Controlling for Pongoland

This chapter investigates how Christophe Boesch's colleague and codirector Michael Tomasello derived truth claims about the anthropological difference between Homo sapiens and Pan troglodytes from controlled experiments comparing the social cognition of human children with that of grown chimpanzees. Tomasello's claim that humans were the only primates capable of culture and cooperation received an enthusiastic reception by German philosophers. Yet Boesch called into question the validity of Tomasello's findings by pointing out that the social behavior of both humans and apes was too contingent on local circumstances for Leipzig kindergarten children and zoo chimpanzees rescued from a Dutch pharmaceutical company to represent all of humanity and chimpanzeehood. He accused Tomasello of not controlling for the different conditions under which Tomasello tested humans and apes. The ensuing controversy over the relationship between laboratory work and fieldwork happened at a time when new statistical methods were opening up vast new possibilities for chimpanzee ethnography, even fostering hopes that experimentation with captive animals would become superfluous because uncontrolled observations in the wild would allow the establishment of causal relations. The chapter then assesses whether Boesch's cultural primatology could inform a different philosophical anthropology than the one drawing from Tomasello's comparative psychology.

The Birth of Cultural Primatology from the Spirit of Japanese Uniqueness

This chapter discusses the birth of cultural primatology in mid-twentieth-century Japan, looking at the prehistory of the chimpanzee culture wars. The story begins in 1948 with the observation of a troop of Japanese macaques on a subtropical islet. As Kinji Imanishi and his students fed them sweet potatoes on the beach, the monkeys invented a way of washing off the sand in the sea. Subsequently, they passed on the new behavior from generation to generation. The Japanese primatologists conceived of this social transmission as preculture. They framed their anthropomorphic conceptualization, as well as a research practice that made no effort to minimize human interference, in terms of Japanese culture. Soon Imanishi's anti-Darwinian evolutionary theory became engulfed in national and international controversy over its association with nationalist politics and its breach of the divide between science and the humanities. Ironically, this self-consciously Japanese brand of scholarship had not only appropriated European and American elements of evolutionist thought, including the idea of animal traditions, but also stirred up a controversy over primate cultures that polarized primatology far beyond the boundaries of national cultures.

Field Experiments with a Totem Animal

This chapter follows Tetsuro Matsuzawa and his coworkers to their outdoor laboratory in Bossou, Guinea. Revered as the totem animal of the Manon and deprived of almost all primary rainforest, the Bossou chimpanzees had learned to live on human crops in an agricultural landscape. In contrast to Christophe Boesch's emphasis on so-called wild cultures, Matsuzawa speculated that historically, this chimpanzee community might have learned from the human population how to crack the oil palm nuts that local farmers cultivated. Field experiments allowed the primatologists to study how female immigrants passed on their knowledge of how to crack other kinds of nuts within the group. At this point, Japanese cultural primatology contradicted the Manon's mythological understanding of “their” apes as a bounded community of nonnatural animals. Chimpanzee road crossings provided an opportunity for a natural — or really “naturecultural” — experiment in an anthropogenic environment. Ethnoprimatologists collaborating with Matsuzawa studied the ecological interface between humans and primates and used their insights for conservationist ends. After a political conflict over the protection of a small patch of primary forest on a sacred hill, the Japanese primatologists took over the Manon's position that the livelihood of the Bossou chimpanzees was better served by plantations than by a nature reserve.

Introduction

This introductory chapter provides a background of the ensuing controversy over chimpanzee culture. Japanese and Euro-American primatologists have come to question whether humans are the only primates capable of culture — that is, whether culture amounts to human nature. In the 1950s, Japanese primatologists around Kinji Imanishi proposed to attribute “subhuman culture” — or kaluchua, as they called it — to nonhuman primates. In the course of the 1970s and 1980s, a growing number of European and American primatologists and evolutionary anthropologists chimed in with Japanese anthropomorphism and wondered how unique the cultural nature of Homo sapiens really was. Just as cultural anthropologists have struggled to account for the loss of cultural diversity during five centuries of Euro-American domination (currently on the wane), cultural primatology is now confronted with the question of how to make sense of the eradication of nonhuman cultural and biological diversity in light of modern humans' savage success.

Conclusion

This concluding chapter reviews what the previous chapters have revealed about cultural primatology. It compares the knowledge cultures of Christophe Boesch's field station, Michael Tomasello's laboratory, Tetsuro Matsuzawa's laboratory, and Matsuzawa's field station with each other to map a space of no-longer-available possibilities. Boesch's fieldwork on wild chimpanzees and Tomasello's laboratory experiments on captive chimpanzees contradicted each other regarding the capacity of Pan troglodytes for culture and cooperation. Boesch and Tomasello could not agree because the fieldworker doubted the ecological validity of the experimenter's findings, while the experimenter denied that field observations could provide any insights into what caused the observed behaviors, leaving chimpanzee ethnographers unable to rule out alternative explanations of supposedly cultural behaviors. Meanwhile, Matsuzawa's laboratory research at the Kyoto University Primate Research Institute and his field research in Bossou presented an interesting contrast to the disagreements between the two because he integrated lab and field in his own work. He studied the social learning of nut cracking through field observation, field experiment, participation observation, and controlled laboratory experiment — and conceived of his synthesis of all these approaches as an expression of Japanese holism.