The book examines wildmen, images of hairy humanlike creatures
known to rural villagers and other local people in Southeast Asia
and elsewhere. Sometimes described in considerable detail, the
creatures are reported as still living or as having survived until
recent times. The aim of the book is to discover the source of
these representations and their status in local systems of
knowledge, partly in relation to distinct categories of spiritual
beings, known animals, and other human groups. It explores images
of the wildman from throughout Southeast Asia, focusing in
particular on the Indonesian islands, and beyond, including the
Asian mainland, Africa, North America, Africa, Australia, and
Oceania.
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.
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