Primatologists Are Primates Too

AKA Anthorpomorphomania

AKA Cultural Panthropology

I heard about this book in an interview with Hamilton Morris, who you might remember from Hamilton's Pharmacopeia on Vice. He was talking about his other book, Neuropsychedelia, but I was hooked when I heard Hamilton utter "meta-primatology" in a moment of confusion as he tried to describe what the hell this book was. He's studying people who study primates. I think I'm more interested in his wordporn than anything else. Goldmine. 

Also, if you think that's a picture of just any gorilla, you're wrong, because it's Harambe.

Chimpanzee Culture Wars: Rethinking Human Nature alongside Japanese, European, and American Cultural Primatologists

Nicolas Langlitz, Princeton University Press, 2020

• To my familoid
• Multiculturalism to include apes
• Field vs lab, Euro-American vs Japan
• "Apes have culture but do not know that they do" -Thibaud Gruber, Klaus Zuberbuhler, Fabrice Clement, Carel van Schaik, Comparative Psychology 6:91, 2015
• Primatologists are primates too (p19)
• Non-genetic transmission of behavior in the wild -- Imanishi's Koshima, one ape learns to wash sweet potatoes in the stream, and others naturally pick up the behavior, because one of the humans decided to offer gritty, sandy sweet potatoes to the moneys to get them familiar with humans... . It was usually very young animals who first invented or adopted [the new food habits] and then passed them to their mothers. Some older individuals, especially the males, would never take them on.(p34)
• Anthorpomorphomania (p54)
• Cultural panthropology (p94)
• Living conditions and natural selection: Under the heading "Culture and cognition in chimpanzees," Boesch compared the histories and living conditions of three captive groups at the University of New Iberia, Ohio State University Chimpanzee Center, and Liepzig Zoo to explain behavioral differences these communities had shown in experimental tests.
• On the origin of Random Controlled Trials: via R. Mundry, Ronald Fisher proposes, "Randomisation relieves the experimenter from the anxiety of considering and estimating the magnitude of the innumerable causes by which his data may be disturbed."  (p188-189) -Ronald Fisher, Statistical Methods for Research Workers (1925) and The Design of Experiments (1935)
• On Salvage Primatology, Salvage Anthropology - via Darwin's emphasis on the importance of ethnographic research in the face of rapidly disappearing races, Levi-Strauss called the study of this disintegration not anthropology but entropology. -Levis Strauss, Tristes tropiques (1955) 1974
• "Anthropocene Blues" (p313)