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Paper short abstract

This paper explores the changing human-animal relations on the Indonesian island of Komodo, suggesting that local ideas about Komodo lizards as ancestral twins are not representing a symmetrical ontology of human and non-human persons but rather reflect and establish an asymetrical moral ecology.

Paper long abstract

This paper explores what it means to be human for the inhabitants of the Indonesian island of Komodo who regard themselves as ancestral "twins" of a dangerous predatory species, the Komodo lizards or "dragons". But while they see the lizards as intentional and intimately related persons, I argue that this does not imply that humans and lizards are symmetrical partners in a homologous mode of identification, as Descola and others might argue. Nor would the people of Komodo claim that their lizard twins regard themselves as "human", analogous to well-known claims about Amerindian perspectivism and animism.

I argue instead that this kinship relation does not represent an ontology that denies the dichotomy and asymmetry of humans and non-humans but rather it reflects and establishes what I describe as a "moral ecology": a mode of mutual recognition binding two different species by the same morality and ethos. I explore this moral ecology through the lens of a dramatic change imposed by a global politics of nature conservation, which is regarded by the people of Komodo as evidence of their - but not the lizard's - moral failure.

My analysis of human-animal relations on Komodo Island thus critically responds to the idea that because the global ecological crisis is the result of a modern dichotomy and fundamental asymmetry between nature and culture, animals and humans, it should be overcome by replacing this dichotomy with 'posthumanist' entanglements and symmetries.