anthropology – History of The Human Sciences

Interview: ECR Prize 2022 winner Harry Parker on the regional survey movement

Harry Parker (University of Cambridge) is this year’s winner of the History of the Human Sciences Early Career Essay Prize. We spoke to him about his research and winning essay ‘The regional survey movement and popular autoethnography in early 20th century Britain’. Congratulations to Harry whose essay will be published in full in a future issue of the journal.

History of the Human Sciences: First of all, I wonder if you could briefly introduce your PhD project ‘Popular auto-ethnography in Britain, c. 1870-1940’ and describe how this essay relates to that larger project?

Harry Parker: The essay comes from what I think is probably going to be the third chapter of the thesis, which broadly looks at various attempts within the human sciences across the late nineteenth and early twentieth century to turn the anthropological gaze inwards. I do that through looking at a series of surveying projects across the periods that enrolled non-specialists to become observers of their own culture.

I begin in the 19th century, when anthropology in particular was more oriented towards the question of the origins and the composition of the national community. I look at one of the first large scale projects to try and attempt this, which was known as the ethnographic survey of the United Kingdom. As a component of that I’m particularly interested in folklore collection, which was a major part of that project. I then look at the photographic survey movement, which was running more or less at the same time (around the 1890s). And then I jump ahead a bit to the interwar period to look at regional surveys, which seemed to absorb much of the energies that those earlier projects set loose. The other case studies are also focused on the interwar period and look at early attempts to do community studies. So that’s the ‘auto-ethnography’ bit.

The ‘popular’ bit comes from my training (if you can call it that) as a social and cultural historian of modern Britain. Some of the work that I’ve most admired has used the archives of social sciences to try and understand what we might call its vernacularization: how social science concepts were being employed in everyday life. My project isn’t so much about vernacularization per se, but I think that some of the projects that I’m looking at offer a way into understanding how people of various kinds grappled with the question of what it meant to obtain a perspective on one’s own culture.

HHS: What was the regional survey movement and how do you treat its ‘amateurism’ in your analysis?

HP: A regional survey was a technique for studying the social world developed by the Scottish polymath Patrick Geddes. The way it worked in practice was essentially as a mass data gathering exercise. Practitioners of the survey involved themselves in collecting information on everything from the climate of the region to major industries to population. It was an attempt to create a total knowledge of a place.

The amateurism of it actually played quite an important role in the way that it was promoted. Writers on regional survey tended to stress that you didn’t really need to have any specialist skills in order to do a regional survey. In fact, they almost thought it would be better if you didn’t. They conceived it very consciously as a civic or participatory exercise. The survey was, in an important sense, both a social scientific endeavour – trying to create useable knowledge – and a form of social practice – trying to reunite people with their communities.

I’m also interested in the way it related to social thought in Britain at the time. As many historians of sociology have pointed out, many of the distinct innovations or problematizations within social thought tended to come from outside of what we might think of as the sociological discipline itself. This seems to be especially true in Britain, where sociology institutionalized rather late in comparison to elsewhere in Europe. Amateurish social inquiry seems to me to be a significant current within the interwar period, where lots of proto- or quasi-sociological work was being done, not necessarily by professional sociologists but by social workers and reformers.

HHS: Why do you claim that the regional survey movement could be understood in relation to the discipline of ‘social anthropology’?

HP: Anthropology is undergoing a pretty significant moment of transition right at this moment. It’s a moment when something like the modern ‘culture’ concept is coming into being, the idea that cultures are discrete, bounded systems of affinity that can be made knowable via the work of a field worker. Although most of the regional surveyors didn’t conceive of themselves as anthropologists what was striking to me is that they seemed to be articulating many of the same problems. Namely, they were keen to stress that social inquiry should be a field science or something that should be done by a kind of participant observer, someone who’s embedded within the culture, but who also also has to try and gain a detached or scientific perspective on it.

HHS: Who was Patrick Geddes? How did he understand society/social ‘types’ and how was this reflected in the survey method he developed?

HP: Patrick Geddes was a rather eccentric and idiosyncratic thinker. He operated across a range of different disciplines. He was at various points, a botanist, a biologist, a sociologist, a geographer, a town planner. He started his career studying biology under Thomas Huxley. Increasingly, over the course of the 1870s and 1880s he became interested in how one might apply evolutionary theory to the social world. In biology, he was particularly interested in this question of cooperation among organisms and that seemed to underpin a lot of his thinking about society. He developed – and this in large part owed to the influence of a lot of French thinkers, including Frédéric le Play and his followers – he developed his model of the ‘valley plan of civilization’, where he delineated seven distinct social types that he saw as the basis of modern civilization. Much like in his biological studies, he was interested in how those social types were engaged in processes of cooperative adaptation. The task for the regional surveyor was to understand the balance of those social forces within the industrial city.

HHS: How did Geddes conceive of ‘modern life’ and its relationship to ‘pre-modern life’?

HP:

He took up an interest, in particular when he was studying cities, with what he called paleotechnic and neotechnic forms, which I think he intended as a play on the way that archaeologists and anthropologists were writing about paleolithic and neolithic ages. Although he conceived of his paleotechnic and neotechnic forms as being of much more recent origin. The paleotechnic city was powered by steam and the neotechnic city was powered by electricity and oil. He was trying to seek out possibilities for social and environmental progress within what we now know as the moment of the second industrial revolution.

HHS: How did the regional survey movement sit in relation to the broader contemporaneous autoethnography movement? Why do you believe that this approach – ‘the exhortation to “begin where you are”’ – had such traction at this historical moment?

HP: The interwar period is sometimes seen as a moment of of introspection. It’s a moment of imperial contraction. It’s a moment within culture where Greater Britain themes are being replaced by little England ones, if you like. Those developments seem to have prompted some kinds of renewed attempts to try and understand the British nation anthropologically. Jedy Esty’s work on high modernist writers like Woolf and Forster and Eliot, for instance, whom you might think of as these rather metropolitan characters, shows that by the 1930s are turning inwards to invoking and representing the ‘imagined community’. I think the regional survey picks up on some of those themes. It’s a method for trying to get people to rediscover their community. Geddes wrote about the survey as a sort of recuperation from war, a sort of convalescence.

HHS: Though you seem to express some skepticism about that in the paper…?

HP: Geddes was never particularly clear about exactly what a survey might involve. He was much more interested in what its effects might be on civic life. His followers who took up the survey project in the interwar period seemed to take from his ideas what was convenient for them or what suited their own political attachments or intentions.

HHS: You discuss Geddes’ use of visual metaphors – what metaphors did he use and what do they reveal about his approach to observation?

HP: When Geddes wrote about surveying being a convalescence from war, one of the things he was particularly concerned about was this kind of inertness to one’s environment.

In trying to promote observation as a social good he was trying to define a form of it that would allow the observer to rise above their acculturated self to transcend their inherently limited or partial perspective. The first metaphors he used were the metaphors of the child and the tourist. This was about trying to get at a raw visual experience, to access a dehabituated form of vision. At the same time, he also was interested in the survey as this total apprehension of the region. He called this synopsis. He also used visual metaphors that related to viewing things from above or on high: the hillway traveller or the airman. He was particularly interested in flight as a way of apprehending space.

HHS: In the interwar years, who were the regional surveyors and what was their relationship to the local cultures they studied?

HP: They were a rather heterogeneous group with some divergent interests. They included regional geographers (regional geography was the dominant approach to geography in the period), town planners, antiquarians, amateur naturalists and a core group clustered around the Sociological Society ( relocated to a new group of organisations called Le Play House). They all had slightly different approaches to what a regional survey was. The Le Play House group was probably the most tourist-like. Especially from the 1930s onwards, most of their work involved organising field trips in Britain and across Europe to conduct regional surveysBut other projects were much more committed to the survey as a civic project. There were surveys in Manchester and Liverpool, for instance, where the survey did seem to operate more through the organs of civil society, through local naturalist societies and civic societies of various kinds, like the Workers Educational Association and other bodies committed to civic improvement.

HHS: How would you characterise the political orientation or aims of the regional survey movement in the interwar years? For example, how were notions of community, democracy or ‘good citizenship’ articulated in discussions within the regional survey movement?

HP: The political orientation of the regional survey is hard to characterize partly because of the movement’s heterogeneity but partly because it was never very explicit about what its politics were. Some writers on regional survey even seemed to claim that the survey was a means of of transcending politics as such. They never had an explicit analysis of class and were very much opposed to doing that. If they had a conception of what an ideal region might look like they were probably reliant on what we might think of as a rather conservative conception of an organic community. Although interestingly, in the interwar period that notion resonates with parts of the left as well.. There were some advocates for regional survey who would probably have considered themselves ethical socialists. They were drawing on some of the thinkers that had inspired Geddes, like Ruskin, but also Kropotkin and his ideas about mutual aid. I suppose that’s probably where their idea of community was coming from.

HHS: It seems people involved in the regional survey movement grappled with tensions between the part and the whole, the specific and the general, the social and the geographical – how did those tensions play out in practice? Could this perhaps be linked to a point you make at the end of your article that they paid little attention to the national question? You talked earlier of a notion of an ‘imagined community’ but if the imagined community isn’t a nation but is something smaller, more micro, what then is it that they’re imagining?

HP: I would say that they never really came up with a satisfactory answer to that question. The idea of the region comes from Geddes’ engagement with French geographers and it partly comes out of his bio-social approach, in which he’s conceived the survey as a study in human ecology. The region plays the role of a rather ill-defined ‘environment’. That was certainly how many of his geographical followers understood the region. In some of his other writings, Geddes would more tightly define the region as a central city surrounded by the countryside on which it relied for its resources. He borrowed there from Auguste Comte: this is a Positivist ideal of a world of autonomous city states. In practice, regional surveyors were operating at a much more micro scale. They liked to begin with small rural parishes and so on, but generally the aim was always to work up to something they imagined as a ‘region’. Part of what they were doing, and there were a number of advocates of regional surveys who wrote about this, was assuming that they shouldn’t start with a predefined notion of community or space in which they were conducting their investigation. This was something that had to be worked up from the ground.

The region would emerge from doing the survey, rather than the other way round.

What I think is interesting about that is the way it departs from other autoethnographic projects emerging in the interwar period. So something like Mass Observation, which looms large in histories of interwar social science, is much more oriented towards the nation. This I think is mainly because it had a different conception of what the observer was supposed to do. M-O’s founders liked to claim that they were turning everyone into anthropologists of their own lives but in another sense they were also committed to a much more modernist data gathering project in which observers would function as these kind of human antennae that would report back to a national mainframe. So really the main task of doing the analysis and forming social theory would happen at the national centre rather than in the field, whereas the regional surveyors were committed to a project of knowledge production at the fieldwork site..

HHS: Finally, where do you hope your research leads next?

HP: In the next part of the PhD project I’m going to be thinking about early attempts at doing community studies. At the moment I’m looking at one rather experimental community self-study project in a place called Brynmawr in Wales.

More broadly, I’m interested in histories of the field sciences, and the possibilities of anthropological archives for illuminating these.

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity. The interview was conducted by Hannah Proctor.

Review: The Maternalists

Shaul Bar-Haim, The Maternalists: Psychoanalysis, Motherhood and the British Welfare State (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021) ISBN 9780812253153

Katie Joice

During the last two years, we have had ample opportunity to reflect on the capacity of the state to care for its population: to warn us of imminent harm, to nurse us back to health when danger strikes, and to show compassion when the worst happens. As Shaul Bar-Haim skilfully outlines in his introduction to The Maternalists, for several generations,ever since Margaret Thatcher began to shift responsibility for the care of the vulnerable and dependent back onto the family, ‘the nanny state’ has become an epithet of right-wing scorn. Those who mourn the unravelling of the post-war settlement may be hoping that the collective suffering of the pandemic has exposed the need for a more interventionist, ‘motherly’ politics, one which fully compensates for human frailty. Bar-Haim’s study of maternally-minded psychoanalysts, and their influence on post-war social policy, is therefore a timely one, in which questions of theoretical inheritance open onto a series of urgent debates about our own historical moment.

Bar-Haim’s story begins in Budapest during the 1920s, where Sandor Ferenczi, one of Freud’s protegées, advocated a radically new style of analysis. Ferenczi was the yin to Freud’s yang, or as Jung, another of Freud’s rebellious students, might have put it, the anima to his animus. Whereas Freud practiced with cool, paternalist detachment, Ferenczi fostered affection, mutuality, and intuition in his clinical relationships. He encouraged patients to revisit the traumatic experiences of earliest childhood, and famously cradled them in his arms, claiming that there was ‘progression in regression’. By shifting the analytic focus away from the Oedipus conflict and phallocentrism towards the sensuous bond between mother and infant, Ferenczi opened up new terrain for analysts of an egalitarian, emancipatory bent. Infancy was characterised here both by vulnerability to trauma and an original psychic freedom, a halcyon period before the oppressive norms of civilised society achieved their grip. Ferenczi surrounded himself with a group of gifted young intellectuals, including Michael Balint and Geza Roheim, the founder of psychoanalytic anthropology, and later had a profound influence on the Scottish analyst Ian Suttie, who also objected to the Freudian ‘taboo on tenderness’.

The relationship between mothering and the human sciences in the twentieth century – in which Mother features as Origin Story and Causal Principle – is hugely complex, extending from the idealisation of matriarchal religion in Robert Graves’ The White Goddess to the development of a laboratory-based attachment theory. By Bar-Haim’s own admission, this book teases out one micro-history from an intricate tapestry, arguing that a set of Ferenczian legacies within inter-war psychoanalysis anticipated the specifically maternal disposition of the British welfare state.

The Maternalists’ central chapters explore the rehabilitation of the ‘primitive’ psyche and ‘primitive’ mothering, in the work of educationalist Susan Issacs, Roheim, and Suttie. Issacs challenged Piaget’s theory of developmentalism, in which the child’s psyche was equated with that of the ‘savage’. A follower of Melanie Klein, and a member of the anti-colonial movement in inter-war Bloomsbury, she proposed a synchronic model of mind, arguing that at all ages, and within all races, magical and animistic ideas exist alongside rational thought. Roheim’s work is placed in dialogue with that of Bronislaw Malinowski, who had ‘disproved’ the universalism of the Oedipus conflict in his study of the matrilineal society of the Trobiander Islands. Roheim undertook fieldwork in the Aboriginal communities of central Australia with the intention of refuting Malinowski’s claim, but changed course when he observed the psychological benefits of matriarchal culture. Aboriginal life, he concluded, was characterised by ‘indulgent mothering’, the development of a weak super-ego, and pacifism; a corrective to the ‘sadistic’ mothering of modern Europe. Similar arguments were advanced by Suttie in The Origins of Love and Hate (1935), which posited the existence of an archaic pagan community, in which the mother-child bond formed the basis of sociability. In Suttie’s account, monotheism, modernity, and the fixation with ‘progress’ were begot by the envious and destructive patriarch, embodied in Freud himself. The autocratic and bellicose paternalist state is never invoked in The Maternalists, although elisions are sometimes made between the maternal and the parental polity. It is worth noting that the psychology of the fascist patriarch was being excavated in works such as Theodor Adorno’s The Authoritarian Personality well into the 1950s, and that reactionary forms of maternalism, including pro-natalist policies, were in turn associated with authoritarian governments. A post-war suspicion of toxic masculinity, as well as the exaltation of mother-love, perhaps explains the peripheral role of fathers in the case-studies of D.W.Winnicott, the theme of the book’s penultimate chapter.

The book’s argument hinges on its final section, a discussion of Michael Balint’s psychological training with British GPs in the second half of the 1950s. In this illuminating but little-known piece of post-war history, Ferenczian theory was translated into social practice. A significant number of family doctors (including many prominent figures in the Royal Society of General Practitioners) joined Balint groups in this period to deepen their understanding of the doctor-patient relationship. Balint believed that what many patients seek when they visit the GP is regression to a state of infant-like dependency. Anyone who has had the experience of their symptoms mysteriously disappearing after a visit to the local surgery will understand something of this notion, and of the concept of doctor ‘as drug.’ There is also something refreshingly queer about Bar-Haim’s description of middle-class, middle-aged, GPs shape-shifting into loving mothers. In radical contrast to the pressured, consumer-focused approach of twenty-first century medicine, Balint disputed the idea of a medically objective diagnosis, suggesting that both the description and treatment of illness should be an unhurried, inter-subjective process. This is akin to a phenomenological, rather than instrumentalist, account of disease, which blurs the boundaries between physical and psychological medicine. Bar-Haim goes on to suggest that as a section of male GPs began to display maternal capacities in the consulting room, real mothers took on greater responsibility for liaising with the state’s agents, including not only doctors, but social workers, psychiatrists, and teachers. In these various ways, the act of mothering became integrated into the smooth functioning of social democracy.

This brings us to the lived experience of mothers, which the author is careful to distinguish from the theoretical constructions of his book’s protagonists. One of his literary touchstones is historian Carolyn Steedman’s memoir of post-war childhood, Landscape for a Good Woman, in which she makes the striking claim: “I loved the state because it loved me.” For Steedman, the state compensated – with milk, orange juice, library books and free education – for what her mother could not provide. As well as underlining the huge redistribution of wealth and ensuing social mobility that took place in this period, we are reminded that a state with maternal capacities frees flesh-and-blood mothers to be imperfect, or even inadequate, which is precisely what makes welfarism a moral issue for the Right.

We return then to the broader issues raised by the book’s enfolding of inter-war psychoanalytic theory with post-war state interventions. Histories of maternalism inevitably leave political, sociological and philosophical questions in their train. Most obviously, where do we stand with regard to this aspect of our past, in an era when so many forms of ‘care’ have been shredded and privatised? What role, if any, remains for psychoanalysis, now marginalised within NHS practice? The example of Balint groups is compelling, but histories of the role played by analysts in the construction of the welfare state obscure the contribution of radical British socialists to Atlee’s sweeping post-war reforms. This latter tradition advanced an ethic of mutual care using theoretical sources quite alien to psychoanalysis. How should the state compensate for the reproductive labour of women, for the dependence engendered by dependants? Is there a future world in which mothering, and early childhood, could be a period of psychic liberation, a counterpoint to the constraints of industrial time? And finally, is the ‘maternal’ – and the forms of sustenance it offers – bound up with the messy biological and psychological experiences of womanhood, or is it a transferable, rational good?

Review: Chimpanzee Culture Wars

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.