Ancestors and Tiger From Elsewhere: Emerging Forms of Human-Tiger Socio-Natural Relations in Cosmopolitical Frontiers of Sumatra

How are the moral relations between communities and the Sumatran tiger (Panthera tigris sumatrae) being reconfigured as forests fragment and land-use change accelerates across Sumatra's conservation landscape? This article addresses that question ethnographically, drawing on forty semi-structured interviews conducted in Agam and Pasaman Regencies (West Sumatra) between April and June 2026 and interviews with Yayasan SINTAS Indonesia. The article documents the three animistic category of the tiger, comprising Datuk/ancestor, harimau jadi-jadian, and harimau tandang, and traces how it is being reshaped by habitat fragmentation, commodity-driven land expansion, generational interruption of customary authority, and state translocation protocols. Cases from Agam and Pasaman show that the same kind of sighting yields divergent outcomes, a buried relative, cattle predator, a rehabilitated administrative subject, or a marketable carcass, depending on which institution (pawang, BKSDA, NGO, or illegal-trade collector) retains operational authority at the moment of conflict. Conservation programmes in Indonesia frequently treat sacred values and ``local wisdom'' as stable cultural inheritances; the material presented here shows instead that these moral relations are conditional and subject to transformation. Using a cosmopolitical-frontier framework, the article argues that effective conservation must engage the plural forms of human–tiger relation simultaneously at work and the political-economic forces that recalibrate them, rather than treating community engagement as the recovery of a stable cultural inheritance.