Photo from flickr.com/Bernard Spragg
Six years ago, in a village in West Sumatra, a tiger died and its human ‘relatives’ moved to bury it — because the tiger is understood as their own family. The Indonesian wildlife conservation authority BKSDA intervened, fearing poachers might take the carcass; the villagers, in deep grief, buried the tiger anyway.
That incident is not an isolated case: similar stand-offs have played out in southern Aceh and elsewhere, as Sumatra’s forests are cut into ever-smaller patches by plantations and logging, pushing tigers and people into closer contact than ever before, and tensions grow between different ontologies and practices on how to manage the relationship between humans and tigers.
This is why human-tiger relations are best understood not as isolated belief systems, but as sensitive registers of ongoing socio-ecological change, as suggested by Imam Ardhianto, Chair of the Department of Anthropology at Universitas Indonesia. So what happens to a centuries-old relationship between people and tigers when plantations fragment the forest, a virus jumps species from village dogs, and social media reshapes how a new generation understands the animal?
In this week’s episode, Tito Ambyo chats with Imam, whose research on the cosmopolitics of human-tiger relations draws on fieldwork in Sumatra, tracing how ancestral guardian tigers, were-tigers, and ‘outsider’ tigers are understood — and how those categories are shifting as the forest itself changes
In 2026, the Talking Indonesia podcast is co-hosted by Tito Ambyo from RMIT, Dr Jemma Purdey from the Australia-Indonesia Centre, Clara Siagian from the University of College London, Dr Jacqui Baker from Murdoch University, and Dr Elisabeth Kramer from the University of New South Wales.
