Kinship With Monkeys

Intrigued by a slide showing a woman breast-feeding a monkey, anthropologist Loretta A. Cormier spent fifteen months living among the Guajá, a foraging people in a remote area of Brazil. The result is this ethnographic study of the extraordinary relationship between the Guajá Indians and monkeys. While monkeys are a key food source for the Guajá, certain pet monkeys have a quasi-human status. Some infant monkeys are adopted and nurtured as human children while others are consumed in accordance with the "symbolic cannibalism" of their belief system. The apparent contradiction of this predator/protector relationship became the central theme of Cormier's research: How can monkeys be both eaten as food and nurtured as children? Her research reveals that monkeys play a vital role in Guajá society, ecology, economy, and religion. In Guajá animistic beliefs, all forms of plant and animal life—especially monkeys—have souls and are woven into a comprehensive kinship system. Therefore, all consumption can be considered a form of cannibalism. Cormier sets the stage for this enlightening study by examining the history of the Guajá and the ecological relationships between human and nonhuman primates in Amazonia. She also addresses the importance of monkeys in Guajá ecological adaptation as well as their role in the Guajá kinship system. Cormier then looks at animism and life classification among the Guajá and the role of pets, which provide a context for understanding "symbolic cannibalism" and how the Guajá relate to various forms of life in their natural and supernatural world. The book concludes with a discussion of the implications of ethnoprimatology beyond Amazonia, including Western perceptions of primates.

Annotation This book presents a series of review chapters on the various aspects of primate kinship and behavior. The relatively new molecular data allow one to assess directly degrees of genetic relatedness and kinship relations between individuals. A considerable body of data on intergroup variation, based on experimental studies in both free-ranging and captive groups has accumulated. This allows a full and satisfying reconsideration of this broad area of research.

In The Monkeys of Arashiyama: Thirty-five Years of Research in Japan and the West, Linda Fedigan and Pamela Asquith reveal the diversity of research on the Arashiyama Japanese macaques, and the Japanese and Western traditions in primate studies. The essays reflect studies by primatologists with the population at Arashiyama, Kyoto, and the subgroup which fissioned from the original macaque group, transferred to Texas in 1972. It is a comprehensive examination of this major research group, highlighted by some of the new and interesting findings on primate social organization.

Stressing direct connections between human and nonhuman society, this book about the social life of monkeys, apes and humans emphasizes the importance of social information and knowledge in the understanding of primate behavior and organization.

This collection of essays offers multifaceted explorations of animal encounters in a range of philosophical, cultural, literary, and historical contexts. Exploring Animal Encounters encourages us to think about the richness and complexity of animal lives and human-animal relations, foregrounding the intricate roles nonhuman creatures play in the always already more-than-human sphere of ethics and politics. In this way, the essays in this volume can be understood as a contribution to alternative imaginings of interspecies coexistence in a time in which the issue of human relations with earth and earth others has come to the fore with unprecedented force and severity.

Cheney and Seyfarth enter the minds of vervet monkeys and other primates to explore the nature of primate intelligence and the evolution of cognition. "This reviewer had to be restrained from stopping people in the street to urge them to read it: They would learn something of the way science is done, something about how monkeys see their world, and something about themselves, the mental models they inhabit."—Roger Lewin, Washington Post Book World "A fascinating intellectual odyssey and a superb summary of where science stands."—Geoffrey Cowley, Newsweek "A once-in-the-history-of-science enterprise."—Duane M. Rumbaugh, Quarterly Review of Biology

The list of challenges facing nonhuman primates in the 21st century is a long one. The expansion of palm oil plantations to feed a growing consumer class is eating away at ape and monkey habitats in Southeast Asia and Central Africa. Lemurs are hunted for food in the poorest parts of Madagascar while monkeys are used as medicine in Brazil. Traditional cultural beliefs are maintaining demand for animal body parts in West African markets while viral YouTube videos of “cute” and “cuddly” lorises have increased their market value as pets and endangered their populations. These and other issues are addressed in this book by leading researchers in the field of ethnoprimatology, the study of human/nonhuman primate interactions that combines traditional primatological methodologies with cultural anthropology in an effort to better understand the nuances of our economic, ritualistic, and ecologic relationships.

Underlying the anthropological study of humans is the principle that there is a reality to which a human must adapt for survival. Populations must adapt to the realities of the physical world and maintain a proper fit between their biological makeup and the pressures of the various niches of the world. Social groups must develop adaptive mechanisms in the organization of their social relations if there is to be order, regularity, and predictability in patterns of cooperation and competition. This book presents an introduction to anthropology that is unified and made systematic by its focus on adaptations that have accompanied the evolution of humans, from non-human primates to inhabitants of vast urban areas in modern industrial societies. Human Adaptation contains over forty outstanding essays that are intended to serve as an introduction to physical anthropology, archeology, and linguistics from the point of view of the processes of adaptation. The organization of these selections contains a balance between biological and prehistoric cultural adaptations. They provide coherence for the study of human evolution. Several selections, notably those in connection with linguistic adaptations, deal with contemporary people in order to shed light on earlier evolutionary processes. More than half of the selections deal with biological evolution. This volume unifies the subject matter of anthropology within a single and powerful explanatory framework and incorporates the work of the most renowned anthropological experts on man.