PRIMATE ENCOUNTERS--MODELS OF SCIENCE, GENDER AND SOCIETY Edited by Shirley C. Strum and Linda M. Fedigan The University of Chicago Press 2000 CONTENTS Preface xi SECTION 1 INTRODUCTION AND HISTORY 1 1 Changing Views of Primate Society: A Situated North American Perspective Shirley C. Strum and Linda M. Fedigan 3 SECTION 2 WHAT DO THE PIONEERS SAY? THE ADVANTAGES OF HINDSIGHT 51 2 A Few Peculiar Primates Thelma Rowell 57 3 The Bad Old Days of Primatology? Alison Jolly 71 4 Piltdown Man, the Father of American Field Primatology Robert W. Sussman 85 5 Some Reflections on Primatology at Cambridge and the Science Studies Debate Robert A. Hinde 104 6 Primate Ethology and Socioecology in the Netherlands Jan A.R.A.M. van Hooff 116 E-MAIL EXCHANGES: Why study primates? Did our ideas about primate society change? How do ideas change? 138 SECTION 3 A DIVERSITY OF PRIMATOLOGIES: OTHER NATIONAL TRADITIONS 145 7 Traditions of the Kyoto School of Field Primatology in Japan Hiroyuki Takasaki 151 8 Negotiating Science: Internationalization and Japanese Primatology Pamela Asquith 165 9 Some Characteristics of Scientific Literature in Brazilian Primatology Maria Emilia Yamamoto and Anuska Irene Alencar 184 10 An American Primatologist Abroad in Brazil Karen B. Strier 194 E-MAIL EXCHANGES: Why do Westerners accept Japanese data but not theory and practice? Are there many primatologies or one international science? 208 SECTION 4 ENLARGING THE LENS: CLOSELY RELATED DISCIPLINES 215 11 The Divergent Case of Cultural Anthropology Naomi Quinn 223 12 Standpoint Matters-in Archaeology, for Example Alison Wylie 243 13 Paradigms and Primates: Bateman's Principle, Passive Females, and Perspecties from Other Taxa Zuleyma Tang-Martinez 261 14 Culture, Disciplinary Tradition, and the Study of Behavior: Sex, Rats, and Spotted Hyenas Stephen E. Glickman 275 15 Changing Views on Imitation in Primates Richard W. Byrne 296 E-MAIL EXCHANGES: Did sociobiology make a difference in our ideas about primate society? Did women studying primates make a difference? 310 SECTION 5 MODELS OF SCIENCE AND SOCIETY 321 16 Primate Suspect: Some Varieties of Science Studies Charis M. Thompson Cussins 329 17 A Well-Articulated Primatology: Reflections of a Fellow Traveler Bruno Latour 358 18 Women, Gender, and Science: Some Parallels between Primatology and Developmental Biology Evelyn Fox Keller 382 19 Morphing in the Order: Flexible Strategies, Feminist Science Studies, and Primate Revisions Donna Haraway 398 20 Life in the Field: The Nature of Popular Culture in 1950s America Gregg Mitman 421 21 Politics, Gender, and Worldly Primatology: The Goodall-Fossey Nexus Brian E. Noble 436 E-MAIL EXCHANGES: The fight about science-why does it happen? Primatologists and the media-why do primatologists agonize about it? 463 SECTION 6 REFORMULATING THE QUESTIONS 473 22 Science Encounters Shirley C. Strum 475 23 Gender Encounters Linda M. Fedigan 498 SECTION 7 CONCLUSIONS AND IMPLICATIONS 521 24 Future Encounters: The Media and Science; Gender and Science on the Periphery; The Science Wars; The Value of Primate Studies; The Future of Primates and Primate Studies; Finale: New Teams Shirley C. Strum and Linda M. Fedigan 523 References 541 Contributors 619 Index 623 FROM THE DUST JACKET: How have our conceptions of primate behavior and society changed since primatology came into its own after World War 11? What kind of science is primatology, and what role have women scientists played in its development? Primate Encounters represents a pioneering attempt to answer these questions by bringing together two groups who often ask them: scientists and those who study scientists. The result is a fascinating and provocative collective reflection on primatology and on science in general, and on the relations of both to broader cultural, historical, and social issues. Beginning with a history of ideas about primate society, the book continues with personal reflections from senior primatologists who have lived that history. Other chapters reveal the diversity of "primatologies" that exist outside North America, compare the history of primatology to that of closely related disciplines such as archaeology and animal behavior, and examine the roles that gender, media, society, and technology have played in the development of the field. Closing chapters synthesize the many issues, controversies, and conclusions that emerged through the collaborative process of creating this volume and explore the future of primate encounters. With contributions by a number of well-known figures in both primatology and science studies, Primate Encounters demonstrates the exciting possibilities that arise when scholars from both sides of the "Science Wars" trade ideas rather than insults. The book also includes a selection of informal email exchanges that allows readers to experience firsthand some of the lively discussions generated by such a diverse group of contributors. ABOUT THE EDITORS: SHIRLEY C. STRUM is professor of anthropology at the University of California, San Diego. She is author of Almost Human: A Journey into the World of Baboons and coeditor of The New Physical Anthropology and Natural Connections: Perspectives in Community-Based Conservation. Strum has studied olive baboons in Kenya since 1972 and is director of the Uaso Ngiro Baboon Project. LINDA MARIE FEDIGAN is professor of anthropology at the University of Alberta. She is author of Primate Paradigms: Sex Roles and Social Bonds, published by the University of Chicago Press, and coeditor of The Monkeys of Arashiyama: Thirty-Five Years of Research in Japan and the West. Fedigan has studied the Arashiyama West group of Japanese macaques since 1972 and the white-faced capuchins of Santa Rosa in Costa Rica since 1983. FROM SECTION 1: INTRODUTION AND HISTORY Changing Views of Primate Society: A Situated North American View Shirley C. Strum and Linda M. Fedigan Introduction This chapter has its own history-one that is relevant to its current form. Primatology is a young science that has come into its own since the end of World War II. During this short period, scholars' interpretations of primate behavior and society have changed considerably. These changes have generated a great deal of interest among feminists, historians of science, and the popular media because they have been linked to a provocative claim: that women scientists played a major role in the revisions. This book derives from a workshop that was motivated by the interest in this controversy. Before it was possible to explore who or what might be responsible for changing our ideas about primates, we needed to ask a more basic question: Have our ideas changed and, if so, exactly which ideas? At the beginning of our collaboration, we spent many hours talking about this. Fortunately, both of us had taught classes on the history of primate studies. To our surprise (and delight), we agreed on most things. Ideas had changed significantly, we believed, from the period of the first scientific field studies to the present; we even agreed on which ideas these were. Both of our courses segmented the period into the same historical stages emarcating shifts in interpretations and identified a set of enduring issues that persisted despite various transformations. Armed with these tools, we began to compile the history of changing ideas about primate society that is presented below. We intended it to be a springboard to the more important question concerning the agents responsible for change. Presenting an accurate history of ideas about primate society is a daunting task, particularly for nonhistorians. Our solution was to select and present a more manageable limited history that concentrates on primate field studies (ignoring the majority of research that has been done in captivity), on evolutionary interpretations of behavior and society (ignoring the immense biomedical literature), and on work done primarily by American scientists (who of course are only part of the vast primatological enterprise). Satisfied with our efforts, we wondered whether others would agree. The answer came quickly as our condensed history became part of the position paper for the Wenner-Gren workshop on "Changing Images of Primate Society: The Role of Theory, Method, and Gender (and Culture)." Among the participants were primatologists, ethologists, and behavioral ecologists of different generations and from a variety of national traditions. What we had imagined as a logical set of restrictions for our history aroused strong reactions in others. The reasons became clear only at the end of the week-long workshop. Rather than having touched on some universal truth about the history of ideas, our consensus was more likely a product of cultural, institutional, and disciplinary factors- in short, a similarity in our graduate training. As we discovered, and as this book will demonstrate, there have been and will continue to be many "primatologies" (see chapters 2-10), each the product of specific institutions, disciplinary training, mentors, and historical and sociocultural settings. The history presented below is therefore comprehensible only if we "situate" ourselves in time and space. We are both part of the same age cohort from a lineage that can be called "North American anthropological primatology descended from Sherwood Washburn." This tradition grew out of the New Physical Anthropology (Strum, Lindburg, and Hamburg 1999) initiated by Sherwood Washburn in the 1950s. Washburn rekindled an interest in primate field studies as part of making better reconstructions of primate and human evolution. Locating ourselves this way changes the question from whether we are right or wrong in our portrayal of ideas to a more interesting set of inquiries: How, when, and why does this lineage and its view of knowledge interact, intersect, displace, and join the other primatologies, both historically and in the present? We no longer naively expect others to agree with our version of history; instead, we are interested in the disagreements. This expansion of perspectives also affects preexisting notions about who might have a different history of primatology. In fact, the deeper we delved during the workshop, the more differences we found, until it became problematic to use general categories like "American" or "European" or "Japanese." Rather than feel defeated by this realization, we see the move into the local situated sites of primatology as a first step in rebuilding a more robust understanding of what happened and is happening. This makes our potted history itself a historical document and a contribution to the newly initiated discussion about the diversity of primatologies. As such, it becomes a useful point on the increasingly complex map of our ideas about primate society. CONTRIBUTORS: Anuska Irene Alencar Departamento de Psicologia Universidade Potiguar Natal, RN Brazil Pamela Asquith Department of Anthropology University of Alberta Edmonton, Alberta Canada TOG 2H4 Richard Byrne Department of Psychology University of St. Andrews St. Andrews, Fife Scotland KY16 9JU Charis Thompson Cussins Department of Sociology and Women's Studies Program University of Illinois at Urbana-Champagne Urbana, Illinois USA 61801 Linda Marie Fedigan Department of Anthropology University of Alberta Edmonton, Alberta Canada T6G 2H4 Stephen Glickman Department of Psychology University of California Berkeley, California USA 94720 Donna Haraway History of Consciousness Department University of California Santa Cruz, California USA 95064 Robert A. Hinde Sub-Department of Animal Behaviour Madingley and St. John's College Cambridge England CB2 lTP Alison Jolly Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology Princeton University Princeton, New Jersey USA 08544 Evelyn Fox Keller Program in Science, Technology, and Society Massachusetts Institute of Technology Cambridge, Massachusetts USA 02139 Bruno Latour Centre de Sociologie de L'lnnovation Ecole des Mines Paris France Gregg Mitman Department of History of Science University of Oklahoma Norman, Oklahoma USA 70319 Brian Noble Department of Anthropology and Sociology/Museum of Anthropology University of British Columbia Vancouver, British Columbia Canada Naomi Quinn Department of Cultural Anthropology Duke University Box 90091 Durham, North Carolina USA 27708-0091 Thelma Rowell Department of Integrative Biology University of California at Berkeley Berkeley, California USA 94720 Karen Strier Department of Anthropology University of Wisconsin-Madison Madison, Wisconsin USA 53706 Shirley C. Strum Department of Anthropology University of California, San Diego La Jolla, California USA 92093-0532 Robert Sussman Department of Anthropology Washington University St. Louis, Missouri USA 63130 Hiroyuki Takasaki Laboratory of Anthropology Okayama University of Science Okayama 700-0005 Japan Zuleyma Tang-Martinez Department of Biology University of Missouri-St. Louis St. Louis, Missouri USA 63121 Jan A.R.A.M. van Hooff Universiteit Utrecht Utrecht Pb 80-086, 3508 TB The Netherlands Alison Wylie Department of Philosophy Washington University St. Louis, Missouri USA Maria Emilia Yamamoto Departamento de Psicologia Universidade Potiguar Natal, RN Brazil WHERE TO ORDER: University of Chicago Press 11030 S. Langley Avenue Chicago, IL 60628 1-800-621-2736 (Toll Free) 1-800-621-8476 (Toll Free Fax) ISBN: 0-226-77754-5 (Cloth) Price: $35 Emali: kh@press.uchicago.edu http://www.press.uchicago.edu
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