Images of the Wildman in Southeast Asia: An Anthropological Perspective
À propos de cet e-book
The book reveals how, in Southeast Asia and elsewhere, ‘wildmen’ cannot readily be explained as imaginary constructs rooted in cultural values and social institutions, nor as simply another kind of ‘spirit’. Also critically examined is a view of such figures as fundamentally similar expressions of a pan-human mental ‘archetype’. Forth concludes that many Asian and African figures are grounded in experience or memories of anthropoid apes supplemented by encounters with ethnic others. Representations developed among European immigrants (including the North American ‘sasquatch’) are, in part, similarly traceable to an indirect knowledge of primates, informed by long-standing European representations of hairy humans that have coloured western views of non-western peoples and which may themselves originate in ancient experience of apes. At the same time, the book demonstrates how Indonesian and other Malayo-Polynesian images cannot be explained in the same way, and explores the possibility of these reflecting an ancient experience of non-sapiens hominins.
À propos de l'auteur
Gregory Forth is a Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Alberta, Canada, and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada.
