The Infanticide Controversy: Primatology and the Art of Field Science
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The Infanticide Controversy: Primatology and the Art of Field Science
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Overview
Meticulously tracing the history of the infanticide debates, and drawing on extensive interviews with field scientists, Rees investigates key theoretical and methodological themes that have characterized field studies of apes and monkeys in the twentieth century. As a detailed study of the scientific method and its application to field research, The Infanticide Controversy sheds new light on our understanding of scientific practice, focusing in particular on the challenges of working in “natural” environments, the relationship between objectivity and interpretation in an observational science, and the impact of the public profile of primatology on the development of primatological research. Most importantly, it also considers the wider significance that the study of field science has in a period when the ecological results of uncontrolled human interventions in natural systems are becoming ever more evident.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780226707112 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Chicago Press |
| Publication date: | 11/15/2009 |
| Edition description: | New Edition |
| Pages: | 304 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.10(w) x 9.10(h) x 1.00(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
The Infanticide Controversy
Primatology and the Art of Field ScienceBy AMANDA REES
The University of Chicago Press
Copyright © 2009 The University of ChicagoAll right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-226-70711-2
Chapter One
Primates in the Field: Doing Field Science, 1929–74
Introduction
In the opening decades of the twentieth century, two key figures had turned their attention to what was then known about the bodies, minds, and behavior of the nonhuman primates and the uses this information had been put to. On either side of the Atlantic, Robert Yerkes and Solly Zuckerman were appalled to find that the literature on the lives of wild primates was largely inaccurate, unreliable, and extremely limited and were scathing in their condemnation of their predecessors. For example, in 1929, Robert Yerkes and his wife Ada published their summary of the extant knowledge of the great apes. Even though their review specifically excluded such obvious suspects as "naturalistic or collecting expeditions and ... transient or long continued but usually somewhat sporadic observations of travellers, hunters and animal trainers and caretakers," they still found that "superstitions, surmises, rumours, accidental and unverifiable observations, inferences and unwarranted conclusions, have been repeated through the centuries" (Yerkes and Yerkes 1929, 582, 2). Solly Zuckerman, writing in 1932, complained that "information about mammalian social behaviour has continued to accumulate mainly in the form of travellers' tales—tales which seldom rest upon the accurate personal observation of their narrators; anecdotes in which factual and interpretive elements are inextricably mingled" (Zuckerman 1981/1932, 11). Although both books argued that studying the primates, particularly their social behavior, would present a wonderful opportunity for developing "experimental sociology and important new departures in social psychology" (Yerkes and Yerkes 1929, 255), they complained that the "web of romance" (Zuckerman 1981/1932, 2) in which the subject was ensnared meant such an endeavor was impossible at that time.
Knowledge about the nonhuman primates, especially the apes, was important, they argued, because these animals could act as substitutes for the bodies and minds of human beings. This had worked well in the laboratory, where apes and monkeys had been used as research subjects in anatomical, physiological, and psychological studies, but when it came to studying their social or group behavior, it appeared that speculation was the order of the day. In an early example of the kind of extrascientific uses the primatological literature had been and would be put to, Yerkes and Zuckerman suggested that writers found themselves in the happy position of being able to pick and choose amid accounts of nonhuman primate society. The literature available was so incomplete, so partial, and so contradictory that it could be taken to support almost any position one might choose to adopt. But how could more certain knowledge about the nonhuman primates be achieved? For Yerkes in particular, natural social behavior could not be understood in the artificial conditions of the laboratory: only in the field could one study it in its original context, the conditions under which these behaviors had probably evolved and that might also have applied to the evolution of human behavior. But how should one go about studying behavior in the field?
This chapter will explore the origins of the field research tradition in behavioral primatology, concentrating on the methodological issues of central concern in the debates running through the discipline during the first decade and a half of modern primatological field research. Essentially, researchers were trying to establish how one might go about the systematic, scientific observation of natural behavior under field conditions. This raised a number of interrelated issues—issues that often could not be resolved but had to be constantly managed at the levels of both the individual and the discipline as a whole. Since researchers wanted to study animals living under natural conditions, they had to travel to the field. Given this, at least two further sets of questions were immediately posed. How could one do science in an environment characterized by conditions so very different from those found in the laboratory, the iconic scientific space of the twentieth century? And what was meant by this innocuous term "natural conditions"? But these were not the only problems nascent primatologists faced: for example, people working on primate behavior came from many nations and from diverse backgrounds, thus ensuring that the difficulty of translating between languages and disciplines also affected these debates. As this chapter will show, however, it was in the attempts to answer these questions that the roots of the infanticide controversy grew, as researchers developed pragmatic compromises and partial solutions to intractable problems such as the definition of nature, the adjudication of humans' place in the natural world, and the need to standardize the (almost) infinite variety of places and social structures where primates could be found. At the same time as they were observing the behavior of free-living primates, researchers were being forced to make decisions on how such observations should be accomplished so they might be transmitted to interested communities as accurate reflections of some aspect of the natural world. It was under these conditions that the "fieldworker's regress" was to flourish.
Prewar and Postwar Primates
Robert Yerkes provided the impetus for the first attempts at naturalistic, systematic study of the great apes to establish factual knowledge that could "imply more than hunter, collector, or wandering field naturalist can supply" (587). In pursuit of this project, he sent three students to observe the behavior of chimpanzees (Henry Nissen), gorillas (Harold Bingham), and howler monkeys (Clarence Ray Carpenter). Of these three attempts to study primates in the wild, Carpenter's was undeniably the most successful, and in 1934 he published his account of the social life of the howler monkeys of Barro Colorado Island in the Panama Canal. Based on eight months of observation during 1931–33, Carpenter regaled his audience with details about not just how and where the animals moved and what they ate, but the way their groups were integrated, social relations within and between groups, how group behavior was coordinated, the relationship between the sexes, and the ways both sexes responded to infants and juveniles. In his foreword to this monograph Yerkes concluded that this not only was the "first reasonably reliable working analysis of the constitutions of social groups in the infra-human primates" (Yerkes 1964, 4) but also provided a standard against which successors could measure themselves, most especially Carpenter's analysis of the practical problems of observing primates in the field and the methodological solutions he suggested.
However, this auspicious beginning did not mark the onset of the systematic studies that Yerkes had so eagerly anticipated. Although laboratory research on the anatomy and psychology of the primates continued, as did the attempts to theorize the nature and origin of primate sociality, the field-based reports published in the 1940s and 1950s tended, with a few exceptions, to be either based on isolated observations or undertaken as an adjunct to other research interests. So, for example, in 1940, Beatty reported seeing a chimpanzee cracking nuts in Liberia (Beatty 1951); in 1953 Nolte made a brief examination of the behavior of Indian macaques (Nolte 1955); the East African Virus Research Institute had made fairly detailed descriptions of the behavior of free-living African redtail monkeys (Haddow 1952) as a complement to its laboratory work; and March made unsuccessful attempts to watch gorillas in Nigeria during 1955 and 1956 (March 1957). More systematic studies of the howlers of Barro Colorado had been conducted by Collias and Southwick in 1951 (Collias and Southwick 1952) and by Altmann in 1955 (Altmann 1959). Bolwig had watched baboons in South Africa in 1955 (Bolwig 1959b), and the prosimians of Madagascar had been studied in 1954 and 1956 by Jean-Jacques Petter, among others (Petter 1965). And finally, although largely unknown to Western researchers until the late 1950s, Japanese researchers had been studying the behavior of Japan's indigenous macaques since 1948 (Frisch 1959). This lack of prolonged, naturalistic studies of nonhuman primates, such as those provided by Carpenter, was deeply regretted by anthropologists and anatomists like Ernest Hooton and Adolph Schultz. During an interdisciplinary symposium on primate studies held in the mid-1950s, Hooton made his views plain: "I view with utmost dismay the lack of sustained interest in such studies, the present reluctance of institutions to promote them and the difficulty of financing them" (Hooton 1954, 186). Having reviewed the accomplishments of primatology in the first half of the 1950s, Schultz regretfully concluded that in fieldwork, "little progress has been made in this direction since the exemplary and well-known contributions by Carpenter" (Schultz 1955, 55). But this situation was soon to change.
Less than a decade after Schultz complained of the moribund state of behavioral primate research, Irven DeVore and Richard Lee (1963, 67) were able to publish an (in)complete list of completed, planned, and ongoing field research on primates that ran to nearly fifty entries. The modern period of primate field research in Europe and North America really began in 1958–63. For apes, this was marked by the establishment of the Gorilla Research Unit in Uganda, supported by the University of the Witwatersrand (Dart 1960, 1961; Emlen 1960; Tobias 1961; Schaller 1965a, 1965b); the three separate studies of chimpanzees that began in the early sixties (Good-all 1962; Reynolds 1963; Kortlandt 1962); and Schaller's brief observations of orangutans on Sarawak in 1960–61 (1961). Hall's baboon studies began in South Africa in 1958 (1960), the work of Washburn and DeVore on the baboons of Kenya and Rhodesia began in 1959 (1961), and Kummer and Kurt published the results of their work in Ethiopia in 1963. Surveys of rhesus macaques in India by Southwick, Beg, and Siddiqi were conducted in 1959 and 1960 (1961a, 1961b), and Simonds made behavioral observations in 1961 and 1962 (1965). Jay had watched Indian langurs from 1958 to 1959 (1962), and the Japan India Joint Project in Primates Investigation had done so from 1961 to 1963 (Sugiyama 1964). In addition, the Japanese Monkey Centre, itself established in 1956, had sent out teams in 1958 to survey Africa and Southeast Asia for sites where wild primates could be watched, to complement their work on captive and provisioned Japanese macaques (Frisch 1959). Concentrated overwhelmingly on apes and large-bodied, mostly terrestrial monkeys in Africa and Asia, these projects represented the first wave of primatological field site studies, studies that were to grow exponentially over the next four decades as primatology became institutionalized as an independent discipline.
The emergence of societies, symposia, and dedicated journals marked the onset of this process of academic institutionalizing in the early 1960s, with behavioral studies of free-living primates taking center stage in the development of this new discipline. For example, in 1962 alone four meetings were held in Europe and the United States. Papers dealing with the behavior of both wild and captive primates dominated the British and American meetings (Schultz 1964), although the continuing importance of the use of primates in biomedical research was illustrated in the fourth conference, held at Beaverton, Oregon, to mark the opening of a new primate research center there. In 1963 the International Primatological Society was founded, and its first congress was held in Frankfurt in 1966 (Carpenter 1969). Also in 1963, the first Western journal dedicated to the study of the primates appeared (the Japanese journal Primates had been founded in 1959, although it did not attract much attention in the West until some time after it began to publish in English). Folia Primatologica, on the other hand, quickly began to publish the results of Westerners' field studies of free-living primates. In fact, the very first article in this new international journal was Kummer and Kurt's account of their year in the field studying the baboons of Ethiopia. Seven others were to appear over the next four years, and field studies continued to be reported in other journals such as Behaviour, American Journal of Physical Anthropology, Science, Man, and Journal of the Zoological Society of London. But the appearance of Folia Primatologica is interesting not just because of its significance as the first Western journal dedicated to this emerging discipline, but also because of the explanation given for its origins. The editors explicitly located its genesis in Huxley's admonition to "look at man's place in nature": on this reading, the natural origins of humanity were to be the "foundation of modern primatology" (Anon. 1963, 1). This both continued and endorsed a tradition that had a long history: as Yerkes and Zuckerman had pointed out, the nonhuman primates were of interest because of their similarities to human beings and their capacity to substitute for humans. Like primates in the laboratory, free-living primates were ultimately to be used as a means of studying some aspect of human life inaccessible in modern human bodies and minds, for either practical or ethical reasons.
Establishing Field Traditions
Even as this new disciplinary specialty established its institutions, so the range of primate species studied in a number of locations grew from the late 1950s into the mid-1970s. Researchers, however, continued to focus on the problems and questions Carpenter and Zuckerman had raised in the previous decades. These issues not only related to the growing body of knowledge about the lives and behavior of nonhuman primates, which I will discuss in detail in chapter 2, but also persistently interrogated the contexts within which this information about the lives of the primates is obtained, and the uses it is, or can be, put to. It is evident from the concerns researchers raised in this period that Yerkes's vision of the establishment of sites where "work can continue uninterruptedly for years and where observations on mode of life and environmental relations may be checked, verified and supplemented as desired" (Yerkes and Yerkes 1929, 587) represented an ideal that proved extremely hard to realize. Researchers continued to emphasize the unsatisfactory nature of their knowledge of primate behavior: in particular the lack of systematic, reliable studies of social behavior in the wild as opposed to the analysis of dyadic interactions in the laboratory.
This dissatisfaction can be traced back to the challenge Carpenter laid down in 1942, when he called for the observation of
whole animals in natural, organised, undisturbed groups living in that environment which operated selectively on the species and to which the species is fittingly adapted ... [and the application of] the scientific method in field studies of non-human primates.... Absolute objectivity, accuracy of recording and report, and adequate samplings of observations can be made to characterise alike field investigations and those of the laboratory. (Carpenter 1964, 342–43)
Two themes that were to prove crucial to the development of primatological field practice are being drawn on here. The first is the assertion that that the proper object of the primatological gaze is not just the behavior of the individual animal but its behavior in the context of the whole group, which in turn must be observed in the environment in which the species evolved. Only in this way can the adaptive origins of behavior be understood. This approach was to become characteristic of many examples of field science, emphasizing the holistic nature of the topic of study: animals' actions cannot be understood in isolation from their social and environmental context. Systems must be studied in interaction, not in isolation, as in the laboratory. Carpenter's second assertion, however, explicitly rejected the notion that the study of behavior in the field need be any less "scientific" than its study in the lab: objectivity, accuracy, and the description of representative behavior are to be sought and achieved in both locations.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Infanticide Controversy by AMANDA REES Copyright © 2009 by The University of Chicago. Excerpted by permission of The University of Chicago Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
AcknowledgmentsIntroduction: The Infanticide Controversy
Part 1: Fielding the Question
1 Primates in the Field: Doing Field Science, 1929-74
2 Studying Primate Societies, 1930-74
Part 2: The Infanticide Debates
3 Infanticide’s Infancy
4 From Controversy to Consensus? 1974-84
5 Controversy Resurgent
Part 3: Questioning the Field
6 Accounting for Infanticide, 2001-3
7 Controversy and Authority, Narrative and Testimony
Conclusion
Appendix: Infanticide Interviews, 2002-3
Notes
References
Index