Anthropomorphism, Anthropocentrism, and Anecdote: Primatologists on Primatology

Anthropomorphism, Anthropocentrism, and Anecdote: Primatologists on PrimatologyAuthor(s): Amanda ReesSource: Science, Technology, & Human Values, Vol. 26, No. 2 (Spring, 2001), pp. 227-247Published by: Sage Publications, Inc.Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/690193 .

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Anthropomorphism, Anthropocentrism, and Anecdote: Primatologists on Primatology

Amanda Rees University of York

This article critically examines the ways in which primatologists account for their research. Based on a series of unstructured interviews, it argues that the location of primates at the boundary between Western conceptions of nature and culture or human and animal has materially affected how primatologists talk about their research, what they find possible to write about in their research, and where they choose to publish their research. Through the discussion of a number of related topics (e.g., popular science, sociobiology, the potentially distinctive nature of nonhuman primates as objects of research), it outlines the reflexive nature of primatologists' response to the cultural positioning of their research subjects.

In 1989, Donna Haraway published a book called Primate Visions. In it, she described the history of the emergence of primatology in the twentieth century, situating it in the context of postcolonial, patriarchal capitalism and drawing on an immense range of textual, visual, and cinematic sources. This text has become one of the most engaging volumes of premillennium cultural history and is far too well-known to need further description here. However, I want to begin this article by drawing attention to one particular argument that dominates the book. This is the way in which Haraway used the discipline of primatology to indicate both the relative flexibility and the absolute rigidity of the boundary between the world of humanity and the world of nature within Western culture. In particular, she demonstrated a number of strate- gies that allow the reader to recognize the way in which primatological

AUTHOR'S NOTE: Funding forthis project was provided by the Humanities Research Board of the British Academy, King's College Cambridge, and the Department of the History and Philoso- phy of Science, Cambridge University. I would like to offer my thanks to the primatologists who agreed to cooperate with the project and to acknowledge gratefully the encouragement and criticism of John Forrester, Jim Whitman, and Steve Yearley.

Science, Technology, & Human Values, Vol. 26 No. 2, Spring 2001 227-247 ? 2001 Sage Publications Inc.

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228 Science, Technology, & Human Values

research can be used to demonstrate the permeability of this apparently con- crete barrier. In this article, I want to develop this argument by examining how this problem is dealt with from the point of view of the primatologists themselves. I will argue that primatological researchers are themselves aware of the way in which primates straddle the boundary between nature and culture. Whether or not they consciously reflect on the problem, this awareness has an important influence on their approach to scientific research.

Primatologists seem to be as conscious as Haraway (1989) was of the contested status of primates as the embodiment of the convergence of the cultural categories of humanity and of nature, but their experience with this situation is expressed in a distinctly dissimilar manner. In this article, which is based on a series of interviews with neophyte, practicing, and retired primatologists, I will analyze their perceptions of the problem. It appears that primatologists express their response to the location of their research subjects in this contested cultural area in a number of ways. In the first place, they are wary of being anthropomorphic, of assuming that nonhuman primates possess emo- tional and cognitive capacities that are similar to those possessed by humans. Second, there is an awareness of the dangers of taking an anthropocentric view, of presuming that primates are significant animals purely because of their morphological, phylogenetic, and behavioral similarities to humans. A third element appears as a partial response to these two problems, in that a distinct line was drawn between what primatologists could see primates doing and what they could write about what they saw primates doing. Certain kinds of evidence were considered to be more appropriate to some audiences than others. In particular, it seemed that a line was drawn between popular and academic audiences to avoid facing accusations either of unwarranted anthropocentrism or of inappropriate anthropomorphism.

Primate Talking

This research was conducted as part of a project that explored the nature of primatological field site research, and for this reason, most of the interviewees were primarily field site primatologists, although some had chosen to focus on laboratory research.' Because this article focuses so heavily on the material acquired during face-to-face interviews with primatological researchers, it seems appropriate to raise some issues about the nature of interview material at the outset. These problems are twofold: first, the existence of the interview as a relationship between two people and, second, the role of the interview as a means of actively constructing historical information. In almost every case, the relationship is one where power is unequally balanced.



Rees / Anthropomorphism, Anthropocentrism 229

Usually, this power structure (construed in class/race/gender terms) is weighted toward the interviewer, who has also actively sought out the interviewees and is in the process of acquiring information from them.2 In the case of this project, however, the problem was more subtle. The informants concerned were all white, mostly male, mostly older than the interviewer, and in addition, held academic positions that were superior to that possessed by the interviewer. This situation influenced the interview process in several ways. The imbalance of power was clearly implicated in the level of response to the requests for an interview. Particularly in the United Kingdom, most such requests were met either with refusal or by silence.

It meant that the interview took place very much on sufferance. Most interviewees made it plain, either verbally or physically, that they would answer phones, allow the interview to be interrupted by their own students, or would themselves leave the room to deal with another subject. Many of the responses to questions stressed the interviewee's greater experience and reputation. For example, advice was given on the use of more efficient methodological techniques, and some respondents offered to use their influence with colleagues to persuade them to agree to an interview. All these responses originated in a desire to help, but in the academic context, it also meant that the interview situation occasionally slipped from that of interviewer/interviewee to that of graduate student/supervisor. In addition and without exception, the interviewees expressed some suspicion about the role of the history and sociology of science in academic life and the use that would be made of any information that was gained from them. These comments occurred before the formal interviewing phase, marked by the switching on of the tape recorder (although comments along the lines of "I shouldn't have said that" persisted throughout some conversations).

Turning to the more general aspect of the interview, that of the active con- struction of historical information, it is clear that it is profoundly informed by the first, in that the information is a product not only of the questions asked by the interviewer and the order in which they were posed but also of the manner in which the respondent chose to answer them. There is a danger then of mov- ing too quickly from the unique to the general experience and of granting an air of permanence to material that is essentially permeable. In addition, what people do not say, particularly in a brief relationship that begins and may even end with a degree of suspicion, may be as important as what they do say. However, while the reliability of an interview has often been taken to be a reflection of the degree to which it accurately accounts for events that have taken place and the extent to which the interpretation of these events is generalizable to the experiences of other people in structurally similar situa- tions, what we are actually dealing with is a situation in which two people




create an account of events past through a negotiation of their mutual expec- tations, appraisals, and memories. It may be that these apparent limitations are an inevitable part of an attempt by one researcher primate to study the actions of other researcher primates as they attempt to analyze the activities of yet more primates.

With regard to the formal structure of the interviews themselves, a series of questions was asked of every researcher interviewed. Importantly, they were not invariably posed in the same order, since the intent was to keep the interview as unstructured as possible to allow the interviewees to identify the subjects that were of most concern to them. Specifically, respondents were asked why they had chosen to study primates in the field, about any relationship that they saw between their fieldwork and captive studies carried out by other researchers, about how they chose their research sites, to describe an average day in the field, and about the influence that popular accounts of primatological behavior had had on the view of the discipline held by the general public and the scientific community.

However, when people were encouraged to talk about the history and development of behavioral primatology, a number of related points consis- tently emerged despite the disparate ages, nationalities, and experiences of the interviewees. These points were strongly focused around the problems of anthropomorphism, anthropocentrism, and anecdote for primatology; the impact of sociobiology as a potential reformulation of primatology as a natural science rather than natural history; and the particular problems and issues raised by the rich primate social life for the human observer on the conduct of research at the site. The experiences and opinions that the interviewees had of these issues are the ones that I will explore in this article, since they appear to lie at the heart of the difficulties that primatologists can experience as a result of the way in which nonhuman primates are positioned at the limit of the Western conception of nature and of humanity.

Why Primatology?

In fact, the first indication that a fear of being anthropomorphic was affecting researchers' attitudes toward conducting primatological research emerged in the responses given to what was normally one of the first questions asked, that is, "Why did you decide to study primates?" Very few of the interviewees said that they had deliberately chosen to study primates. Unusually, one respondent traced back his career to "the time I was a child and watched all the Jane Goodall films, I was always intrigued and always totally confident that that was what I was going to do, study and work with primates." More




commonly, another primatologist, when asked why he studied primates, replied that "I'd have to say that it's because I think primates are cool, and I want to get into the field in Africa or South America," then went on to qualify that statement with the words "that just sounds so dodgy, you have to come up with some other way of saying it."

In a similar fashion, many interviewees seemed to feel uneasy with the idea that there were primatologists who were only interested in studying primates. They argued that a primary focus on the animals themselves was in itself enough to damage the scientific reputation of both the researchers and the discipline. One researcher commented, "The people who study primates, they're just very into their animals, you know," while another's opinion was that "I think primatology has almost always suffered from bunny huggers, people who do primatology because they love primates, all the Jane Goodalls and Dian Fosseys and stuff."3 In fact, one researcher described the reaction of his colleagues when he decided to begin studying primates in the following terms: "Oh, God, [he's] lost it; he's off to make daisy chains with gorillas." More calmly, a researcher who was more involved with captive studies than fieldwork suggested that "you get dreamers who come to your doorstep and say, "I want to work like Jane Goodall with chimpanzees in the field."

In line with this attitude, the majority of interviewees were eager to stress that the species of animal that they studied was essentially irrelevant to their projects or career plans. Most expressed their eagerness to do fieldwork irre- spective of animal species: for example, one said, "I was looking for some- where to work abroad. Primates were incidental; it didn't have to be primates, it could have been birds," while another said, "I knew I wanted to do fieldwork, but I wasn't sure if I wanted to do, I still wasn't totally committed to the primate stuff, I just knew I wanted to study animals in nature." The fact that they eventually found themselves working on primates in the field was often explained as the result of the operation of chance or of personal factors in their lives.

Frequently, these interviewees would justify their argument that the species of animal is immaterial by referring to the larger theoretical issues at stake. One researcher argued that "the point is that what we're doing are testing general principles; we just happen to study primates." Another elaborated on this point, stressing that

you've got this bigger issue, this bigger theoretical issue you're trying to test, and these are just handy animals to test them on; you've got this basic data on them, and they fit so you use them. It doesn't particularly matter that they're mangabeys, if you had data on frogs, you could use frogs.




The only researcher who expressed this point of view who was also willing to grant primates as a species any special characteristics did so while emphasiz- ing his conviction that his choice of primates as an object of study was purely a matter of convenience. He asserted, "I'm only doing primates because I do social structures, and theirs is complex; they could be toads for all I care, so I feel all righteous, I' m a real scientist." For this researcher, primates were distinctive animals simply because of their intricate social structure-but his reference to being a "real scientist" clearly demonstrates his awareness that other people find primates distinctive for quite different, apparently nonsci- entific reasons.

The Impact of Sociobiology

The interviewees also invoked the concept of real science when they dis- cussed "the sociobiological revolution," as several of them called it, in the field of animal behavior studies. Some researchers had clearly welcomed the growth of sociobiological thinking, while others were wary of its repercus- sions. However, they were all in agreement that sociobiological theory had completely changed the way in which primatological research was conducted.4 Crucially, however, the reason for sociobiological theory's influence on primatology seemed to be the way in which it provided primatological researchers with the tools to conduct "natural science" rather than "natural history."

For example, some researchers, particularly those who had been working in the field prior to the 1970s, tried to describe this sociobiological revolution in terms of its capacity to generate hypotheses. In other words, they considered it to be an organizing force that came to dominate the attitude that field workers took to their studies. One primatologist described the situation thus:

It has given a theoretical direction to all animal behavior research that was just absent before. So what was previously just a mumble jumble of facts without any theoretical basis to tie them together is now coalesced into something that is now more scientifically sound because of that theoretical contribution.

Others argued that it had had more impact on the types of problems that field researchers chose to examine. From this perspective, what happened was that "we're [now] talking about the study of adaptation. That is the big transition that has taken place." Sociobiology, or what can be spoken of

more broadly under the label of behavioral ecology, what it boils down to is asking not only the old question of what do the animals do but in addition, asking the question, "If they are well adapted, what should they be doing and how




close does the one match the other?" This is the kind of thinking that has really revolutionized animal behavior in general, not just primate field studies.

But whether researchers thought that the sociobiological revolution had primarily affected the way they thought or the things they thought about, none of them challenged the idea that sociobiology had transformed primatology. To reiterate, many of them seemed to feel that it had done so by making it possible for primatologists to take a more objective, scientific stance toward their research subjects.

However, not all of them felt that this change was for the better. Several respondents were concerned that sociobiological theory had made primatology less rather than more scientific, and interestingly, this criticism came more often from those who had been more involved in captive studies of primates. Some suggested that the relatively simplistic models of the early days of sociobiological theory had encouraged researchers to see models in nature where none existed. As one researcher put it, "You see a pattern in nature, you stick on a post hoc explanation for how wonderfully adaptive this must be, and you're through." Other researchers were concerned to point out the fact that many of the most important sociobiological concepts remained unmea- surable and nonoperationalized. One researcher bemoaned the fact that "we need data on things which are extremely difficult to measure, like fitness, so we use shorthands; we say reproductive success." However, while reproductive success seems to be considered an adequate substitute for the more nebu- lous concept of fitness, it can be just as hard to measure in the field.5

Indeed, some respondents went further still, suggesting that sociobiological theory, while a valuable tool for organizing the analysis of adaptation, remained ultimately unjustifiable and could potentially lead scientists into error. As one researcher argued, "We can obtain evidence that is consistent with a particular sociobiological hypothesis, and that's good, because that's contribut- ing, but it doesn't, you're never going to prove it, you're never going to have sufficient evidence to say, oh yes, all the necessary data are here and this is it, because it's not there." Others warned of the dangers of depending too much on sociobiological theory, of the possibility that "on the basis of intuitively attractive theory, we come to conclusions when empirical support is completely lacking." One respondent was concerned about the potential for dem- agoguery in sociobiology, accepting that "sociobiology has been very important, but sociobiology can become a religion, in the sense that you just buy into those highly attractive and seductive arguments on the basis of inade- quate evidence."

Occasionally, those researchers who were hostile to sociobiological thinking argued that sociobiological techniques, despite their wide appeal, could




not be appropriately used to study primates. This was the case, they suggested, because certain unique primate characteristics meant that it would be difficult to use sociobiological theory to study them. One respondent stressed that

a lot of the sociobiological theories could have been tested and have been tested very well on birds or rodents; you don't need primates to test these theories. Primates reproduce too slowly and are too hard to follow and to see and so on. What is special about the primates is their brain size and their cognitive capacities, and that area was largely ignored.

For this researcher, what was "exciting is primate social cognition or primate cognition in general."6

Are Primates Something Special?

This issue brings us back to one of the central points underlying the debates outlined in this article. Are primates a special category of animal, and if so, why? Haraway (1989) has shown that the mere fact that this question has to be raised tends to indicate that primates are special, at least to the West- ern mind-set, but this argument is being played out here in the context of a very specific set of scientific discourses. It is, in fact, this issue that seems to lie close to the heart of the way in which primatologists evaluate their work and that of their peers, and it appears to be centered on the debates surround- ing the relative significance of ecological adaptation, primate cognition, and social organization. Respondents either claimed that primates were animals just like any other, in which case, they tended to assert the benefits of studying their behavior through reference to the methodological techniques of sociobiology or behavioral ecology; or respondents were willing to accept that, in some way, primates stood apart from the rest of the natural world. Crucially, however, most of those in the first category still seemed to consider primates as somehow unique, even if they did so unwillingly. The most usual example of primate uniqueness that they cited was the relatively rich social life of some primate species.

For example, one respondent spoke of the debates he had had with his colleagues on these topics. He came down firmly on the side of sociobiology, behavioral ecology, and adaptation, saying,

Some people have argued with me and said that the real revolution in primate studies is the study of cognition. No, I don't think so. I think those are very fascinating studies, but even those studies will make sense primarily in the extent to which they explain the adaptations of the animals to the world they live in.




He suggested that the early studies of wild living primates had focused on the wrong topics, that "originally we were all seduced by the rich social life of these animals, so the behavior and the social relationships and the kin structure and so forth dominated the early literature that came out of primate field studies," and it was not until people "began to take seriously the context within which all these activities were taking place" that any progress could be made in the understanding of primate behavior.

However, it seems clear from the descriptions that the interviewees gave of their experiences with the animals that many primatologists, even those who are most dismissive of "bunny huggers," are still attracted and absorbed by the social life of their primates but that this varies according to the species of primate under observation. For example, one researcher who had moved from studying an arboreal and relatively small species to a species that was both large and terrestrial contrasted her experiences in studying the two species partly in terms of the degree to which the activities of individual animals caught the interest of the observer. It is worth quoting this fascinating account at some length. It appears that the large-bodied, terrestrial animals were

so much more intensely social, and [there are] the little ones who are like loons, and they're always doing stupid things, and there's always something going on, and then after a while, it doesn't take that long to get to know them. And there was this one particular juvenile in one of our study groups who was very pale, and that was why we came to focus; we could always recognize that individual, and because they stood out so much from the rest of them, and this little-she's a female, she's a nutter, she's an absolute nutter, and nobody will carry her any- more because she's too big. Her mum won't carry her, and so she'll just run up to people and just leap on them and then just hang on for dear life, and they're trying to get her off and everything, but she'll just try it with males and other females and going back, and then her mum would twat her, and you can't help but think, hugely amusing, and then the next day you're thinking, what's she going to do today?

It is hard to miss the absorbed joy in the social detail that emerges from this description of daily life with the animals. Clearly, the social complexity that is characteristic of many primate species has had an impact on the researchers who have studied it, but this social complexity is also one of the characteristics that place some of these nonhuman primate species in their position between the natural and the human worlds. The sociability of the animals evokes a response from the observer, and it is easy for the observer to put him- or herself in the position of the observed.

In this context, it is interesting that an increasingly common strategy for studying wild living primates is that of constructing the life histories of the animals. In terms of sociobiological theory, this is of importance because of




the need to assess such things as, for example, the lifetime reproductive success of an animal. However, there is a potential elision between writing an animal's life history and monitoring the "soap opera" of the animals' interactions, an elision produced by the way in which both models depend essentially on narrative. As the same researcher put it, "You get attached to [the primates] in some way that you don't necessarily do if you're doing a different sort of study where you don't watch what happens on a day-to-day basis, how their lives unfold. If you're doing fish or frogs or that sort of thing, you just go in and count things or go in and do an experiment or go in and remove some and see what happens. You're not following their lives in the same sort of way." So, on this reading, it is the fact that researchers are essentially watch- ing what these individual but group-living and highly social animals do on a daily basis that makes the study of primates unique for the researcher rather than any particular characteristic of the primates themselves. From this perspective, primates themselves are not special, but the way in which they live makes it particularly easy for the researcher to identify with them.

With respect to this point, it is notable that not all species of primates have this effect on the researchers. Perhaps not surprisingly, those that do tend to be the species that are both large and terrestrial. Is it the case, then, that these species are special, are easy to anthropomorphize, not because they are primates but because they are easily visible and capable of individual identifica- tion? Several researchers felt that there was little difference in how primates and nonprimate species were considered, in that "it's inevitable that everyone does get a little bit anthropomorphic when they study an animal, whether it be a primate or a horse; it doesn't matter what the animal is." Another felt that the important characteristic when it came to arousing people's interest and curiosity was whether the animal in question was a mammal. She argued that "I find it easy to interest students because I work on mammals, so I don't think it's just that it's primates, but that certainly helps. I think that it's the fact that it's mammals."

In contrast, however, many of the researchers did try to suggest that primates were perceived to be somehow special, particularly because of the phylogenetic proximity and morphological similarity between human and nonhuman primates. Even though from the public point of view, information "about elephants or whales or any of those sorts of things" may be fascinating, people are still "particularly interested in primates." One primatologist asked rhetorically, "Why do we look at primates? Because they're our closest relative. And again, the implicit assumption there is that we share a heritage, which we do, in general, we do, obviously. We're closer to nonhuman primates than we are to other mammals." A related but distinctly different point was made by another respondent who was trying to explain why more




attention was paid to the primates of Africa and Asia in comparison to those of the New World. He drew attention to the fact that many primatologists, particularly in the United States, had received their initial training in anthropology. While the study of the Old World primates could be considered an appropriate subject for anthropology, in the eyes of some researchers, New World monkeys were too distantly related to humans to count.

In short, the proximity of human and nonhuman primates, in terms of their morphological and behavioral similarity to humanity,7 has resulted in a number of problems for and accusations made against the field of behavioral primatology. The interviewees frequently spoke of the risks involved both in taking an anthropomorphic attitude toward their animals and in adopting an anthropocentric approach by relying on false homologies in their arguments. One researcher spoke of the danger of the "inappropriate selection of animal examples, that is, animal models, or particular behaviors to make the comparison." He argued that

you don't take sexual behavior in a stumptail macaque and compare it to human female sexual behavior just because it's catchy, it's interesting, it's intuitively satisfying because there are superficial similarities. The real question is, Are these completely different phenomena; are we describing them as similar when there's a superficial similarity?

He was very aware of the possibility that the relationship might be analo- gous rather than homologous.

Some researchers suggested that the very fact that primates in general and great apes in particular are considered to be so genetically close to human beings leads to a situation in which the

temptation will always be to say, well, look to the nonhuman primates for hints to human behavior. It may well be, but we can't willy nilly pick what appeals to us or what superficially seems to be similar and make the argument that we're dealing with something inherited from a common ancestor.

He went on to suggest that "maybe we can get hints and suggestions and evidence about [human origins] by studying nonhuman, nonprimate species as well, because it gives us some indication what are the conditions that would promote the evolution of representational signaling or those kinds of questions." He was keen to stress the fact that although it is easy to make the assumption that we share traits with primates because of our mutual genetic heritage, it may well be the case that "you can learn just as much by looking at dolphins perhaps, or social carnivores."8




Primates Writing

The problems that were caused for primatologists by the positioning of nonhuman primates at the boundary between nature and humanity became most obvious when the researchers began to discuss the way in which they wrote about their research. The interviewees often spoke of the care they needed to take when they wrote about the animals that they studied. In dis- cussing the attitudes of journal editors and referees to primate research, one researcher commented that

when you write your papers, of course you're very particular about what you say and what you don't say and I mean actually there was a time, I'm not sure whether they do it so much now, but you'd put things in to Animal Behaviour and you'd say, this mother had this infant and she did this, and they wouldn't like you to use 'she' or 'her,' you'd have to say 'it.'

In a similar vein, some interviewees drew attention to the problematic issue of the names that individual animals are given by the primatologists. One researcher pointed out that "you're not supposed to give them names, you have to give them code numbers. But the thing is, once you call an animal 33, that's his name, it becomes his name, his name is 33 as if you'd called him May or June."

At another level, primatologists speak of the gap between their assessment of primate capacities and their own ability to prove that these animals possess these capacities. One researcher commented that while it seems clear that

there's quite a high level of cognitive processes going on; I mean, not necessarily a theory of mind and all this really fancy stuff, but clearly, there's some sort of desire or what have you, going on there, so I think, when you talk to other people about it, you'll say, she wanted to do that, and he wasn't having any of it and so on, but you just don't write about it in those terms.

Another said that while

to me and to other primatologists it seemed obvious that this monkey is consol- ing this one, but because we're not allowed to say that, we'll get completely dis- respected for saying that, and [we use] all these clinical terms and end up using like a paragraph just to say the same thing."

This inability on the part of primatologists to prove what they suspect might be going on is reflected in the descriptions of the published accounts of their research. It also seemed to be the case that their willingness to discuss




this was related to their position on the issue of primate uniqueness. Inter- viewees made particular reference to the kind of evidence that was suitable for publication in a professional journal and contrasted it to the kind of evidence that would be condemned out of hand for being too accessible to anthropomorphism and inaccuracy. One primatologist told me,

I don't have room in my technical articles for anecdotes. They're not even accepted, well, probably accepted if you throw in one or two, but you cannot write to Animal Behaviour a whole article with just anecdotes; they want to see graphs and tables and rightly so. They want to see qualification of what you're doing, a more systematic approach.

In fact, it swiftly became plain that those primatologists who had written popular accounts of their work were using this partly as a means for describing the range of primate behavior that cannot readily be categorized and studied quantitatively but which is none the less visible to the primatologist. One primatologist said,

I see a lot of things when I look at my primates, a lot of interesting things that make me reflect maybe in a somewhat different manner on their behavior than I would normally admit in a technical article. So the [popular] books allow me an outlet to describe behavior in a much broader range, throwing in anecdotes where I think they fit.

Another researcher was even more enthusiastic, pointing out that

it's fun, I mean, monkeys; my research is more than numbers on a page, and it was really fun to write that way. I love teaching that way, which doesn't mean that I think that the science and the quantitative side of them aren't important, but when you have something as wonderful and alive as a lot of primates, it's fun to talk about them.

Popularized Primates

In contrast, many primatologists dismiss the popularizations that their colleagues and the media produce as distortions of the original research. In the case of the interviewees, this dismissal appeared to be related to whether they themselves were prepared to write popular accounts. Some researchers drew a line between what they found interesting in their research and what they felt the public would find interesting. For example, one respondent said that




what for me are the interesting or important issues are not necessarily the popular conception of what's interesting, so if you have no control over the final product, the picture that is presented is not one in which I would be interested or think of as important picture to get across. And so I'd rather not participate because I'm anticipating a distortion. Or not a distortion but an omission of what I think of as important.

Another felt that "truly popular accounts tend to be less satisfying in the sense that I think they're often inaccurate; in other words, to reach the general pop- ulation, people have tended to go in directions that I would find, that I would be reluctant to go." The model of popularization that is used here seems to be the traditional one-the idea that popular science represents a corrupted form of the original research.9

However, it remained the case that researchers who felt that this perceived distortion existed tended also to feel that it was a matter of interpretation rather than of explicit misinformation. What they suggested was that most popularisations tended to err in the direction of an anthropomorphic explanation of primate behavior and its concomitant implication that one can make generalizations about human behavior based on observed primate behavior. So, for example, one primatologist who disapproved of popularizations of primatology said,

I don't think anyone deliberately misinforms on a matter of fact, but one might talk about sexual behavior in bonobos or in a species of monkey and make all kinds of inferences about human sexual behavior. Well, there's an assumption there that is implicit for the lay audience that there's a kind of homologous con- dition, that what we look at in a nonhuman primate, whether it be a chimp or a monkey, is more likely to be shared by a human being because we are taxonom- ically close. Well, that's not necessarily the case.

Other researchers felt that anthropomorphism was the major failing of popular accounts. One respondent suggested that "when you have these animals that are clearly very clever, then it's inevitable that you anthropomorphize to a certain extent, but I think it happens a lot more in popular programs; it's set up a lot more in popular programs." Another argued that the danger came not from primatologists who chose to popularize their work but from other writers who decided to adapt the work of the primatologist for a popular audience. In other words, if

you have popularizations by science writers, as sometimes happens, or if you get science writers who team up with a scientist and together they do something, then you sometimes get anthropomorphisms that I think, wow, gee do you really think that? Because most of us who are intimately familiar with our




animals, we are reluctant to interpret certain things. So it's an anthropomorphism with boundaries. Whereas a journalist and science writers, they don't care, so to speak, as long as the story sells, that's fine with them.

In other words, there do not appear to be any scientific sanctions on nonscientists who choose to popularize scientific work, and since the general public have "a great level of interest in a particular idea about primates and how that relates to human beings," they are more likely to speak in anthropomorphic terms about the animals. It is notable, however, that the blame for this anthropomorphic anthropocentrism is being laid firmly on the shoulders of the nonscientists who are involved in the popularization process.'?

Some researchers disagreed with the idea that the general public wanted to be entertained rather than educated by popular science, that these anthropomorphic accounts were what people wanted. One researcher who found television programs about primates to be personally distasteful felt that her par- ents agreed with her:

I know I sort of thought that was all a bit patronizing, but I thought that was because I know more about it, but my mum and dad wouldn't know proper primatology from a hole in the ground, and nevertheless, they feel as if their intelligence was being ever so slightly insulted, and you're not clever enough, so if we just told you the scientific facts, the wherefores of their social life, you might not, we have to jazz it up in this way to catch your attention.

Another researcher held out hope for the future of communication with the public while still criticizing the current state of affairs, arguing that "I don't think it needs to be sloppy. I think that we can communicate, that it's possible to communicate scientifically accurate information and to argue that this is valuable information but not in the superficial, simple way that is often presented."

But primatologists also seemed to feel that these popularizations of primate research have had a powerful, biasing impact on the way in which they themselves are regarded by both the wider science community and the general public. In particular, there is a powerful perception that primatology is a female-dominated discipline and that it is the "feminine touch" that has resulted in several of the latest advances in the study of primate behavior. One primatologist complained,

There is a claim out there which I have seen repeatedly, which is that feminist primatology or female primatology, whatever you want to call it, has introduced new elements to primatology that didn't exist before. I think one of the things that has been mentioned in that context is attention to kinship. Now the attention




to kinship came from the Japanese scientists who are all male and then was enhanced by sociobiology and kin selection theory, of course, which was invented by a male, so I think that's also a lot of bull.

Crucially, in his opinion, what

has happened is that the women were more willing to popularize, and they also were more attractive maybe, given that they were doing fieldwork on great apes because that's always more attractive than doing fieldwork on baboons or whatever; they were more attractive targets, so to speak, for National Geographic, so that's how they came in the public eye.

Several of the other respondents suggested that part of the reason for primatology's feminine image was that "Leakey's girls," Jane Goodall, Dian Fossey, and Birute Galdikas, became iconic representations of primate fieldwork in the public eye. One woman spoke of people's reactions to her as a primatologist, saying that "you talk to people, and say you do primatology, and they say, oh, you're Dian Fossey." In all cases, interviewees strongly associated the prevalence of female primatologists in popular accounts of primatology with primatology's feminized public image. One female researcher described her interactions with the National Geographic magazine in these terms, arguing that "they kind of like the idea of the Western woman, primatologist, who goes off and does her thing," and another explicitly associated that model with its public appeal, since "the thing about women and big primates, it's just a sort of media way of putting it across, making people sit up and take notice."

Popularizations of primatology are thought to have had other direct effects on the discipline. For example, some respondents argued that the feminized popularizations of primatology have "heavily impacted on how many women were interested in the field." Several researchers paid particular tribute to the work of Jane Goodall in this context since, although

there are women who, they probably would say, no, I didn't go into this thing to become a little Jane Goodall, but nonetheless, she provided a role model and showed that a woman, even a single woman, can go off into the bush in the depths of Africa and do fieldwork, and I have no doubt that that is one of the things that has resulted in a lot of females going into primate fieldwork.

In fact, researchers also spoke of a range of other positive contributions that popularizations of primatology can have, which range from the availabil- ity of funding for primatological research to the importance of both the conservation ethos to primatology and the willingness of the public to make contributions to conservation causes. One primatologist, while accepting that




popularizations can be oversimplifications or even true distortions, stressed that "there's no doubt that the public in general and ultimately the granting agencies such as the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health and private organizations, are more willing to give money to things that they know the public is interested in." He felt that

the popularization through television in particular have done a lot to bring this kind of thing to the attention of the public and, in turn, have, in the long run, meant that there was more funding available, so that today, there are many people involved in primate field studies.

Other researchers spoke of their obligation to pass on their experiences of "creating knowledge for knowledge's sake" to the public and their feeling that "popular primatology can serve some really pretty important societal functions at the level of getting people to care about conservation and getting people to care about science." As one respondent summed the situation up, "It helps people contribute money to conservation organizations, which is really what it comes down to at the end of the day."

Primates Interacting

Importantly, just as primatologists were aware that popularizations of primatology could have positive effects as well as negative ones, a similar ambivalence could occasionally be seen in their assessments of the role of anthropomorphism in primatological research. Some primatologists were willing to accept "this new wave of thinking that maybe it isn't such a dis- graceful thing after all." Others took the attitude that attributing human concepts and emotions to animals was acceptable in cases where "you anthropo- morphise to get inspiration, for ideas, to use that intuition, that very natural link there to interpret their behavior, to propose hypotheses which you then test as a real hard-nosed scientist." In other words, "you can talk about it in anthropomorphic terms, as long as there's a deep layer of hard concepts underlying it." Others were far more open about their acceptance of a contin- uum between human and nonhuman primates, having the attitude "that all the evidence points to ape minds working rather in the same way that human minds work," preferring "to err on the side of assuming there are similarities than of assuming there are differences."

In addition, some respondents were willing to talk about the importance of the existence of a relationship between the animals and the researchersthe kind of relationship that other primatologists dismissed by labeling the




behavior bunny hugging. They argued that the only way in which it was possible to collect detailed and accurate data was to interact with the animals and to be accepted by them. While agreeing with the idea that the "desired state would be not to interfere at all," one researcher in particular felt that since the primates that he studied were such social creatures, "in terms of them acting naturally, it's better to be part of their life rather than trying to pretend that you're not." He did not advocate an active relationship with the animals but pointed out that a group of animals will react differently to a familiar observer than to a strange one. If a stranger was to appear, then "they'd be suddenly more concerned; they'd be attending to what that person is doing and in ways that would be different from when they're completely comfortable, when you're predictable. If you're predictable to them, they're going to behave naturally, more naturally."

Finally, in another case, where the researcher was following chimpanzees on a daily basis, the response to the question of entering into a relationship with the primates was slightly different. What the researcher wanted at first to do was to blur the line between human and animal by eliminating his human advantages in order to have a "natural" experience. He described his initial attitude to studying chimpanzees in these terms: "I wanted to get into their skin and be like them and wander around with no clothes on. That's said satir- ically, but I really wanted to understand what it was like to be an animal like a chimpanzee, living in their temperature, their climate, their food regime." In other words, rather than avoiding contact with the animals to avoid adversely affecting the animal behavior, the researcher wanted to try to experience the world in the way that the animal would, eschewing the environmental advantages of being human.

Conclusion

Nonhuman primates occupy a space in Western culture that is both con- fused and contested, a point that was ably demonstrated by Haraway (1989) more than a decade ago. But although they would not describe the situation in these terms, this point was not new to those scientists who study nonhuman primates. Their consciousness of this fact has been an important if sometimes oblique influence on the way in which they have carried out their research. The issue, for them, appears to come down to whether they are justified in treating the study of nonhuman primates in a different way from the study of other nonhuman animals.

On the face of the matter, there would appear to be no excuse for doing so, since to treat primates differently would be to succumb to anthropomorphism.




Yet even those who are most scathing about people who adopt what they consider to be a sentimental attitude to the animals are still aware that some primate species do seem to be different in some way. Publicly, they account for this difference in biological and physiological terms. For example, primates are long lived; they are extremely social creatures. The mother- infant bond is prolonged and intense, their anatomy is very similar to human anatomy, and so on. Ascribing any greater meaning to these objective biological differences is inappropriate, since it is anthropomorphic. Equally, to make too many direct comparisons between human and nonhuman primates is danger- ous, in that it again implicitly singles out primates as different from the rest of the animal kingdom and it suggests that the study of primates is important precisely because of the relationship between human and nonhuman primates. This tension is partially resolved for some primatological researchers through the production of popular, sometimes anecdotal accounts of primatological research. In these accounts, they seem to feel more freedom to skirt closer to anthropomorphic and anthropocentric arguments, to use primate models to discuss human behavior, and to wonder explicitly about the nature of the primate mind.l'

Yet the tension is still felt, and it is felt not only in the context of talking about primate research but in terms of conducting that research in the first place. Individual primatologists have had to decide whether they want to take the risk of publishing anecdotal accounts of the behavior of their research subjects,12 and if so, under what circumstances and at what stage of their career to do so. The complexity of the position of primates, held in both the human and the natural world, indeed, the very existence of the Western divi- sion between the human and the natural world, forces primatologists to be particularly careful in what they say and what they write about their subjects.

Notes

1. In total, twenty-five primatologists from the United States and the United Kingdom were interviewed as part of this project. The vast majority had done most of their work at field sites, but some had spent their careers conducting laboratory-based research, and some were graduate students who were working on their first project. Almost three-fifths were based in Africa, just over half of the rest had worked in Asia, and the remainder had worked in the laboratory or in South America.

2. This problem has been noted frequently in methodological research in the social sci- ences. See, for example, Cicourel (1964) or, for a more general overview, Perks and Thomson (1998).

3. I should note here that I do not think it was the interviewee's intention to criticize either Jane Goodall or Dian Fossey by making this comment. Rather, the comment appeared to be directed at those who had developed a romanticized idea of the lives of the two researchers.




4. For example, it might be noted here that Glen Hausfater credits Sarah Blaffer Hrdy with using sociobiological theory to demonstrate the maturity of primatology as a scientific discipline. See Hausfater (1984).

5. This is especially the case for male animals. In the absence of DNA testing, which can be difficult to arrange under the constraints of fieldwork, paternity is almost invariably uncertain.

6. It is notable that research into primate social cognition is distinctive in the field of behavioral primatology because of the way in which it depends on captive studies of primates as well as field-based research.

7. I do not wish to include their genetic relationship to humanity in this context-after all, at the moment, the order that is considered phylogenetically closest to the Order Primates is the Order Insectivores, and scientists who work on these animals do not appear to suffer from a similar series of problems.

8. It should be noted that at least one researcher has attempted to come to terms with this: see King (1980).

9. A number of researchers who have studied the popular or the public understanding of science have noted and analyzed this response on the part of scientists to media representations of their work. See for example, Shinn and Whitley (1985); Friedman, Dunwoody, and Rogers (1986); and Freidman et al. (1996).

10. This would tend to confirm Hilgartner's (1990) argument that the usual characterization of the process of popularization represents a political resource for the scientist. See also Gregory and Miller (1998, 104-31).

11. For example, Wrangham and Peterson (1996) or Small (1993). Interestingly, both use examples of primate behavior to interpret aspects of human sexuality.

12. Anecdotal accounts are not necessarily confined to the popular literature. For example, Richard Byrne and Andrew Whiten (1988) have produced a number of articles and books on the role of deception in nonhuman primate lives, most of which are dependent on anecdotal accounts of primate behavior. However, they have also been criticized for making use of unsustainable anecdotal material in this way. Also see Tomasello and Call (1997) and Whiten and Byrne (1997).

References

Byrne, R. W., and A. Whiten, eds. 1988. Machiavellian intelligence: Social expertise and the evolution of intellect in monkeys, apes and humans. Oxford, UK: Clarendon.

Cicourel, A. 1964. Method and measurement in sociology. New York: Free Press. Diamond, J. 1992. The rise and fall of the third chimpanzee: How our animal heritage reflects

the way we live. London: Vintage. Friedman, S., S. Dunwoody, and C. L. Rogers. 1986. Scientists and journalists: Reporting risk

as news. London: Collier Macmillan. Friedman, S. M., K. Villamil, R. A. Suriano, and B. P. Egolf. 1996. Alar and apples: Newspapers,

risk and media responsibility. Public Understanding of Science 5:1-20. Gregory, J., and S. Miller. 1998. Science in public: Communication, culture and credibility. Lon-

don: Plenum. Haraway, D. 1989. Primate visions: Gender, race and nature in the world of modern science.

London: Routledge, Chapman and Hall.




Hausfater, G. 1984. Infanticide in non-human primates: An introduction and perspective. In Infanticide: Comparative and evolutionary perspectives, edited by G. Hausfater and S. B. Hrdy, 145-50. New York: Aldine.

Hilgartner, S. 1990. The dominant view of popularisation: Conceptual problems, political uses. Social Studies of Science 20:519-39.

King, G. E. 1980. Alternative uses of primates and carnivores in the reconstruction of early hominid behaviour. Ethology and Sociobiology 1:99-109.

Perks, R., and A. Thomson. 1998. The oral history reader. London: Routledge. Shinn, T., and R. Whitley. 1985. Expositiory science: Forms and functions of popularisation.

Dordrecht, UK: Reidel. Small, M. F 1993. Female choices: Sexual behaviour offemale primates. New York: Cornell

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Amanda Rees is a lecturer in sociology at the University of York. Her main research interests are in the sociology and history of science, and her Ph.D. (obtained from Cam- bridge University in July 1999) explored the nature of field-based scientific research in primatology. Currently, she is working on popular science and public understandings of science in relation to animal models of human experiences.



Anthropomorphism, Anthropocentrism, and Anecdote: Primatologists on Primatology

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