ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

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

Session Submission Type: Organized Session

English Abstract

In Euro-American primatology, the practice of identifying and naming individual non-human primates is often described as a major disciplinary shift. While Jane Goodall’s fieldwork is frequently credited with introducing a subject-oriented, ethnographically attuned approach to studying primates, several other histories complicate this narrative. These accounts do not deny Goodall’s influence, but they reveal distinct origins, forms, and consequences regarding non-human primates as individual subjects. In Northeastern Brazil, for example, field assistants from traditional rural communities draw on their own classificatory practices and experiential knowledge to distinguish individual robust capuchin monkeys. In the former Belgian Congo, colonial institutions developed their own logics for recognizing and naming bonobos for laboratory use. In the United States, laboratory and legal actors likewise mobilize different frameworks for identifying individual primates.
This session traces how diverse traditions of naming and individualizing primates operate across these settings. What consequences follow from these practices? How do scientific, indigenous, legal, biomedical, and museological worlds intersect, negotiate authority, or contest one another in the process? Spanning laboratory and museum contexts (Hannah Kressig), field sites (Mateus Oka), and legal arenas (Shira Shmuely), From Specimen to Subjects offers a comparative analysis of what it means to treat primates as individuals within varied regimes of knowledge production. Together, the papers examine how Indigenous caretakers, fieldworkers, and animal-rights advocates contribute to and challenge the ways primate individuality is defined, enacted, and given significance.

Sub Unit

• Organized Session

Chair

• Lisette Jong, University of Amsterdam

Individual Presentations

• The Remains of a Dream: Bonobos as Experimental Animals - Hannah Kressig, Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin

• Among Dominants and Chiefs: Who rules Primatology? - Mateus Oka, State University of Campinas, São Paulo, Brazil

• “On Behalf of Tommy”: Primate Cognition and the Making of Legal Personhood - Shira Shmuely

• On The Limits of Scientific Listening: The Hidden Influence of Animal Alterity and Sameness in Animal Communication - Khatijah Rahmat, Max Planck Institute for The History of Science

Session Organizer

• Hannah Kressig, Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin