ELEPHANTS, HORSES, AND NEGOTIATIONS OF THE HUMAN-ANIMAL RELEATIONSHIP IN PRE-MODERN INDONESIA

Abstract

This thesis aims to examine the ways that animals can serve as historical agents in their own right within the social and environmental history of pre-modern Indonesia. Primarily, it identifies the factors that influenced how the humananimal relationship was constructed in pre-modern Indonesia. In discussing this, the inherent social and cultural specificity of the human-animal relationship is also elucidated. To examine the nature of the human-animal relationship in prenineteenth century Indonesia, I will compare the cultural roles of two animals - the elephant and the horse. Both animals came to occupy equally important roles - functionally and symbolically - in the culture and history of numerous Indonesian societies despite them seeming very different, and arriving in the archipelago at different times. That is to say the elephant is indigenous to Indonesia, while the horse was imported around the second century CE. This manifests the presence of a social order that attaches meaning to perceived traits and features of these animals. The symbolic dimensions of interactions between humans and animals are often negotiated in conjunction with material or metaphysical changes in society. Such coding and shifts in classification tend to become closely entwined in the identity politics of human groups, with animal images and metaphors utilised to mirror human societal strata and vice versa. Thus, identifying the factors that contributed to the emergence of these categories provides a more representative analysis of the influencing factors at play within the mechanisms of social ordering - specifically, how animals are incorporated into a human society's worldview.