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.
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