Last December, I had the opportunity to escape the cold, wet London winter and stay in Singapore for three weeks. One of the things that immediately stood out to me was how clean this city is. Where in London, stretches of urban pavement are decorated with dried globs of chewing gum, discarded cigarette butts, and wrappers of various snacks, Singapore’s streets are simply tidy and clean. A local actually told me that one of the reasons behind this is that the government generously hands out fines for the mere possession of a pack of chewing gum so as to prevent waste. Apparently, there is even a joke going around that says that ‘Singapore is a fine city’.
The contrast between London’s waste-cluttered streets and Singapore’s immaculate asphalt transported me back to my undergraduate program in Anthropology. No Anthropology course is complete without talking about Mary Douglas’ book ‘Purity and Danger’. In it, Douglas argues that anything that is considered dirty is not inherently dirty, but that what we consider dirty is dependent on the culture and context. She says that something is likely to be categorised as dirty as soon as it crosses a boundary that we have established and ascribe importance to.
Douglas herself gives an example: Let’s say you're having dinner with someone and as you get to main course, they suddenly place their shoes on the table. The shoes don’t necessarily have to be dirty, and yet this act is considered dirty. The established rules dictate that shoes belong on the floor and preferably outside, and that the dining table is for food, plates, utensils, et cetera. Placing shoes on the dining table crosses boundaries of inside-outside and floor-table, and in doing so become what Douglas calls matter out of place, and therefore a problem that needs to be addressed.
In Singapore, a city in which everything seemingly is ‘in place’, to speak of Douglas’ terms, there is a specific animal that is stirring the orderly pot. Because while Singapore used to be a country full of mangrove zones and lush rainforests, 95% of its native forest was cleared in the mid-to-late 19th century. This significantly disrupted one of the native inhabitants of Singapore, the long-tailed macaque, and forced them to look for other modes of survival.
Singapore's Simians
Long-tailed macaques, also called the crab-eating macaque, are about 40 to 50 centimeters in height although their name already indicates that if you include their tails they would be more than twice that length. They are light brown or beige in colour, and the top of their head often has a small crest of hair that is coloured brown-red. Both male and female monkeys have long whiskers on the side of their face which looks a bit like old-timey sideburns, although males will only have moustache-like whiskers. Long-tailed macaques live in matrilineal troops of varying sizes, although they tend to live in bigger troops if they are fed by humans.
When they are not fed by humans, however, they hang around in the forest where they feed on fruits and seeds. That doesn’t mean they only eat fruit, however. These macaques will eat everything they can get their hands on. When I was on a walk in a forest in Singapore, I saw the National Parks Board had placed signs warning people of falling durians as macaques are likely to be eating them overhead. Dropping spiky and stinky durians from trees might sound disruptive, but this actually fulfils an important ecological function in Singapore’s forests as macaques distribute seeds by eating them and spitting them out.
What's the matter?
The thing is: Macaques don’t just live in forests. To prevent further deforestation, Singapore’s biggest forests are confined to nature reserves that are surrounded by the concrete for which the rest of the trees had to make space. Long-tailed macaques are clearly not stupid, and they’ve had plenty of years to conclude that, generally, humans equal easy food. This is a logical conclusion for the monkeys to draw, since humans frequently hand out food to monkeys. People are concerned about the availability of natural foods for the monkeys, and thus go out of their way to feed the macaques. Sometimes they simply give monkeys snacks that they have on them when they’re on a hike, but at other times people deliberately drive out to areas where monkeys might be and throw food out from their car window.
But I want to draw your attention to the borderlands between the forest and residential areas. Because where people live, there is waste. And where there’s waste, monkeys will know how to find it. And thus, people living in the regions bordering Bukit Timah Nature Reserve and the Central Catchment Nature Reserve had to learn how to live with these neighbours. The macaques are challenging their human neighbours as the monkeys try to get into waste bins, rob people who walk with plastic bags as they have come to associate bags with food, and occasionally enter opened windows in the hopes of snatching some easy snacks.
Their behaviour does keep them up with the times as they frequently go viral on social media. I’ve found videos of macaques eating bananas in the middle of an intersection, pictures of monkeys looting from supposed ‘anti-pilferage bins’, and a spectacular video in which a group of macaques perform a daring heist from a 5th floor apartment with open window as if they’re starring in an action film.
Singapore’s government websites offer loads of advice on how to deal with this: Don’t walk around with plastic bags, double bag your waste, tie down the lids of your wheelie bins, and replace fruit-bearing trees with other trees to prevent monkeys from seeing your lawn as a restaurant. They keep repeating that, above all else, people should not feed monkeys no matter how amusing it looks.
Macaques as co-designers
It is here where I want to bring back Mary Douglas’ idea of matter out of place. Interestingly enough, I found out recently that Mary Douglas herself actually does not consider waste itself to be matter out of place. Waste has a designated location and category, and as soon as it is defined as waste there is a certain consensus about where it goes. Yes, it transgresses a boundary if it is on the floor instead of in the bin, but conceptually it is waste in both locations. Long-tailed macaques, however, are ascribed to be out of place as soon as they transgress beyond the forest.
And yet, it is the monkeys themselves that very consciously choose to be in these residential areas. Their agency not only defies human ideas of who belongs where, but what I want to point out here is that they co-construct human areas at the same time. Monkey-proof bins, fruit-free lawns, limiting the usage of plastic bags, and closed windows are products of a negotiation between the monkeys and humans living next to the forest.
And this is exactly why I find animals such as these so interesting. Liminal animals such as monkeys, rats, birds, raccoons, and any other animal that tries their luck scavenging in urban areas warrant a response. Not because their presence is inherently unacceptable, but because of how they interact with our infrastructure, built environment, and waste. These interactions are – in a way – their negotiation for belonging in the city. For example, Singapore’s monkeys enforce a closed-window policy, Tokyo’s crows cause impose the use of weighted nets over trash bags, rats worldwide leave their toothmarks all over material, and I’m sure we can think of many more examples. My point is: The presence of liminal animals can even be read in their absence.
This shows the resilience of both humans and nonhumans. We are quick to classify Singapore’s monkeys and other animals as matter out of place, but these animals show us that it was never just our place to govern. As they transgress the borders that we create, they remind us that we live in a multispecies world in which determining who and what is in- and out of place is not just for humans to say. The concept of ‘matter out of place’ reveals itself to be anthropocentric and inattentive to animal ecologies. Maybe the term itself is rather out of place?
Herre de Bondt has done research on rats in Amsterdam, crows in Tokyo, and gulls in The Hague. His work has now brought him to London where his PhD project is concerned with urban bird feeding practices. From hanging up fatballs for chirpy robins to tossing seed to flocks of ‘flying rats’, Herre is determined to investigate the inherently multispecies practice of bird feeding. He is particularly interested in the ways non-human animals inform and shape the contemporary city in collaboration with – and in defiance of – humans.
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