Dear members and friends of the Austrian Indonesian Society, 
With pleasure I want to invite you to the lecture with the title Reimagining Javan Tigers: Macan Cisewu, double extinction, and human-animal relations in the digital age.

Lecturer: Tito Ambyo from the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology University.

He is an Indonesian-Australian anthropologist and journalism lecturer at RMIT University, Melbourne. He researches haunted ecologies and extinction in Indonesia, and is currently a research fellow at KITLV, Leiden University. He co-hosts the Talking Indonesia podcast and is a board member of Inside Indonesia magazine.

Time: 12 November 2026, 16:00 – 17:30

Place: Institute for Social Anthropology (ISA), Meeting Room 5, 4th Floor, Georg Noch Platz 2, 1010 Vienna

Short abstract: In 2017, a photo of a tiger statue at a military post in Java went viral on Indonesian social media. Carved by a soldier to project the army‘s ferocity, it instead looked goofy and overly friendly. Nicknamed Macan Cisewu online, it was later replaced by the army with a properly menacing one. But by then, Macan Cisewu had proliferated into various memes online.This small, funny failure opens a larger question: what does it mean to invoke, mock, and remember an animal that no longer exists?

For more details, please consult the link below, which contains images and an extensive abstract!

https://www.oeaw.ac.at/fileadmin/Institute/ISA/events/2026/2026-11_Poster-RGL.pdf