Top, view of the famous Koshima beach where cultural studies of animals found their origin. In the foreground, the freshwater stream in which Imo, a juvenile female, dipped her first sweet potato before other monkeys, beginning with her mother and peers, followed suit. It is only later that the monkeys moved their cleaning operation to the ocean, visible in the background. Bottom, two juveniles have carried potatoes to the salty ocean. (Photos by author).
I visited many primate field sites in Japan. Here I am watching a peaceful grooming scene at Katsuyama, where recently monkeys developed the habit of washing grass roots before eating them. (Photo by Catherine Marin). Below, a monkey at Arashiyama rubs two rocks together, a habit transmitted at this site for over twenty years. Cultural learning does not appear to follow the same rules as contingency learning in the laboratory: So far as we know, stone handling delivers no rewards. (Photo by author).
Mr. Spickles, who for many years seemed the absolute leader of a group of rhesus monkeys, was nevertheless dependent on female support, which kept him firmly in the saddle in the presence of stronger, younger males. (Wisconsin Primate Center, photo by the author).
The only captive group of chimpanzees that knows the hand-clasp grooming posture, also observed in a few wild communities, resides at the Yerkes Primate Center's Field Station in Georgia. The custom has spread slowly from its originator, a female named Georgia, to virtually all adult members of the group: here between Georgia's sister and mother. (Photo by author).
Looking back at Imanishi's influence, it is clear why his ideas about harmony among species and his opposition to reductionism would create trouble with Darwinists. But we should not let these problems overshadow the enormous accomplishments of Imanishi's approach to primate behavior, which amount to a paradigmatic shift adopted by all of primatology and beyond. The basic premises of his school, and its application of ethnography to the study of animal societies, are now all but taken for granted. If students of long-lived animals in the field-whether they watch wolves or elephants-routinely identify individuals and follow them over their life spans, they are employing a technique from the East initially mocked and resisted by the West.83
In our own creative way, we have come to justify the need for this kind of observation, arguing that since natural selection operates on individual variation, every individual deserves special attention. But in order to make this step we had to overcome thousands of years of cultural prejudice against "lower" animals. We had to be shown the way by scientists immune to this hierarchical point of view.
Imanishi as Obstacle
To depict nature as harmonious, as hnanishi did, is entirely legitimate: there are indeed large segments characterized by peaceful coexistence, equilibrium, and symbiosis. To look for competition and tension is equally legitimate, and such an enterprise doesn't come tip empty-handed either. What is silly, however, is to depict emphasis on harmony as culturally biased and emphasis on competition as somehow scientifically objective, as Halstead did. These are the remarks of a man unwilling or unable to examine his own perspective, which ironically shares with Japanese culture that it has been molded by life on a crowded island where people think they are unlike any other.
Imanishi's defenders have complained about Halstead's prejudices: "To understand how this seems to a Japanese, the Western reader might imagine the translated account of a Japanese professor, who speaks no English, who has spent a few months at Oxford and who gradually works out, through the characters he meets, Oxford's contradictions and Britain's hidden class structure."84 In the same breath, the visitor might have noted-as Halstead did with Imanishi-how Darwin's theory reflects the society that produced it. That ideas about free-market capitalism and the struggle for life arose at the same time and in the same place can, of course, hardly be coincidental. Hence, when Halstead accuses Imanishi of being the product of a feudal society in denial of individualism, and when Nature prints this view along with a defense of Darwinism as the only way to understand the world, all we have is the familiar case of one culture perceiving another's biases more acutely than its own.
This is not to say that Imanishi didn't ask for a confrontation. Had he merely formulated a theory emphasizing the harmonious side of nature, no one would have protested, either in Japan or outside. But increasingly he began to present habitat segregation as a viable alternative to Darwinism, as incompatible with and surpassing traditional evolutionary views. As a result, he became positively hostile to Darwin. This stance invited direct comparisons between the power of Imanishi's theory and that of Darwin's. With great frankness, HiraiwaHasegawa makes clear that this comparison was not in Imanishi's favor:
He repeatedly explained that survival of the fittest doesn't explain anything, that such mechanical, purely biological explanations are not sufficient for a full understanding of organisms, that natural selection based on competition among individuals is a distorted view of the organic world from a Western point of view. He has written 30 volumes on his theory of evolution, and it is widely known as Imanishi's theory in Japan. However, none of his books provides mechanical or scientific explanations on how these things occur and how the theory can be tested. I think this is not science: this is a personal view on the organic world.85
Halstead drew a parallel with Kropotkin, who also selectively looked for and found examples of cooperation in nature. Yet throughout his life the Russian prince remained a staunch admirer and follower of Darwin. The target of Kropotkin's wrath was not Darwin, but Thomas Henry Huxley and his narrow outlook-often described as "gladiatorial"-that pitted every life form and every individual against every other. Kropotkin rightly noted that many animals survive not through struggle, but through mutual aid. Huxley's cardboard version of Darwinism was exactly the sort of caricature that Imanishi also objected to, and that he may have mistaken, quite erroneously, for Darwin's own perspective.
And so what remains is that Imanishi underestimated how his ideas, without too much trouble, could have been reconciled with Darwin's. Even though the process of natural selection is inherently competitive, it has produced all sorts of tendencies and configurations in nature, including socially positive and cooperative ones. The lethal territoriality of the male tiger is as much a product of natural selection as the death-defying solidarity among dolphins. Inasmuch as confusion between process and outcome has led scientists in the West to doubt that humans and animals can be genuinely nice, we shouldn't be too hard on Imanishi for making the opposite error, which was that he doubted the competitive nature of evolution because of the harmony he felt it had produced. Both inabilities to come to grips with the paradox of evolution reflect real cultural biases. Imanishi's views could and should, like Kropotkin's, have been presented as a special emphasis within the larger evolutionary framework rather than as a brand-new theory.
Explanations for this largely unnecessary quarrel range from that it was the work of journalists, who loved to present one of their countrymen as having the same stature as the great Darwin, to the nationalism of Imanishi himself. Like many Japanese after the war, Imanishi resented the Anglo-American dominance that made it seem that their own culture didn't matter. In his defense, older scientists stress that Imanishi distanced himself equally from the Russian influence on Kyoto intellectuals, many of whom were left-wing and enamored with Lysenko, the dangerously ideological geneticist under Stalin. Imanishi was first of all a scholar, open to ideas, always instilling independent-mindedness in his students. He himself read everything he could put his hands on, and urged his followers to be international, and to read and write in English.
The stifling impact on primatology and ecology that Halstead referred to did not come directly from Imanishi himself, who retired from the university in 1965, but from his followers. Japanese scientists who embraced sociobiology in the late 1970s or 1980s carry the scars of an uphill battle in a strongly conformist society. In the same way that every silverback gorilla inescapably reaches the point at which he can no longer defend his group and will b
e overtaken by an upstart, Imanishi and his followers kept looking impressive and in control while under their feet the theoretical landscape was shifting like quicksand. The rebels eventually won, as is evident from the current crop of young primatologists and ecologists, many of whom are either unaware of Imanishi or consider him irrelevant.
Darwin Envy
The anti-Darwinian attitude of Imanishi and his descendants considerably slowed the adoption of sociobiology in Japan. Partly because of a lack of education in evolutionary theory, Imanishi's made-in-Japan evolutionism prevailed for a long time. Osamu Sakura, an ex-primatologist at Yokohama National University who now studies the reception of sociobiology around the world, has compared the response in Japan with that in France, which was also tinged with national pride and Darwin envy (given that Darwinism replaced Lamarckism). But he found the strongest parallels with the reception of sociobiology in Germany.86
When an influential founder, or guru, is on the local scene, new scientific developments may undermine his authority and that of his school. Hence, the new development will be resisted by members of the school. Only outsiders or a younger generation less committed to the guru will dare to venture outside established doctrine. In Germany, this process was clearly visible around Lorenz, whose followers stood in the way of new scientific developments. Thus, both Sakura and Hiraiwa-Hasegawa insist that Imanishi's influence should not be looked at as uniquely Japanese. As Hiraiwa-Hasegawa notes:
If you assume that the Japanese scientists fully understood the neo-Darwinian theory and still preferred Imanishi's theory to Darwinism because of their original, cultural view to see the organic world, you will end up overestimating a cultural effect on logical thinking in natural science. I think this is what Pamela Asquith did in her research. Or you will end up underestimating the Japanese ability of logical thinking. I think this is what Beverly Halstead did in his Nature paper on Imanishiism.
Her reference to Asquith concerns a Canadian anthropologist who has extensively compared Eastern and Western primatology. Asquith has pointed out many useful distinctions, such as the aforementioned lack of human-animal dualism in Eastern religion. She has also tried to place Imanishi's sociological approach in the context of a culture that ties individual identity to group identity. Asquith doesn't actually believe that Darwin was ever rejected by Japanese scientists, but rather that Western scientists tended toward either-or thinking (they were either for or against sociobiology), whereas their Japanese counterparts simply adopted the most appealing elements from the theory, ignoring the rest.
This leaves us with one unresolved issue. Some believe that Japanese scientists responded the way they did to sociobiology due to a special set of circumstances related to the end of the war, nationalism, and the way founding fathers first stimulate and then hamper progress. In this view, there was nothing specifically Japanese about what happened. Others tie Imanishi's theory to his background and hence see the support for Imanishi and the resistance to sociobiology as stemming from cultural differences. Imanishiism may never have represented a true alternative to Darwinism, but in the eyes of many Japanese it contained valuable, unique elements thus far ignored by the West.
My own position-number one thousand and one-is that Imanishi deserves immense gratitude from all students of long-lived animals in the field since he planted the seed for the only sensible approach. He did so with a typically Eastern emphasis on the group as well as respect for individual identities. At the same time, he downplayed or misunderstood the power of the Darwinian framework, and in doing so blocked much-needed change. But whereas he and his followers had the political power to slow the acceptance of sociobiology, their ideas simply couldn't stem the flow.
It only goes to show that when the time comes, everyone will change.
"The bonobo is an extraordinarily sensitive, gentle creature, far removed from the demoniacal Urkraft [primitive force] of the adult chimpanzee."
Eduard Tratz and Heinz Heck, 1954
"... in kinship with our insouciant, fun-loving, nonreading relatives the delightful cousins Bonobo. May Life be thanked for them."
Alice Walker, 1998
"Of bonobos, perhaps the less said the better, at least in a family magazine."
Barbara Ehrenreich, 1999
t must be fun studying those bonobos," people sometimes say to me with a wink. It most certainly is, but not for the implied reason-that this species of ape engages in an aston ishing variety of sexual activity. What actually fascinates me more is the puzzle of how bonobo society came to be femalecentered and pacific. The answer has implications for the evolution of human sexuality and gender relations: every program in women's studies ought to include a little excursion into the world of the bonobo.
But the question about their sex life is on target when it comes to the public reception of the bonobo. The way animals are perceived mirrors the culture in which we live. Thus, we admire the workaholic ant but not the lazy pig, which in addition is seen as dirty. Similarly, bonobos have reached us with a double handicap: first, they seem sexually licentious, and second, they refuse to fit macho evolutionary scenarios that revolve around the inevitability of violence, male dominance, male bonding, and the importance of technology. The traditional outlook has been amply summarized under titles such as Man the Hunter, Man the Tool-Maker, Demonic Males, Men in Groups, The Imperial Animal, and The Dark Side of Man. These views have become so ingrained that anyone who brings up the sexy and peaceful bonobo risks being called a dreamer.
In contrast to the pig, however, the bonobo is not some distant life form that can be pushed aside in debates of human nature. This anthropoid is indeed so close to us that some scientists consider it the best extant model of the last common ancestor of humans and apes, thought to have lived about five million years ago. Yet, due to its relatively late discovery (in 1929) and its rarity in captivity, the species was until recently barely known. Nevertheless, bonobos are equally close to us as chimpanzees.
It was not until the 1970s that expeditions by Japanese and Western scientists to the Democratic Republic of the Congo (formerly called Zaire) began to document the natural history of the elusive bonobo. What they found has put question marks all over the evolutionary map of our species, which is commonly believed to have conquered the planet through warfare and genocide. Other primates, such as baboons and chimpanzees, do seem to lend support to these views, but the lives of bonobos most certainly do not. If chimpanzees are from Mars, bonobos must be from Venus.
Bonobos are egalitarian primates that substitute sex for aggression: they resolve conflict through sexual contact. Females occupy prominent positions in society, and the high points of the bonobo's social life are conflict resolution and sensitivity to others. Whereas it would be unwise to rely exclusively on the bonobo in attempts to reconstruct our evolutionary past, the species does expose the one-sidedness of previous attempts.
Obviously, bonobos would not need conflict resolution if they never had any reasons for conflict. It is the paradox of my work that the study of peacemaking requires conflict and aggression. We researchers have ample time to reflect on this if we are working with a colony of primates that gets along "too well," making it hard to collect the necessary information on how they manage conflict.87 This has never been a problem with bonobos, though, which are far from perfectly pacific. Bonobos are lively and competitive: they are no mellow pushovers who love each other to death. But they do have a different, highly effective way of regulating rivalries, and as such invite an alternative mode of thinking about our ancestors, one that has thus far not occurred to anyone except a few isolated feminist authors.
The bonobo thus serves as a reminder that people who keep shoving the murderous side of chimpanzees into our faces so as to make the point that humans are "killer apes," as Robert Ardrey called us, have a biased agenda. They have seized upon the chimpanzee with an enthusiasm that doesn't do justice to this species-which is cooperative and sociable most of the time-but tha
t does expose the culturally colored glasses that have thus far kept the bonobo on the sidelines of the human evolution show.
Kamasutra Primates
My own involvement with these apes began in 1978, when I first looked a bonobo in the eyes and immediately noticed how their curious and sensuous temperament differed from that of the emotionally volatile chimpanzee. I later set out to study the world's largest colony of bonobos by spending hundreds of hours with a video camera in front of an enclosure at the San Diego Zoo. Work with animals in captivity cannot re place observations in the field, but it does offer the enormous advantage of complete visibility so that behavior can be followed in its most minute details. I was thoroughly familiar with chimpanzee behavior, which I had interpreted in rather Machiavellian terms in Chimpanzee Politics. Now, I was seeing a tableau more reminiscent of Rousseau-or perhaps I should say a simian version of the Kamasutra.
Bonobos have sex in all imaginable positions and in virtually all partner combinations. They contradict the notion that sex is intended solely for procreation. I estimate that three quarters of the sexual activity I saw at the zoo had nothing to do with reproduction: it frequently involved members of the same sex or took place during the infertile portion of a female's menstrual cycle. Sexual activity was most likely to occur at moments of tension, such as when there was a risk of competition over food, or as a way of reconciliation after a fight.
It is impossible, therefore, to understand the social life of the bonobo without attention to its sex life. Whereas in most other species sexual behavior is a fairly distinct category, in the bonobo it has become part and parcel of social relationships. Bonobos become aroused remarkably easily, and express this in a variety of mounting positions and genital contacts. Perhaps the most characteristic sexual pattern is so-called Benito-genital rubbing, or GG-rubbing, between adult females. One female clings with arms and legs to another-almost the way an infant clings to its mother-while the other female, standing on both hands and feet, lifts her off the ground. The two females then rapidly rub their genital swellings laterally together. Completely absent in the chimpanzee, this behavior has been observed in every bonobo group, captive or wild, with more than one female.
The Ape And The Sushi Master Reflections Of A Primatologist Page 10