Hybrid Seminar - Imagining Javan Tigers: Haunting and the Times of Extinction by Dr. Tito Ambyo

Join us on November 6, from 12:00 to 1:00 p.m., for a hybrid brown bag seminar in Meeting Room 04.163 (FSW).

Our speaker is Dr Tito Ambyo, Lecturer in the School of Media and Communication at RMIT University and currently a Research Fellow with KITLV/Leiden University. Below more information about the seminar.

In a late-nineteenth-century photograph from Java, a tiger just released from its crate walks across an arena ringed by men with spears. It is a rampog macan, a ritual tiger-killing staged by Javanese regents, often with Dutch officials watching. The Javan tiger was not yet extinct, but its ending was already under way. More than a century later, decades after the last confirmed sighting and its listing as extinct by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), tigers keep returning to Java as statues, memes, literary characters, mascots and spirits. In 2017, for example, the army demolished a tiger statue in Cisewu, West Java, after it went viral as a national joke. At the end of 2025, villagers in Kediri, East Java, chose instead to keep their own mocked white tiger statue, which has since become a tourist attraction. Meanwhile, as I camped in a forest in Aceh in 2026, a guide whispered to me that a young male Sumatran tiger, from a critically endangered population, was roaming nearby in search of territory of his own.

This presentation reads these three moments of haunting (already, after, still) to ask how extinction is lived across different times, and what that means for how environmental urgency is perceived. Where urgency imagines time as a countdown, these tigers show extinction as layered: already under way, lived after its end, and still unfolding. I approach these moments through hantulogi, a method developed from my research on Indonesian ghost-content creators on YouTube. It reads photographs, archives, social media and ethnographic encounters alongside one another, tracing where each piece of evidence comes from, and holds claims about the unseen in the Indonesian stance of percaya engga percaya, or “believe it or not”. Against nature storytelling that removes humans from the frame, and against forms of urgency that justify exclusion, I argue that taking haunting seriously, including our own part in the history of extinction, offers a slower and more accountable way of imagining the animals we have lost, and those we may still lose.