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.