Читать книгу Storytelling Apes - Mary Sanders Pollock - Страница 9
ОглавлениеWe can no longer speak of reality . . . without considering how the world is altered and created when it is put into words.
—WALLACE MARTIN, Recent Theories of Narrative
I
I begin this story with a glance at some small monkeys in a small place and a scientist who loves them. The monkeys and the scientist are exemplary.
I look up from the treacherous clay path just as a toucan hops, high in the canopy, from one branch to another, its black silhouette and magnificent yellow beak clearly visible even from my position. “Are you sure it wasn’t a monkey?” asks Lorna Joachim. “When they’re going short distances, toucans sometimes hop like monkeys instead of flying.” Almost as if invoked by our longing, monkey shapes now emerge from the leafy shadows, a hundred feet above our heads. They could be spider monkeys, capuchins, or howlers—three species who share this small forest fragment in northeast Costa Rica. Almost at once, Lorna identifies the shapes as mantled black howler monkeys, who are apparently deciding whether to travel on after napping or lunching.
Lorna sees monkeys in trees because she has a search pattern for the monkeys, consisting of type and speed of movement, size, coloration, location, and the company they keep. For this species, noise is the best identifying feature, but howlers howl only on their own schedules, or if they are protesting someone’s presence. Since following howlers means constantly looking up through backlit branches, the slow, deliberate hopping movements of the monkeys are the first thing that can be spotted from the ground. Howlers are much heavier than the capuchins who also inhabit this area, and less agile than the resident spider monkeys, so they move more slowly. If the light is just right, an observer can see the males’ fluffy white scrotal fur, and if the silhouette can be distinguished clearly from the background, head and body shape are also identifying features. Finally, these howlers typically live and travel in groups of fewer than ten. Their lives are so completely arboreal that, without the search pattern, the follower probably won’t see the monkeys at all in their natural habitat.
While we watch, the small band of males, females (one with a clinging infant), and juveniles start to move gingerly from one branch to another and from one treetop to the next. Since I have never seen howlers except at the zoo, I am surprised by the care with which they pick their way. I had expected a rush of carefree abandon. But even though howlers have evolved to spend the majority of their time at the top of the forest, where the most tender leaves are found, monkeys do sometimes fall, and a fall from such a height would result in death or serious injury.
A single figure stands facing me, reaches up, and grasps the branch overhead, extending to full height. At such a distance, with the light filtering from above and behind, only the shape is visible: I cannot discern the color, sex, or size, although I can observe the monkey’s careful movements, which suggest that it is relatively heavy and therefore an adult. In this dim and tricky light, my field glasses merely enlarge the silhouette. All I can see is that the body in the tree is like mine, even though it is doing something my body could have accomplished only during the most vigorous and adventurous years of my childhood. The monkey takes me up in space and back in time. It awakens my curiosity and my desire for understanding. I could fall in love with these beings and this life.
Lorna has. I witnessed her passion that very night as we shared our beer and played endless card games in the research center dining hall. Suddenly, semiautomatic weapon fire rang out a few yards away, and the howlers abruptly ended their evening canticle. Lorna’s only fear was for the monkeys. The next day, after spending the night acting out the plot of a B movie—in a tiny SUV, on tooth-shattering roads, escaping to a sleazy motel twenty miles away—we found out that a local thug had been squatting in a cabin in La Suerte Bioreserve, which the owners have dedicated to conservation in return for a substantial tax reduction. The interloper was trying to lay claim to the cabin by means of an unusual (and irrelevant) Costa Rican law that discourages absentee ownership, and trying to impress the women he was entertaining with the size of his guns. This time, the monkeys were safe, and so were we. But all that is another story.
This book is about primates worldwide and the scientists who study them. Most primate species—apes, monkeys, and prosimians (lemurs and their close kin)—inhabit equatorial forests, uplands, and savannahs. For scientists from the so-called developed nations, these animals have been exotic, rare, and hard to study in the wild until the last fifty years, when postcolonial expansion opened up remote areas for communication and economic development. Tremendous economic, military, and environmental pressures followed, and many primate species are now on the brink of extinction before ever having been studied in their natural homes. In fact, as Jane Goodall explains in her most recent book, Hope for Animals and Their World (2009),1 there is reason to believe that many species, including some primate species, could become extinct before they are even seen in the wild by primatologists.2
Fortunately, the small groups of howlers, capuchins, and spider monkeys observed by students in Lorna Joachim’s field school belong to some of the best-known nonhuman primate species. Capuchins are the traditional “organ grinders’ monkeys.” Spider monkeys have long been zoo favorites. And howlers in Panama were first studied extensively in the 1930s by C. R. Carpenter, a student of Robert Yerkes, the founder of the discipline of primatology. Even though howlers, capuchins, and spider monkeys are not endangered, every small population is still important because, as habitats shrink and fragment, both the raw numbers and the genetic diversity of whole species decrease.
Throughout Cenozoic time, primates have developed into key players in tropical ecosystems as predators of insects and other small animals, seed dispersers, managers of undergrowth, and thinners of forest canopy. In addition, they make up a significant percentage of the forest biomass. Without primates, the forests that support them would not be themselves. And without the forests, nonhuman primates would be extinct except in zoos and research centers; they would not be themselves, either. Furthermore, almost every serious study of primates in the wild adds to the knowledge of the animals and, indirectly, of humans. Lorna and her students have been especially interested in observing play behaviors and trying to explain the capuchins’ protocultural custom of lime washing: the monkeys scar the skin of a lime, briskly rub their fur with the fruit before discarding it, and start right away with a fresh lime. Although the result is a nice-smelling monkey (at least to human sensibilities) with some insect repellency, we can only surmise that a capuchin might engage in lime washing to get these results. The whole procedure might just be an adaptive accident.
We don’t even know all the questions, much less the answers. Meanwhile, the monkey troops in La Suerte Bioreserve, Lorna’s field site, could be lost to stray bullets shot into the air by show-offs or to the whim of the landlord who owns the reserve, which is not even a forest, but a collection of forest fragments.3 There could be a change in the tax laws that now shelter the property as a reserve, a sale of the ranch to a banana exporter, a forest fire, an especially destructive hurricane, or some other consequence of global warming. If that loss were multiplied by a dozen, entire wild populations of these monkeys would indeed be at risk. Every field primatologist works on the cusp of a diminishing primate population and incalculable contingencies. Every one of them fears for the animals, with good reason. That is why I have written this book about the stories told by primatologists.
II
Humans are primates. We belong to the same order as singing siamangs, hamadryas baboons, and cotton-top tamarins. Genetically, we are more akin to the mouse lemur and slow loris than to the poodle sprawled on the carpet or the cat lounging on the kitchen table. We are apes. We share over 98 percent of our DNA with chimpanzees and bonobos—and it shows in many ways, not least in the uncanny oscillation between identification and repulsion that many people feel in their presence. On the basis of our shared genes and our shared evolutionary history, Jared Diamond calls humans “the third chimpanzee.”4 Apes, monkeys, and prosimians are significant in science and culture, not only because of the way they fill ecological niches but also because, more than any other animals, they serve as mirrors and surrogates for human beings.
My 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 native to some of the most challenging and remote areas on earth, written by some of the most iconic figures in modern science. Thus, the evolution of the field narrative as a genre reflects the development of the discipline of primatology, as well as the changing conditions in natural primate habitat, which is increasingly under siege from human encroachment.
Some of these scientists write about their work and their study animals in terms of heroic individualism. Others write stories about themselves as participant observers in fluid, complex societies in which individual animals are moving parts in a larger whole. The genre of popular primatology field narratives written by scientists originated with the publication of George Schaller’s The Year of the Gorilla, an account of his yearlong sojourn in Central Africa in 1959. He and Jane Goodall, who began her study of chimpanzees in Central Africa in 1960, wrote tales of romance and adventure. Dian Fossey, who started working with mountain gorillas about ten years after Schaller’s year with them, published a field narrative entitled Gorillas in the Mist in 1983—and, at least in artistic and media representations, lived a tragedy. Biruté Galdikas embarked on a quest into the wilds of Borneo in the early 1980s and wrote about her work with orangutans in a spiritual autobiography, Reflections of Eden, published in 1995. Like Goodall and Fossey, Galdikas presents her animal subjects as complex, larger-than-life characters.
Although field scientists were able to study monkeys in the wild and publish significant scientific studies about them by the middle of the twentieth century, popular field narratives about monkeys did not appear until Schaller and Goodall had already established the genre with their ape stories. Sarah Blaffer Hrdy first published her book about colobine monkeys, The Langurs of Abu, in 1977; it contains features of the popular primatology narrative, although educated general readers were evidently not Hrdy’s original intended audience. On the other hand, Almost Human, Shirley Strum’s 1987 account of her baboon fieldwork, was clearly written for the lay reader as well as the scientist.
These books by Hrdy and Strum resemble novels, as they are defined by one of the most influential literary theorists of the twentieth century, Mikhail Bakhtin. In Bakhtin’s view, the novel is a fluid narrative genre, composed of multiple story layers, referencing multiple literary forms, hospitable to multiple voices, and, above all, emphasizing the subjectivity and psychological autonomy of not only the author but also other personages in the story.9 The primatology field narratives I discuss in this book have these qualities; although most of them can be read as novels, the works by Strum, Hrdy, and Sapolsky resemble the messy, “dialogic,” and fluid narrative that Bakhtin theorizes as most “novelistic.” Unlike the more technical scientific literature, these informal accounts convey rich, imaginative pictures of the interior lives of primates going about their daily business in their own worlds. They also convey what it feels like to be a close observer of those worlds, sometimes to the extent that the felt realities of the study animals blur with the author’s own.
The Langurs of Abu and Almost Human also bear the feminist imprint of their time. The feminism in these books is a function not only of the political climate of the late twentieth century but also of what philosopher of science Thomas S. Kuhn has famously called a “paradigm shift,” or a shift in basic beliefs and values that allows for a new wave of discovery.10 Field scientists had much to teach those whose work was carried out in the laboratory. Following Goodall’s protocols, many field scientists came to believe that animals could be better understood if they were known as individuals, with names instead of numbers. As social scientists moved away from behaviorism—which, of course, focuses on quantifiable behaviors rather than the subjects’ interior lives—primatologists became more willing to grant their animals increased agency and something like consciousness. As a result of this shift, scientists can now speak with much greater confidence about animal behavior and cognition. They are also more willing to speculate about consciousness and agency.
An emphasis on consciousness and agency in study animals is just a trend, of course, and there are some notable exceptions to it. For example, in two highly readable books—How Monkeys See the World (1990) and Baboon Metaphysics (2007)—Dorothy Cheney and Robert Seyfarth narrate years of observations and field experiments with vervets and baboons, concluding that nonhuman primates in general do not have a complete theory of mind. In other words, Cheney and Seyfarth do not believe that monkeys and nonhuman apes fully know what they know, or fully understand how information is available (or not) to others. Cheney and Seyfarth pull back at the paradigm shift toward linking animal behavior with the possibility of animal interiority. Nevertheless, on the whole, narratives about primates have become more interesting—indeed, more literary—since the paradigm shift that occurred after Jane Goodall’s entry into primatology. Even though their animal characters are not finely drawn, Cheney and Seyfarth do introduce narrative elements to charm and hold the interest of readers accustomed to the vivid stories told by others in their discipline. If these two scientists do not participate fully in the trend of these informal field narratives, they are still influenced by it.
And the field narrative genre as story remains vital into the twenty-first century. Robert Sapolsky—younger and more jaded than Strum or Hrdy—loved his monkeys as much as anyone, but, striking out for new literary territory, he wrote A Primate’s Memoir (2001) as a self-deprecating parody of the field study. Sapolsky’s work with baboons in Kenya was originally conceived as a supplement to his controlled research in the laboratory. Certainly, Sapolsky’s background in experimental science explains his anxious oscillation between seeing the baboons as subjects and seeing them as objects. But his anxiety also seems to result from a feeling, shared by many of his colleagues and explained in his book of essays, Monkeyluv (2005), that primatology has become a female-dominated discipline. Statistics say otherwise, but the attitude about female dominance has perhaps had an impact on research, and women certainly predominate in popular media representations of wild primates and the scientists who study them.
In A Primate’s Memoir, Sapolsky ruminates on human nature as much as baboon nature—and underscores the similarities. Sapolsky’s difficulties in the laboratory and the field are intensified by pressures on fieldwork in primate habitat, as humans interfere more often and more destructively in the lives of the animals. Indeed, since primate habitat is giving way to human encroachment, field narratives as adventure stories are becoming more difficult to write. The field itself—as natural primate habitat—is almost gone, or drastically changed.
At this moment, the primatology field narrative is still a living genre, and, as Vanessa Woods’s Bonobo Handshake (2010) demonstrates, new discoveries are still being made about primates in locations where they evolved. But the planet is in danger from deforestation, pollution, human overpopulation, loss of biodiversity and ecological balance, and climate change. Most primate habitat happens to be in environmental hot spots—that is, locations where these problems are expressed most dramatically. Unless the current economic and geopolitical trends that destroy primate habitat are reversed, most nonhuman primates may soon exist only in zoos, laboratories, and reserves. If that happens, field narratives such as those I discuss in this book will be replaced by other kinds of stories. As wild populations go, so goes the literary genre about them. The reverse may also be true.
Some environmentalists complain that it is easier to inspire concern for monkeys (and other charismatic megafauna) than for monkey habitat. It would be nice if humans were more farsighted. However, as Darwin suggested, sympathy for a being like oneself, which is written into human evolutionary history, may be the root of ethics and morality. So if apes, monkeys, and prosimians are saved in landscapes where they evolved simply because humans somehow identify with them, then the forests and forest fragments that serve as the lungs of the planet will be preserved; the fresh water that is its lifeblood will be in greater supply; and global warming can perhaps be reduced or stalled.
Any story that inspires action based on sympathy and understanding is, in practical terms, a good story. The rich narratives of field primatology have such potential. If recent literary and scientific theorists are to be believed, the telling of stories is encoded in human DNA, and, since primates resemble one another so much, it makes perfect sense that those who spend their time with our next of kin would write stories about them, in the same way that we humans tell stories about members of our own species. These stories are an important part of both modern science and contemporary literature.
The stories I examine here are only a sample of the available primatology narratives (indeed, many of them exist only within the extremely popular genre of wildlife documentary). I have chosen these books because they suggest how primatologists adapt existing literary forms to convey their particular experiences, which are as varied as the primates they study. Not surprisingly, the generic development of primatology narratives roughly parallels the development of narrative forms in Western history, from the classical to the postmodern. These story forms seem so inevitable that one is tempted to say that humans only had to develop speech in order to tell them, and they make powerful rhetorical statements by engaging and challenging their readers.
In Sense of Place and Sense of Planet, Ursula Heise makes the point that certain genres can often “override” the stories that “fit less well into existing narrative patterns”—in other words, uncomfortable stories.11 The particular genius of these storytellers is their ability to deploy “comfortable” genres to do uncomfortable work. The stakes could not be higher: stories can reveal and also shape the world, and stories about our fellow primates can contribute to saving them from extinction. But the disappearance of species and habitats constitutes only one kind of loss. It is sad to remember that there will be no more stories by Shakespeare, Charlotte Brontë, or James Baldwin, all of whom made their audiences uncomfortable.
Primatology field narratives have influenced the ways in which humans understand animals, but the stories change as habitat and field conditions change, and the impact of the stories is likely to wane as the genre changes; it may be a vicious circle. We humans require challenging stories. We consume them avidly in multiple forms and at all times. As long as there are apes, monkeys, and prosimians, there will be stories about them. But if these animals are confined in zoos, sanctuaries, and even small managed reserves because their species survival necessitates human intervention and manipulation, what a loss that will be for those of us who crave stories about animals, love, death, politics, and the wild!
