ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Man-Eater or Honest Tiger? Contested Ethology in Colonial Myanmar

• In Event: (Mis)Understanding Animals? Biology, Epistemic Uncertainty, and Non-Human Animal Management in the Late Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries

English Abstract

In March 1903 a tiger was spotted on the Shwedagon Pagon in colonial Yangon, the capital of British Burma. The big cat’s appearance at this prominent Buddhist site elicited an outpouring speculation from both British and Burmese commentators. Why was this tiger here and what were its intentions? On the British side, this was a dangerous animal that threatened the urban populace. For some Burmese Buddhist writers, this was an auspicious event with cosmological ramifications. These mutually antagonistic responses to the tiger were exacerbated by the decision to shoot and kill her. The Shwedagon was already a contested space in colonial Myanmar. It has been looted during the Second Anglo-Burmese War in 1852 and occupied by British troops since then. The military presence compounded a rumbling debate over Europeans wearing shoes in the Pagoda by the end of the century. The so-called ‘Shoe Question’ became a spark for Buddhist revivalism, anti-colonial sentiments and nascent nationalism. The tiger’s killing was debated in an already febrile and fractious public sphere that centred on the Shwedagon. These contested meanings notwithstanding, a close reading of the responses to the tiger’s visit also reveal overlapping understandings of animal behaviours. This paper uses this notable episode in Myanmar’s animal history to explore the emergence of, and exchange between, indigenous and imperial ethological knowledge.

Author

• Jonathan Saha, Durham University