Wild Man from Borneo

Contributor: Robert Cribb Robert Cribb is emeritus professor of Asian history at the Australian National University and lives in Canberra.

This joint-authored, multidisciplinary study offers a wonderful introduction to the promise and challenge of investigating human-animal histories. --- The great strength of this book lies in its historical analysis and it provides a detailed, insightful, and entertaining exploration of our ever-shifting relationship with our close cousins. ---

The book documents the history of the importation and keeping of orangutan specimens in
Europe, for the purposes both of science and of entertainment. It looks at attitudes to the process
of killing animals who were generally portrayed, in their forest homes, as savage and dangerous;
and it explores how the ways in which orangutans were treated and displayed once they reached
Europe – which often mimicked human ways and manners – reflected the continuing toying with
the possibility that orangutans were some kind of ‘primitive’ human.

--- In their book, Wild Man from Borneo: Cultural History of the Orangutan, the authors Cribb, Gilbert, and Tiffin provide a thorough history of the orangutan as not only a nonhuman animal, but a cultural subject that is orchestrated and performative, reflecting the social and political history of the United States and many European nations. . . . this book serves as an important reminder of the responsibility now mandated for the orangutan which must be achieved through universal support, but provides important context for responsibility being historically relative and is a principle not universally held due to these historical differences. --- In its detailed attention to changing Western views, the book is certainly comprehensive. . . . The book’s greatest value is its exhaustive demonstration of how Western representations of the ape have alternated between a view of the orangutan as a very humanlike and a definitely non-human creature, a mere animal among other animals. --- Wild Man from Borneo is an illuminating and revealing study, which will appeal to general readers as well as specialists. --- Professors of Asian history, theatre and postcolonial and studies respectively, Cribb, Gilbert and Tiffin have collaborated to produce a sweeping account of wild and captive orang-utans in the scientific, artistic and popular imagination. . . . The book’s main strength lies in its well-researched details about the orang-utan’s place in cultural traditions as seen through works of biology, zoology, psychology and anthropology, as well as through literature, drama and film. . . . The details and comparative interpretations offered are in some ways impressive. --- Wild Man from Borneo is an illuminating and revealing study, which will appeal to general readers as well as specialists. Over 50 illustrations complement the authors’ elegant and detailed written account. In view of the orangutan’s precarious condition today, the book also contains an urgent message that the disappearance of the ‘wild man’ from the wild would be a tragedy not only for the orangutan but for humanity as well.