Nicolas Langlitz, Chimpanzee Culture Wars: Rethinking Human Nature Alongside Japanese, European, and American Cultural Primatologists. Princeton: University Press, 2020; 352pp; Paperback: £22.00. ISBN: 9780691204284
Alfred Freeborn, Humboldt University
The founding figures of science studies told us that we have never been modern (Latour, 1993), that we have never really been cultural agents independent from the natural world but have moved in a web of nature-culture hybrids. Nor indeed have we ever been human (Haraway, 2008), but exist on a continuum with our animal kin. How then are we to understand the exceptional destruction of biodiversity and climatic change that humans alone seem to be causing? This is one of the central questions Nicolas Langlitz poses in his journey alongside people who study chimps in order to understand why it ended up that we are interested in them. Chimpanzee Culture Wars asks what is at stake in understanding the limits of the “anthropo” in the Anthropocene and uses the disciplinary matrices of primatology, anthropology, psychology and science studies to explore this question.
So far, the book has only been reviewed by primatologists, one of whom is a central protagonist in the book: these reviews look at the book as a commentary on primatology (Nakamura, 2020; McGrew, 2021). This review, in contrast, will show the reviewer looking at Langlitz looking at primatologists looking at chimps. I met Langlitz at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton while he was completing this book. We had met because of a shared interest in the work of German sociologist Niklas Luhmann (1927-1998). I was on a research trip to the States and he had kindly invited me to lunch at the Institute. Langlitz originally studied medicine in Berlin before shape-shifting into a medical anthropologist in California, writing a book about neuroscientists studying psychedelics (Langlitz, 2012) and becoming associate professor of anthropology at the New School for Social Research in New York. After lunch he suggested we walk a woodland path through the empty waterlogged grounds of the Institute.
As we walked, he told me that Bruno Latour had developed actor-network theory after studying baboons with the primatologist Shirley Strum in the late 1970s. Langlitz explained that while Latour’s designs for a ‘primatology of science’ understood human culture not as the result of a cognitive difference to apes but a quantitative proliferation of technical objects, which the apes did not have, subsequent primatology had left Latour behind. In the 1980s primatologists increasingly observed apes using objects. The question of what set human cultures apart from ape cultures remained fiercely debated and paralleled in many ways the debates over pseudoscience in the science wars. All this controversy had resulted in an impasse whereby communication between people interested in human cultures and those interested in primate cultures broke down. While Langlitz’s colleagues in cultural anthropology had followed Donna Haraway’s Primate Visions (Haraway, 1989) in dismissing the epistemic goals of primatology as a morally dubious political project of ranking humans and chimps, he could not help but sympathize with the desire of many primatologists to demoralize the study of apes and their behaviours. In this sense, Langlitz understood the debates over how to study chimp culture as a site from which to reflect on his own epistemic culture. I was surprised by this unfamiliar perspective on the intellectual origins of science studies and struggled to focus on our conversation while navigating the wet path on which my shoes quickly became sodden and caked in mud.
As part of his virtuoso ‘experiment in reflexivity’, Langlitz walks with ease across disciplinary boundaries and alongside many different observers. The book operates across three levels: it is primarily ethnographic in that it follows Langlitz’s fieldwork from the mid-2010s with cultural primatologists and comparative psychologists across West Africa, Japan and Germany. At a second level, its analysis involves a comparative epistemology of laboratory work and field work including a comparison of national research traditions. Finally, as a historical work, its chronological arc begins with the origins of cultural primatology in 1950s Japan, through to the so-called North-American chimpanzee culture wars that began in the 1970s and up to the transformations in methods and professional politics that mark contemporary primatology. After two opening historical chapters, the book moves across the different sites where Langlitz was able to observe scientists observing chimps: the shrinking forests of Guinea and the Ivory Coast, a psychological laboratory attached to the zoo in Leipzig and the large chimp enclosures of a primate research institute in Inuyama, Japan. While the author’s determination to keep ideas in situ may overwhelm the reader lacking any prior knowledge of primatology – I strongly recommend watching one of the many documentaries about chimp intelligence before reading – it is nonetheless a book for historians of the human sciences.
Langlitz anchors his wide-ranging observations to the eighteenth-century project of philosophical anthropology, showing both how the last representatives of this European tradition (such as Jürgen Habermas and the Frankfurt School) have celebrated the idea of a strong distinction between humans and chimps, as well as how contemporary disciplinary differentiation continues to frustrate unifying visions of a science of primates. Langlitz’s own contribution to this project is to position the ability to observe observers, to conduct what Niklas Luhmann called ‘second-order observations’, as the distinguishing ability of humans against their primate cousins. In an entirely refreshing manner, the book relocates tired debates of positivism versus the humanities in what will be to many readers an entirely foreign landscape. To accompany Langlitz on such a journey is demanding, but it comes with its own rewards. I remember leaving Princeton on the Megabus back to New York relieved not to have lost my footing and with much to think about.
To summarize my observations: there is no single consensus over the limits of chimp culture as an object of scientific study nor over what has made homo sapiens such a successful primate. The point of Chimpanzee Culture Wars, as the title suggests, is that culture as a concept must be understood as a term of conflict, born out of asymmetric comparisons, by which certain things are compared and certain things excluded from comparison. The essence of Langlitz’s (anti-)polemical argument is that the scientific study of culture, chimp or human, in the field or in the laboratory, need not be conducted in moral terms and that the reluctance of cultural anthropologists and science studies scholars to engage with the question of human distinctiveness blocks our ability to understand our current period of natural history (e.g. the Anthropocene). In a final epilogue, Langlitz suggests that we should by all means be more human about nature, preserving biodiversity and slowing climate change, but that we should also try to be more chimp about culture: sometimes, in between energetic bouts of working to control our environment, all we can do is move with the powerful forces around us.
Bio: Alfred Freeborn (@Alfred_Freeborn) is a doctoral candidate in the History of Science at Humboldt University, Berlin. His research focuses on the history of biological psychiatry in postwar Britain, North America and Germany, with a special focus on the changing field of schizophrenia research – and he has published on the history of the Mind and Brain Sciences in HHS. He will join the Practices of Validation in Biomedical Sciences Research Group at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in July (link: https://www.mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de/research/departments/max-planck-research-group-biomedical-sciences)
References
Haraway, Donna. Primate Visions: Gender, Race, and Nature in the World of Modern Science. Routledge, 1989.
Haraway, Donna. When Species Meet. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008.
Langlitz, Nicolas. Neuropsychedelia: The Revival of Hallucinogen Research since the Decade of the Brain. University of California Press, Berkeley, 2012.
Latour, Bruno. We Have Never Been Modern. trans Catherine Porter. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1993.
McGrew, William C. “Chimpanzee Culture Wars: Rethinking Human Nature alongside Japanese, European, and American Cultural Primatologists, by Nicolas Langlitz.” Primates 62, no. 2 (March 1, 2021): 443–44.