Primate Visions: Gender, Race, and Nature in the World of Modern Science

"Donna Harraway is an extremely imaginative as well as a very theoretically sophisticated scholar. This is her monumental book. It’s a history of 20th century primatology, starting with a fantastic chapter about the taxidermy in the Natural History Museum and the American Museum of Natural History, where animals were presented in conventional nuclear family units. Primate Visions combines history of science with ethnography of primatologists. Primatology is a highly politicised area, for the reasons I’ve already talked about. It’s been an arena for working out gender issues within the community of scientists and scholars because the connection between people and our nearest relatives have often been used to justify male dominant social organisations. “Primatology has been an arena for working out gender issues in humans” When primatologists looked at baboons, they saw stark sexual dimorphism. The males have bigger teeth, for instance, and the dominant ones collect harems. That was until the 1960s, when women started going out into the field and observing the same baboons. It turns out that male primatologists tend to focus on male baboons, while their female colleagues also looked at female baboons. And it turns out there is also a hierarchy among the females—and because male baboons can’t always defend their harems, females may wander off into the high grass to consort with others. So, baboon society looks very different, depending on whether you’re focused on male or female baboons. That’s a little hard for a historian to answer. The temptation to say that similar practices surrounding animals have a similar social meaning is strong. Sometimes similar practices have similar meanings, sometimes they don’t. Historians tend to be reluctant to generalise outside cultures we know well. Things like pet-keeping can be embedded very differently across cultures, or even in different parts of the same culture. For instance, what pet-keeping means to upper-class people or middle-class people who have small toy dogs has always been different to people who keep working animals."