about elephants emphasize increased aggressive behaviour which is blamed upon poaching, environmental degradation and the relocation of pachyderms to their areas. Concomitantly, Bateks express heightened anxiety about decreasing tiger populations and increasingly represent tigers as bloodthirsty lycanthropes rather than benevolent protectors. Behavioural changes of both species are perceived within the Batek’s relational ontology as marking more widespread catastrophic changes.
Principal Conclusions and Implications for Field: Recent approaches by proponents of new animism have focused on cosmological constructs and relations between humans and animals as other-than-human beings in indigenous peoples’ shamanic practices and myths. However, the ontological shifts that Bateks describe are informed by real-world problems that they and the keystone species they share the forest with experience as a result of changing ecological conditions and violence. I argue that to successfully implement policies for species conservation, governments and NGOs should advocate for an ethically symbiotic approach that fully respects the rights of both keystone species and indigenous peoples.