Storytelling Apes. Mary Sanders Pollock

study focuses on primatologists from the West and the global North, whose work has been distinct from that of Asian primatologists. European and North American primatology developed in the early twentieth century from two different enterprises. The first was the parallel development of the social sciences as science, along with advances in medical science. Nonhuman primates have been considered for over a century to be the best models for studying the human body, human psychology, and human social behavior. In order to use nonhuman animals as models (with ample justification provided by philosophy and religion), Western science has typically defined nonhuman primates as similar to but not having the same transcendent significance as human beings. The second enterprise in the foundation of primatology was colonialism, which sent out European explorers, missionaries, and settlers to extract wealth in raw materials and knowledge from the exotic corners of the world—a process that has, in fact, only escalated since the official end of the colonial era. Of course, exploitation is not the purpose of scientific primatology. However, ironically, this background of European and neo-European expansion influences the shape of field narratives, which emphasize individual risk and discovery by primatologists, as well as ups and downs in the lives of the animals they study.

      Japanese primatology has almost as long a history as Western primatology, but that tradition emerged from the study of Japan’s own indigenous snow monkeys (Japanese macaques) and a focused interest on monkey behavior and society as a model for human culture. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, many other Asian countries, as well as countries in Latin America and Africa, now likewise have university primatology programs to train scientists to study their own indigenous primate species, but this development is relatively new. In these countries, the discipline has developed against deeply embedded archetypes of primates as gods, heroes, tricksters, and even human beings who perhaps took a different road sometime in the past. Although not the focus of this study, these ancient and new perspectives provide potentially rich threads if or when they are woven into Western understandings of primates.

      The monkey god Hanuman, whose exploits are described in the Hindu epic Ramayana, is only one example of a primate archetype with a very long history, but I will mention him here because he figures in chapter 4. A henchman of the great King Rama, Hanuman is made a god for helping rescue Rama’s wife, Sita, from the dark lord Ravana. Hanuman is kind, clever, brave, loyal, funny, and loquacious—and he can fly. He is very much the stereotype of the good monkey, except for the talking. (In one way of looking at it, some monkeys really can fly because they can speed through the treetops.) In a culture where primates have ontological status equivalent to humans, or in a country with indigenous primates, studying them is not considered exotic, and discoveries about primates are not necessarily feats of extreme individualism. Still, individualism and adventure are defining features of the field narratives written by Western primatologists—and that is one reason they are interesting to a broad readership in the West.

      III

      The literature of primatology includes academic peer-reviewed articles about experimental studies; books about field studies; and narrative accounts written for a mixed audience of scientists and lay readers. In (academic) scientific publications, technical language and the formulaic organization of material are designed to safeguard scientific accuracy and—perhaps equally important—the appearance of accuracy. Many field scientists find that the form cramps their style because it is wholly predictable, and the style sterilizes language against anthropomorphism—that is, the attribution of human qualities to nonhuman animals. Remove the scientist from the professional environment (in person or in print), and she typically refers to her study animals in thoroughly human terms, acknowledging with humor and irony that speaking of them in any other way is virtually impossible.

      In contrast to publications written for fellow scientists, the storyworld that comes into being when a primatologist writes a field narrative—a literary zone somewhere between scientific argument and prose fiction—allows the lay reader to enter into the ordinarily formidable landscape of scientific discourse, while the scientist is allowed to speak in an authentic, personal voice. The field narrative is the focus of this book. The great contemporary novelist Ian McEwan gets the picture. “If one reads accounts of the systematic nonintrusive observations of troops of bonobo,” he writes in The Literary Animal, a recent anthology of Darwinian literary criticism, “one sees rehearsed all the major themes of the English nineteenth-century novel: alliances made and broken, individuals rising while others fall, plots hatched, revenge, gratitude, injured pride, successful and unsuccessful courtship, bereavement and mourning.”⁵ In the same volume, E. O. Wilson speculates that the desire to replicate these plots is the result of the human mind’s character as “a narrative machine, guided unconsciously by the epigenetic rules in creating scenarios and creating options.”⁶

      Collectively, the narratives under consideration here tell an additional story. Most of the scientists represented in this book are well-known figures in popular culture. Furthermore, although my selection is a fragment of the available field literature, these books, considered chronologically, reveal a history. They illustrate how the discipline of primatology—and the field as a site of knowledge production—has changed since the middle of the twentieth century. As a science, primatology has become more nuanced and necessarily more imbricated with the science of ecology. As a location, the field shrinks and decays with economic development, the expansion of human populations, war, and localized consequences of global warming. As the field and the discipline change, the narrative forms also change. If setting is an essential feature of most belletristic literature, so attention to geographical location is an essential feature of the primatology field narrative. At first, primatology narratives were about free-living animals whose lives had been virtually untouched by human activity; in 2015, most, if not all, primate populations are under threat, and reserves or sanctuaries are taking the place of the forest as field sites. As I show in this study, the shapes of the stories themselves evolve in response to changes in the setting/field.

      My story begins before the earliest publication of primatology field narratives, however, with the Darwinian themes of evolution through natural and sexual selection and human kinship with other animals—themes that inform every one of the texts under consideration here. Darwin himself was a formidable storyteller, and like modern primatologists, he was fascinated by the behavior of apes and monkeys. After the 1859 publication of The Origin of Species, he began to write about them frequently. There are additional reasons why Darwin might be considered the first primatologist: he pondered the entire primate order and grappled with the evolutionary relationships among all the primate species he knew about. Apes and monkeys are so much like humans that dwelling on them in his first big book on evolution might have closed off escape routes for any reader who wanted to accept the theory of natural selection as it applied to other species but not to human beings. Darwin was sensitive to the dotted line that distinguishes the human from the animal and aware that most lay readers and many scientists saw this line as an absolute, divinely ordered boundary. Of course, by 1871, when Darwin published The Descent of Man, the cat was already out of the bag, so this book and later works are replete with references to primates.⁷

      Darwin had the temperament and the knowledge of a primatologist, but the discipline of primatology itself did not develop as a professional, organized body of knowledge until the early twentieth century, when the psychologist Robert Yerkes began to experiment with captive apes after World War I. Soon it became clear that monkeys were more numerous and less costly to acquire and maintain than apes. During the decades that followed Yerkes’s early experiments, Western behavioral and biomedical scientists imported thousands of monkeys, especially rhesus macaques from Asia, various monkeys from South America, and baboons from Africa. When laboratory populations increased, surplus animals were occasionally released onto small islands and other unpopulated areas, where something like fieldwork could be practiced. Even though these populations did not occupy the habitat in which they had evolved, scientists could still observe behaviors that were not being deliberately manipulated in an experimental setting.⁸

      At the midpoint of the twentieth century, with improved transportation and communication infrastructures, true fieldwork became feasible. The annals of field primatology began to include stories about charismatic animals