ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

On The Limits of Scientific Listening: The Hidden Influence of Animal Alterity and Sameness in Animal Communication

• In Event: From Specimens to Subjects: Plural Practices of Seeing and Naming Primates

English Abstract

This paper juxtaposes two twentieth-century approaches to animal communication to argue that the scientist's perception of animal alterity fundamentally shapes research practices, interpretive frameworks, and conclusions about their cognitive abilities. The first, animal language studies, sought to understand the evolution of human language by training evolutionarily proximate animals, like primates, in human linguistic forms. The second, bioacoustics, used new technologies to study communication within its natural context across a diverse range of non-primate taxa, from birds to elephants.
Though pursuing different objectives, this comparison of parallel inquiries reveals how an unacknowledged and complicated anthropocentrism influenced scientist-primate relations and ultimately contributed to the field’s decline after the 1990s. Bioacoustics, by centering a wider tree of life, forced a de-centering of the human, compelling scientists to adopt more multimodal and productive interpretations of animal expression on its own terms. Analyzing the imagined ‘sameness’ of primates and ‘difference’ of bioacoustics subjects, this paper demonstrates how such assumptions dictate what counts as communication, shape scientific reception, and influence ethical obligations. Ultimately, this analysis reveals how animals themselves, through their perceived otherness, actively challenge the notion of objective animal research.

Author

• Khatijah Rahmat, Max Planck Institute for The History of Science