Primate Visions

Gender, Race, and Nature in the World of Modern Science

Donna J. Haraway

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136608148
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Kunst
• Subtopic: Volkskultur in der Kunst

Haraway's discussions of how scientists have perceived the sexual nature of female primates opens a new chapter in feminist theory, raising unsettling questions about models of the family and of heterosexuality in primate research.

1

INTRODUCTION:
THE PERSISTENCE OF VISION

The names you uncaged primates give things affect your attitude to them forever after. (Herschberger 1970 [1948])

For thus all things must begin, with an act of love. (Marais 1980)

How are love, power, and science intertwined in the constructions of nature in the late twentieth century?¹ What may count as nature for late industrial people? What forms does love of nature take in particular historical contexts? For whom and at what cost? In what specific places, out of which social and intellectual histories, and with what tools is nature constructed as an object of erotic and intellectual desire? How do the terrible marks of gender and race enable and constrain love and knowledge in particular cultural traditions, including the modem natural sciences? Who may contest for what the body of nature will be? These questions guide my history of the modern sciences and popular cultures emerging from accounts of the bodies and lives of monkeys and apes.

The themes of race, sexuality, gender, nation, family, and class have been written into the body of nature in western life sciences since the eighteenth century. In the wake of post-World War II decolonization, local and global feminist and anti-racist movements, nuclear and environmental threats, and broad consciousness of the fragility of earth’s webs of life, nature remains a crucially important and deeply contested myth and reality. How do material and symbolic threads interweave in the fabric of late twentieth-century nature for industrial people?

Monkeys and apes have a privileged relation to nature and culture for western people: simians occupy the border zones between those potent mythic poles. In the border zones, love and knowledge are richly ambiguous and productive of meanings in which many people have a stake. The commercial and scientific traffic in monkeys and apes is a traffic in meanings, as well as in animal lives. The sciences that tie monkeys, apes, and people together in a Primate Order are built through disciplined practices deeply enmeshed in narrative, politics, myth, economics, and technical possibilities. The women and men who have contributed to primate studies have carried with them the marks of their own histories and cultures. These marks are written into the texts of the lives of monkeys and apes, but often in subtle and unexpected ways. People who study other primates are advocates of contending scientific discourses, and they are accountable to many kinds of audiences and patrons. These people have engaged in dynamic, disciplined, and intimate relations of love and knowledge with the animals they were privileged to watch. Both the primatologists and the animals on whose lives they reported command intense popular interest—in natural history museums, television specials, zoos, hunting, photography, science fiction, conservation politics, advertising, cinema, science news, greeting cards, jokes. The animals have been claimed as privileged subjects by disparate life and human sciences—anthropology, medicine, psychiatry, psychobiology, reproductive physiology, linguistics, neural biology, paleontology, and behavioral ecology. Monkeys and apes have modeled a vast array of human problems and hopes. Most of all, in European, American, and Japanese societies, monkeys and apes have been subjected to sustained, culturally specific interrogations of what it means to be “almost human.”

Monkeys and apes—and the people who construct scientific and popular knowledge about them—are part of cultures in contention. Never innocent, the visualizing narrative “technology” of this book draws from contemporary theories of cultural production, historical and social studies of science and technology, and feminist and anti-racist movements and theories to craft a view of nature as it is constructed and reconstructed in the bodies and lives of “third world” animals serving as surrogates for “man.”

I have tried to fill Primate Visions with potent verbal and visual images—the corpse of a gorilla shot in 1921 in the “heart of Africa” and transfixed into a lesson in civic virtue in the American Museum of Natural History in New York City; a little white girl brought into the Belgian Congo in the 1920s to hunt gorilla with a camera, who metamorphosized in the 1970s into a writer of science fiction considered for years as a model of masculine prose; the chimpanzee HAM in his space capsule in the Mercury Project in 1961; HAM’s chimp contemporary, David Greybeard, reaching out to Jane Goodall, “alone” in the “wilds of Tanzania” in the year in which 15 African primate-habitat nations achieved national independence; a Vanity Fair special on the murdered Dian Fossey in a gorilla graveyard in Rwanda in 1986; the bones of an ancient fossil, reconstructed as the grandmother of humanity, laid out like jewels on red velvet in a paleontologist’s laboratory in a pattern to ground, once again, a theory of the origin of “monogamy”; infant monkeys in Harry Harlow’s laboratory in the 1960s clinging to cloth and wire “surrogate mothers” at an historical moment when the images of surrogacy began to surface in American reproductive politics; the emotionally wrenching embrace between a young, middle-class, white woman scientist and an adult American Sign Language-speaking chimpanzee on an island in the River Gambia, where white women teach captive apes to “return” to the “wild”; a Hallmark greeting card reversing the images of King Kong with a monstrous blond woman and a cringing silverback gorilla in bed in a drama called “Getting Even”; the anatomical drawings of living and fossil female apes sharing the basic lines of their bodies with a modern human female, in order to teach medical students the functional meaning of human adaptations; ordinary women and men from Africa, the United States, Japan, Europe, India, and elsewhere, with tape recorders and data clipboards transcribing the lives of monkeys and apes into specialized texts that become contested items in political controversies in many cultures.

I am writing about primates because they are popular, important, marvelously varied, and controversial. And all members of the Primate Order—monkeys, apes, and people—are threatened. Late twentieth-century primatology may be seen as part of a complex survival literature in global, nuclear culture. Many people, including myself, have emotional, political, and professional stakes in the production and stabilization of knowledge about the order of primates. This will not be a disinterested, objective study, nor a comprehensive one—partly because such studies are impossible for anyone, partly because I have stakes I want to make visible (and probably others as well). I want this book to be interesting for many audiences, and pleasurable and disturbing for all of us. In particular, I want this book to be responsible to primatologists, to historians of science, to cultural theorists, to the broad left, anti-racist, anti-colonial, and women’s movements, to animals, and to lovers of serious stories. It is perhaps not always possible to be accountable to those contending audiences, but they have all made this book possible. They are all inside this text. Primates existing at the boundaries of so many hopes and interests are wonderful subjects with whom to explore the permeability of walls, the reconstitution of boundaries, the distaste for endless socially enforced dualisms.

Fact and Fiction

Both science and popular culture are intricately woven of fact and fiction. It seems natural, even morally obligatory, to oppose fact and fiction; but their similarities run deep in western culture and language. Facts can be imagined as original, irreducible nodes from which a reliable understanding of the world can be constructed. Facts ought to be discovered, not made or constructed. But the etymology of facts refers us to human action, performance, indeed, to human feats (OED). Deeds, as opposed to words, are the parents of facts. That is, human action is at the root of what we can see as a fact, linguistically and historically. A fact is the thing done, a neuter past participle in our Roman parent language. In that original sense, facts are what has actually happened. Such things are known by direct experience, by testimony, and by interrogation—extraordinarily privileged routes to knowledge in North America.

Fiction can be imagined as a derivative, fabricated version of the world and experience, as a kind of perverse double for the facts or as an escape through fantasy into a better world than “that which actually happened.” But tones of meaning in fiction make us hear its origin in vision, inspiration, insight, genius. We hear the root of fiction in poetry and we believe, in our Romantic moments, that original natures are revealed in good fiction. That is, fiction can be true, known to be true by an appeal to nature. And as nature is prolific, the mother of life in our major myth systems, fiction seems to be an inner truth which gives birth to our actual lives. This, too, is a very privileged route to knowledge in western cultures, including the United States. And finally, the etymology of fiction refers us once again to human action, to the act of fashioning, forming, or inventing, as well as to feigning. Fiction is inescapably implicated in a dialectic of the true (natural) and the counterfeit (artifactual). But in all its meanings, fiction is about human action. So, too, are all the narratives of science—fiction and fact—about human action.

Fiction’s kinship to facts is close, but they are not identical twins. Facts are opposed to opinion, to prejudice, but not to fiction. Both fiction and fact are rooted in an epistemology that appeals to experience. However, there is an important difference; the word fiction is an active form, referring to a present act of fashioning, while fact is a descendant of a past participle, a word form which masks the generative deed or performance. A fact seems done, unchangeable, fit only to be recorded; fiction seems always inventive, open to other possibilities, other fashionings of life. But in this opening lies the threat of merely feigning, of not telling the true form of things.

From some points of view, the natural sciences seem to be crafts for distinguishing between fact and fiction, for substituting the past participle for the invention, and thus preserving true experience from its counterfeit. For example, the history of primatology has been repeatedly told as a progressive clarification of sightings of monkeys, apes, and human beings. First came the original intimations of primate form, suggested in the pre-scientific mists in the inventive stories of hunters, travelers, and natives, beginning perhaps in ancient times, perhaps in the equally mythic Age of Discovery and of the Birth of Modern Science in the sixteenth century. Then gradually came clear-sighted vision, based on anatomical dissection and comparison. The story of correct vision of primate social form has the same plot: progress from misty sight, prone to invention, to sharp-eyed quantitative knowledge rooted in that kind of experience called, in English, experiment. It is a story of progress from immature sciences based on mere description and free qualitative interpretation to mature science based on quantitative methods and falsifiable hypotheses, leading to a synthetic scientific reconstruction of primate reality. But these histories are stories about stories, narratives with a good ending; i.e., the facts put together, reality reconstructed scientifically. These are stories with a particular aesthetic, realism, and a particular politics, commitment to progress.

From only a slightly different perspective, the history of science appears as a narrative about the history of technical and social means to produce the facts. The facts themselves are types of stories, of testimony to experience. But the provocation of experience requires an elaborate technology—including physical tools, an accessible tradition of interpretation, and specific social relations. Not just anything can emerge as a fact; not just anything can be seen or done, and so told. Scientific practice may be considered a kind of story-telling practice—a rule-governed, constrained, historically changing craft of narrating the history of nature. Scientific practice and scientific theories produce and are embedded in particular kinds of stories. Any scientific statement about the world depends intimately upon language, upon metaphor. The metaphors may be mathematical or they may be culinary; in any case, they structure scientific vision. Scientific practice is above all a story-telling practice in the sense of historically specific practices of interpretation and testimony.

Looking at primatology, a branch of the life sciences, as a story-telling craft may be particularly appropriate. First, the discourse of biology, beginning near the first decades of the nineteenth century, has been about organisms, beings with a life history; i.e., a plot with structure and function.² Biology is inherently historical, and its form of discourse is inherently narrative. Biology as a way of knowing the world is kin to Romantic literature, with its discourse about organic form and function. Biology is the fiction appropriate to objects called organisms; biology fashions the facts “discovered” from organic beings. Organisms perform for the biologist, who transforms that performance into a truth attested by disciplined experience; i.e., into a fact, the jointly accomplished deed or feat of the scientist and the organism. Romanticism passes into realism, and realism into naturalism, genius into progress, insight into fact. Both the scientist and the organism are actors in a story-telling practice.

Second, monkeys, apes, and human beings emerge in primatology inside elaborate narratives about origins, natures, and possibilities. Primatology is about the life history of a taxonomic order that includes people. Especially western people produce stories about primates while simultaneously telling stories about the relations of nature and culture, animal and human, body and mind, origin and future. Indeed, from the start, in the mid-eighteenth century, the primate order has been built on tales about these dualisms and their scientific resolution.

To treat a science as narrative is not to be dismissive, quite the contrary. But neither is it to be mystified and worshipful in the face of a past participle. I am interested in the narratives of scientific fact—those potent fictions of science—within a complex field indicated by the signifier SF. In the late 1960s science fiction anthologist and critic Judith Merril idiosyncratically began using the signifier SF to designate a complex emerging narrative field in which boundaries between science fiction (conventionally, sf) and fantasy became highly permeable in confusing ways, commercially and linguistically. Her designation, SF, came to be widely adopted as critics, readers, writers, fans, and publishers struggled to comprehend an increasingly heterodox array of writing, reading, and marketing practices indicated by a proliferation of “sf” phrases: speculative fiction, science fiction, science fantasy, speculative futures, speculative fabulation.

SF is a territory of contested cultural reproduction in high-technology worlds. Placing the narratives of scientific fact within the heterogeneous space of SF produces a transformed field. The transformed field sets up resonances among all of its regions and components. No region or component is “reduced” to any other, but reading and writing practices respond to each other across a structured space. Speculative fiction has different tensions when its field also contains the inscription practices that constitute scientific fact. The sciences have complex histories in the constitution of imaginative worlds and of actual bodies in modern and postmodern “first world” cultures. Teresa de Lauretis speculated that the sign work of SF was “potentially creative of new forms of social imagination, creative in the sense of mapping out areas where cultural change could take place, of envisioning a different order of relationships between people and between people and things, a different conceptualization of social existence, inclusive of physical and material existence” (1980: 161). This is also one task of the “sign work” of primatology.

So, in part, Primate Visions reads the primate text as science fiction, where possible worlds are constantly reinvented in the contest for very real, present worlds. The conclusion perversely reads a sf story about an alien species that intervenes in human reproductive politics as if it were a monograph from the primate field. Beginning with the myths, sciences, and historical social practices that placed apes in Eden and apes in space, at the beginnings and ends of western culture, Primate Visions locates aliens in the text as a way to understand love and knowledge among primates on a contemporary fragile earth.

Four Temptations

Analyzing a scientific discourse, primatology, as story telling within several contested narrative fields is a way to enter current debates about the social construction of scientific knowledge without succumbing completely to any of four very tempting positions, which are also major resources for the approaches of this book. I use the image of temptation because I find all four positions persuasive, enabling, and also dangerous, especially if any one position finally silences all the others, creating a false harmony in the primate story.

The first resourceful temptation comes from the most active tendencies in the social studies of science and technology. For example, the French prominent analyst of science, Bruno Latour, radically rejects all forms of epistemological realism and analyzes scientific practice as thoroughly social and constructionist. He rejects the distinction between social and technical and represents scientific practice as the refinement of “inscription devices,” i.e., devices for transcribing the immense complexity and chaos of competing interpretations into unambiguous traces, writings, which mark the emergence of a fact, the case about reality. Interested in science as a fresh form of power in the social-material world and scientists as investing “their political ability in the heart of doing science,” Latour and his colleague Stephen Woolgar powerfully describe how processes of construction are made to invert and appear in the form of discovery (1979: 213). The accounts of the scientists about their own processes become ethnographic data, subject to cultural analysis.

Fundamentally, from the perspective of Laboratory Life, scientific practice is literary practice, writing, based on jockeying for the power to stabilize definitions and standards for claiming something to be the case. To win is to make the cost of destabilizing a given account too high. This approach can explain scientific contests for the power to close off debate, and it can account for both successful and unsuccessful entries in the contest. Scientific practice is negotiation, strategic moves, inscription, translation. A great deal can be said about science as effective belief and the world-changing power to enforce and embody it.³ What more can one ask of a theory of scientific practice?

The second valuable temptation comes from one branch of the marxist tradition, which argues for the historical superiority of particular structured standpoints for knowing the social world, and possibly the “natural” world as well. Fundamentally, people in this tradition find the social world to be structured by the social relations of the production and reproduction of daily life, such that it is only possible to see these relations clearly from some vantage points. This is not an individual matter, and good will is not at issue. From the standpoint of those social groups in positions of systematic domination and power, the true nature of social life will be opaque; they hav...