Essay Review: Primate Visions, A Model for Historians of Science?

*
ANNE FAUSTO-STERLING Division of Biology and Medicine Brown University Providence, Rhode Island 02912

Primate Visions has changed my life. Brought up near New York City, I thrilled to my trips to the Museum of Natural History. The great halls filled with skeletons of giant animals both extant and extinct, the dioramas depicting the lives of distant peoples, and, perhaps most wonderful of all, the great mammals of Africa moved me deeply, confirming my desire to study nature for myself. Reading Donna Haraway's account of the building of the Great Hall of Africa (chap. 3, "Teddy Bear Patriarchy: Taxidermy in the Garden of Eden, New York City, 1908--1936") profoundly disturbed my romantic vision of nature. No longer can I enter the museum with my child's mind. Her account of the killing, stuffing, and presentation of the mountain gorillas, her insight into "the Museum's task of regeneration o f . . . [an] urban public threatened with genetic and social decadence, threatened . . . [by] the new immigrants, threatened with the failure of manhood" (p. 29) has stolen my innocence. No longer can I look without suspicion at the display cases of butterflies or the dioramas of Native American families. Instead, I find myself asking about the hidden meanings, about the underlying visions of nature portrayed, wondering how I am being taken in, lulled into a social complacency by the museum display. And yet . . . . And yet I am still profoundly moved, as the romantic child I was and the wishfully thinking adult that I am; I am moved by the gorillas and the chimps and the whale skeletons; my eyes widen with wonder at the richness and grandeur of nature. But then Haraway calls my attention to the Museum entrance dominated by the statue of Teddy Roosevelt atop a horse, "father and protector of two 'primitive men,' an American Indian and an African, both standing, dressed as 'savages.'" Past the statue, just
* Donna J. Haraway, Primate Visions: Gender, Race, and Nature in the World of Modern Science (New York: Routledge, 1989). Journal of the History of Biology, vol. 23, no. 2 (Summer 1990), pp. 329--333. 1990 KluwerAcademic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.

330

ANNE FAUSTO-STERLING

inside the doors, I read Roosevelt's words. Under the heading "Nature" I find that "no words can reveal its mystery." On the wall opposite Nature -- and, as Haraway astutely points out, in mirror to it -- I see Youth, which I learn refers to "boys . . . gentle and tender," for whom "Courage, hard work, self mastery and intelligent effort are essential to a successful life." Of Manhood I find that "Only those are fit to live who do not fear to die" -especially, one presumes, for the State, for which Roosevelt's words "Aggressive fighting for the right is the noblest sport the world affords" mark the end of the message (all quotes from pp. 27--28). The progression continues from Roosevelt's words on the wall, past the glorification of his life as a hunter, leader, and builder of the Panama canal, to the statue by Carl Akeley of African men on a lion hunt. The visual and textual message tells me that youth, nature, and the primitive mirror one another -hence the fact that the great white hunters always called their African guides "boy" and, as Haraway definitively documents, treated them like children. Finally, I discover that the youth who will grow to adulthood, explore nature, and, while risking death, tame and rule the world is a male child; my youthful aspirations to study nature with other ends in mind are not to be shown in this great museum. It seems that my childhood vision was pure because I was a child; but now I must contend with adult contradictions. It is, I suspect, exactly the sort of conflict and dis-ease Haraway hoped to provoke in writing this book. Primate Visions is one of the most important books to come along in the last twenty years. Historians of science have begun to write more externalist histories, acknowledging the possibilities of a science profoundly integrated with ongoing social agenda. Haraway's history of primatology in the twentieth century sets new standards for this approach, standards that will not be surpassed for some time to come. The book is important to students of science, feminists, historians, and anyone else interested in how the complex systems of race, gender, and science intertwine to produce supposedly objective versions of the "truth." This analysis of primatology is at once a complex, interdisciplinary, and deeply scholarly history and an imaginative, provocative analysis of the working of science in late twentieth-century Euro-America. In Primate Visions Haraway interweaves four analytical approaches, which she calls the "four temptations" because she finds "all four positions persuasive, enabling, and also dangerous, especially if one position finally silences all the others" (p. 6). Her first temptation is the tendency within the social studies of science to reject scientific notions of reality, suggesting that scientific knowl-

Essay Review: Primate Visions

331

edge is primarily and essentially a social construct. Bruno Latour's body of work best articulates this viewpoint. Like Haraway I find an approach to science that examines the process of transforming "raw nature" into defensible "fact" through operations, machines, and finally diagrams and the written word, enormously revealing. Yet trained as a scientist (as was Haraway, who holds a Ph. D. in Biology), I do not find the so-called strong program, the claim of a completely constructivist position, convincing. But also like Haraway, I wish to use the tools of these particular social scientists to provide critical analyses of how science works. That aspect of the Marxist tradition which studies the institutional structuring of apparently individual acts involving the production of daily life provides Haraway's second temptation. As she writes (and I concur), "Wage labor, sexual and reproductive appropriation, and racial hegemony are structured aspects of the human social world. There is no doubt that they affect knowledge systematically, but it is not clear precisely how they relate to knowledge about the feeding patterns of patas m o n k e y s . . . " (p. 7). The third temptation is "the siren call of the scientists themselves" (p. 7), as they insistently point out that there are real monkeys that behave in some ways but not in others. This book explores varied aspects of how the working scientist obtains her "facts." Although in the end it does not provide a definitive account of how science works, it clearly demonstrates that "science grows from and enables concrete ways of life, including particular constructions of love, knowledge, and power" (p. 8). Finally, Haraway presents her fourth and "master temptation to look always through the lenses ground on the stones of the complex histories of gender and race . . . " (p. 8). Here her indebtedness to the extensive analytical literature developed by women's studies and race scholars reveals itself explicitly. The book's strength lies in Haraway's ability to approach her topic with the breadth provided by the four temptations. Whether one agrees with every point or not is a side issue; the real point is that no one has before attempted a history of this scope. And this book achieves a great measure of success. While bioanthropologist Robin Dunbar, in reviewing it for the N e w Y o r k Times, x complains that the book is too filled with detail, it is just this amassing of data that ought to fascinate the historian. Haraway provides the information that she uses to draw her conclusions; the critical reader can take it from there. 1. Robin Dunbar, review of Primate Visions by Donna J. Haraway, N.Y. Times Book Rev., January 7, 1990, p. 30.

332

ANNE FAUSTO-STERLING

Primatology provides a fertile field for Haraway's project of examining the intersections of race and gender as they partake in the creation of a picture of what we so innocently call "nature." Race, for example, plays a part in the study at many different levels. The gorilla and the chimp have often been taken as the most "primitive" precursors to human society. In the nineteenth century, white European scientists placed them in a Great Chain of Being in which people of color took an intermediate position between the primitive ape and the advanced white man. In the twentieth century the study of primates in their home environments has taken Western scientists into the heart of African politics, a politics laden with the burden of white colonialism. So too has the politics of gender been bound into the study of primates from the very start. Early theories of primate social organization, written almost entirely by male scientists, suggested a dominance hierarchy in which males ruled females. More recently, however, female scientists have enriched the field and changed the story in significant ways: not only have they taken the trouble to observe female social interactions but, more fundamentally, they have pioneered new methods of observation, such as the long-term study of individually identified animals. Haraway divides her book into three parts, each of which may be read separately. In "Monkeys and Monopoly Capitalism: Primatology before World War II" she discusses the use of museums in the presentation of the primate world, analyzing in depth the N. Y. Museum of Natural History from 1908 to 1936. In separate chapters she delineates the events leading to the establishment of primate research colonies, and analyzes the careers and ideas of Robert Yerkes, C. R. Carpenter, and S. A. Altmann. In the section entitled "Decolonization and Multinational Primatology" she follows the field from World War II to the present, looking both at the biopolitics of Western scientific primatology in the face of a vanishing colonialism and at the careers of Sherwood Washburn and Harry Harlow. While Harlow's work is popularly fixed in the minds of those old enough to remember his wire-and-terry-cloth surrogate Rhesus mothers, I suspect most readers will be far less familiar with the development of Japanese and Indian primatology, or with the fascinating international politics involved in taking primate studies to an African continent in the throes of decolonization and its complex political aftermath. Haraway is enormously effective in demonstrating how international politics constrained and shaped post--World War 1I primatology. In the third section, 'q-he Politics of Being Female: Primatology is a Genre of Feminist Theory," Haraway continues

Essay Review: Primate Visions

333

the presentation of primatology as a "Western and sexualized discourse," while introducing an examination of feminism's effect on the field. To this end she discusses the careers and work of four important women primatologists: Jeanne Altmann, Linda Marie Fedigan, Adrienne Zihlman, and Sarah Blaffer-Hrdy. She argues that women significantly reconstructed the field of primatology, although she is careful to note that this restructuring "was not a natural result of their sex; it was an historical product of their positioning in particular cognitive and political structures of science, race, and gender" (p. 303; emphasis in the original). Primate Visions is not an easy read. It is long, and Haraway's prose and complex vision are sometimes difficult to absorb in large portions (which is why I suggest starting with brief forays into whatever chapter is of interest before attempting a sequential read). Although the book is so important that I wish it were easier to read, I keep in mind the many times that reading other books on the history of science has put me to sleep. Academics do not have a monopoly on brilliant prose, and this book never made me drowsy. It is a book to be dipped into again and again. Each chapter is so rich (I have read quite a number of them several times and learn something new each time I do) that I recommend repeated readings. It is my experience that a great intellectual gulf has opened between the historians and philosophers of science who have read the relevant feminist works (from Keller, Rossiter, Harding, and Merchant to the most recent works of Schiebinger, Russett, and Longino, to name some of the full-length books and not to mention the innumerable shorter pieces by a variety of authors) and those who have chosen not so much to oppose the feminist approach as to ignore it. To continue to do history of science and to be ignorant of these authors is to take a profoundly antiintellectual stance toward the field. Thus I see Primate Visions as a challenge. Will large numbers of mainstream historians take this book and read it? Will they take up the challenge to try on new ways of thinking, organize symposia to discuss and debate it, and think about how Haraway's broad-ranging approach might benefit their own work? Or will they continue to work in ignorance? I obviously hope for the former, at the same time that I fear the latter.