Primate Visions: Gender, Race, and Nature in the World of Modern Science

by Donna J. Haraway

Haraway's discussions of how scientists have perceived the sexual nature of female primates opens a new chapter in feminist theory, raising unsettling questions about models of the family and of heterosexuality in primate research.

Genres: Science, Feminism, Philosophy, Nonfiction, Anthropology, History, Race

498 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1989

About the author

Donna J. Haraway is an American Professor Emerita in the History of Consciousness Department and Feminist Studies Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz, United States. She is a prominent scholar in the field of science and technology studies, described in the early 1990s as a "feminist, rather loosely a postmodernist". Haraway is the author of numerous foundational books and essays that bring together questions of science and feminism, such as "A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century" (1985) and "Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective". Additionally, for her contributions to the intersection of information technology and feminist theory, Haraway is widely cited in works related to Human Computer Interaction (HCI). Her Situated Knowledges and Cyborg Manifesto publications in particular, have sparked discussion within the HCI community regarding framing the positionality from which research and systems are designed. She is also a leading scholar in contemporary ecofeminism, associated with post-humanism and new materialism movements. Her work criticizes anthropocentrism, emphasizes the self-organizing powers of nonhuman processes, and explores dissonant relations between those processes and cultural practices, rethinking sources of ethics.

Haraway has taught Women's Studies and the History of Science at the University of Hawaii and Johns Hopkins University. Haraway's works have contributed to the study of both human-machine and human-animal relations. Her works have sparked debate in primatology, philosophy, and developmental biology. Haraway participated in a collaborative exchange with the feminist theorist Lynn Randolph from 1990 to 1996. Their engagement with specific ideas relating to feminism, technoscience, political consciousness, and other social issues, formed the images and narrative of Haraway's book Modest_Witness for which she received the Society for Social Studies of Science's (4S) Ludwik Fleck Prize in 1999. In 2000, Haraway was awarded the Society for Social Studies of Science's John Desmond Bernal Prize for her distinguished contributions to the field of science and technology studies. Haraway serves on the advisory board for numerous academic journals, including differences, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, Contemporary Women's Writing, and Environmental Humanities.

Reviews

[Zachary Tanner · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is my third Haraway, after first reading Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: the Reinvention of Nature and then Crystals, Fabrics, and Fields: Metaphors of Organicism in Twentieth-Century Developmental Biology, and I can confidently say that after six months with this book (paced about 10 pages-per-hour) Donna Haraway is the only author I enjoy reading more than I enjoy reading my favorite novelists. They also inform my daily self-monological narratology musings more than any “Literary Criticism” I have ever read.

“One story is not as good as another. This book is about what enables and what constrains a particular kind of story-telling practice—scientific narrative in a field of extreme boundary disputes, among many differently situated writers and readers that range from popular filmmakers to mathematical population biologists, ,comparative anatomists, and molecular biologists. The boundary disputes written into the bodies of primates—fossil and living, human and nonhuman—involve the major themes of modern history, from decolonization to nuclear war to feminism. In the context of unprecedented expansion and proliferation of sciences and science-based technologies, the disputes fundamentally involve constraints and enabling histories specific to the kind of cultural material practice that primate science is: bones, animal activities, discourses in adjoining sciences like cultural anthropology and medicine, and accumulation of many years of inhomogeneous data on dozens of species from laboratory and field. Attention to narrative is not instead of attention to science, but is emphasized in order to understand a particular kind of scientific practice that remains intrinsically story-laden—as a condition of doing good science.”

[Angela · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book summarizes the history of non-human primate research through a lens of "what do the approaches taken and conclusions drawn by these researchers tell us about their assumptions, worldview, prejudices, etc.," in particular as they relate to gender and race.

It's especially fascinating because primate research is so heavily associated with trying to figure out what aspects of human behavior are related to pure nature, versus cultural effects. So you have all these scientists who are trying to figure out human behavior as reflected through study of various primates, and then on top of that you have Haraway who is looking at all this research that was done, and showing that, sure, you get some information about specific primates, but a lot of what you get is just a reflection of the culture and beliefs of the researchers doing the investigations.

Aside from a really good reminder about how bias can creep into research, there are also some interesting points made about effectiveness of researcher networking, and how to go about successfully "destabilizing" an accepted (but perhaps erroneous) scientific theory.

This would have been a solid 4-star book, but the writing, particularly in certain sections, is really hard to read. (As in, for example, whole pages just listing dates and titles of publications.) Yeah, I got the point she was trying to make, but it didn't have to be this difficult.

[Shannan · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'm in love with Donna Haraway. Primate Visions is maddeningly dense and difficult to read, but Haraway's jungle of words isn't mere academic pretense. It serves a purpose (the best kind of purpose: a subversive, feminist one). Worth slogging through.

[Ricardo De moore · Rating 2 out of 5]

Donna Harraway's book is very much a product of 1980's critical theory. She uses primatology to shine a light on scientists own agendas and obsessions. I found it hard going and find' t read all of it. Having said this, her chapter on Robert Yerkes and the Yale Primate Research Station was well researched, if rather bold in its reading of Yerkes's inner motivations.

I found it a usefull springboard into giving some cultural background to a study I was doing on William Kellogs 1930's experiment of raising a Chimp, Gua, with his son, Donald.

[JC · Rating 5 out of 5]

I am still embarrassed to admit that I love Haraway’s older writing. Despite Haraway self-identifying as a marxist, most marxists and other leftists I've met don’t care for her work. I can understand this impatience because Haraway does not share the same sort of political and theoretical commitments or ‘reliability’ as many other marxists, and her postmodern eschewal of 'grand narratives' (and that framing itself) is in some sense a rejection of less heterodox forms of marxism. Near the start of the book she labels one strain of marxism (standpoint theory, interestingly something Haraway has come to be associated with, and most marxists I know would not identify with) as among the four temptations she’s trying to avoid with this book:

“The second valuable temptation comes from one branch of the marxist tradition, which argues for the historical superiority of particular structured standpoints for knowing the social world, and possibly the “natural” world as well. Fundamentally, people in this tradition find the social world to be structured by the social relations of the production and reproduction of daily life, such that it is only possible to see these relations clearly from some vantage points… From the standpoint of those social groups in positions of systematic domination and power, the true nature of social life will be opaque; they have too much to lose from clarity.
…Thus, the owners of the means of production will see equality in a system of exchange, where the standpoint of the working class will reveal the nature of domination in the system of production based on the wage contract and the exploitation and deformation of human labor. Those whose social definition of identity is rooted in the system of racism will not be able to see that the definition of human has not been neutral, and cannot be until major material-social changes occur on a world scale.
…These issues are hardly irrelevant to primatology, a science practiced in the United States nearly exclusively by white people, and until quite recently by white men, and still practiced overwhelmingly by the economically privileged. Much of this book examines the consequences for primatology of the social relations of race, sex, and class in the construction of scientific knowledge.
… the marxist, feminist, and anti-racist accounts reject the relativism of the social studies of science. Explicitly political accounts take sides on what is a more adequate, humanly acceptable knowledge. But these analyses have limits for guiding an exploration of primate studies. Wage labor, sexual and reproductive appropriation, and racial hegemony are structured aspects of the human social world. There is no doubt that they affect knowledge systematically, but it is not clear precisely how they relate to knowledge about the feeding patterns of patas monkeys or about the replication of DNA molecules.
…Another aspect of the marxist tradition has made significant progress in answering that kind of question. In the 1970s, people associated with the British Radical Science Journal [my comment: this journal became Science as Culture] developed the concept of science as a labor process in order to study and change scientific mediations of class domination in the relations of production and reproduction of human life.
…But these reproductive practices visibly affect more than a few contents and methods in modern primate studies. But even an extended concept of mediation and systematic social process, one that does not insist on the reduction to labor in a classic marxist sense, leaves out too much.”

Despite the lack of appeal Haraway has for comrades, I however have very unfashionable taste in philosophy and theory, and reading this Haraway book was a total joy for me. I’m very glad there are books like this on my comps list. Haraway’s really sprawling all over the place here, but puts her thoughts down in words so impressively; and either way, my brain likes books that wander like this because it just makes for reading that’s so much more fun.

The book has three main sections: (1) primatology under monopoly capitalism before WW2 (with stuff on Robert Yerkes, C.R. Carpenter, and S.A. Altmann), (2) multinational primatology during decolonization (Sherwood Washburn and Henry Harlow), and (3) primatology as a genre of feminist theory (with dedicated chapters on primatologists like Jeanne Altmann, Linda Marie Fedigan, Adrienne Zihlman, Sarah Blaffer Hrdy).

In Chapter 3, Haraway, citing Sontag, provides a fascinating excursion into public history and science that takes shape in museums, and the role of the camera in both these institutions and colonialism more broadly, where cameras were designed very much to function like guns (something Paul Virilio also writes about very well):

“Even at the literal level of physical appearance, “[t]o one familiar with the old types of camera the Akeley resembled a machine gun quite as much as it resembled a camera” (Akeley 1923: 166). Akeley said he set out to design a camera “that you can aim … with about the same ease that you can point a pistol” (Akeley 1923: 166)… The “naked eye” science advocated by the American Museum perfectly suited the camera, ultimately so superior to the gun for the possession, production, preservation, consumption, surveillance, appreciation, and control of nature… The camera is superior to the gun for the control of time; and Akeley's dioramas with their photographic vision, sculptor's touch, and taxidermic solidity were about the end of time”

It reminds me of a conversation I had last month after a conference in Mexico about the gaze of tourists and cameras and what exactly we were doing with them, and the extent to which colonial history and relations of domination are caught up in these moments that I honestly don’t contemplate much about. I asked whether capturing something by way of writing rather than photography should be subject to a similar level of scrutiny. In many senses, this is the entire problematization with anthropology, which Haraway puts forward in this book. Many primatologists, including women, were part of anthropology departments, because primatological science was being used as an epistemic foundation for many sorts of anthropological and sociological theorizing, with respect to human nature, behaviour, dominance, and sexual difference.

Where did sexual difference come from? Was it natural, social, economic? Was hierarchy and dominance natural to the human species and its precursors? Did they constitute what made humans distinct from other hominids? Many primatologists were attempting to answer questions like this, which is why they were deeply entangled within the history of scientific management, psychiatry, engineering, industrial production, and the military. Haraway writes:

“Social relations of domination are built into the hardware and logics of technology, producing the illusion of technological determinism. Nature is, in “fact,” constructed as a technology through social praxis. And dioramas are meaning-machines. Machines are maps of power, arrested moments of social relations that in turn threaten to govern the living. The owners of the great machines of monopoly capital were, with excellent reason, at the forefront of nature work—because it was one of the means of production of race, gender, and class. For them, “naked eye science” could give direct vision of social peace and progress despite the appearances of class war and decadence. They required a science “instaurating” jungle peace; and so they bought it.”

“But the relations of knowledge and power at the American Museum of Natural History should not be narrated as a tale of evil capitalists in the sky conspiring to obscure the truth. Quite the opposite, the tale must be of committed Progressives struggling to dispel darkness through research, education, and reform. The capitalists were not in the sky; they were in the field, armed with the Gospel of Wealth.30 They were also often armed with an elephant gun and an Akeley camera.”

“Human engineering was “the movement to control the human element of production at the individual and group level through the study and manipulation of human behavior.” The concept of engineering had its origin in liberal reform of the Progressive Era, roughly 1890 to World War I, especially in science-based industries linked to chemical and electrical engineering. In the language of the emerging literature, the main problems were the inventory, redesign, and maintenance of the human being for incorporation into production and consumption processes of industrial capitalism. That project involved deliberate removal of “irrationalities” in the system, including “maladjustments” and “inefficient” discrimination due to race, sex, or class. By the 1930s personnel management integrated the methods of physical, biological, and social sciences in order to produce harmony, team work, adjustment—in short, cooperation in the face of the imperatives of “modern society.” The structure of cooperation involved the entire complex of division of labor and authority in capitalist production and reproduction. Motivation of cooperation was a management problem. It was also a biomedical problem.”

These investigations into human biology and psychology were also being integrated into scientific theories about sexual difference:

“On “scientific grounds,” Yerkes rejected the proposition that males were mentally superior, or for that matter, naturally dominant. Males and females had the same psychological (ideation) and drive (motivation) structure. But there were differences in expression of drives as a result, presumably, of hormones. The result was personality. The physical marker for the internal state was always required in life science. ”

“Discussing differentiated techniques of social control adopted by males and females, Yerkes described biologically determined differences in drive expression. Differences among chimps in “techniques of social control” suggested that human modes were also psychobiologically legitimated and inevitable.”

“With the passing of religion, the new bedrock for value decisions, the more evolutionarily adaptive ground for judgment, was comparative life science. Sex was fundamental to managed society. Sex was mobilized by science and medicine as it was discursively freed from religion. In the division of labor in the family, the model for division of labor in all of society, naturalization of the bio-politics of reproduction was a cornerstone of historical explanation.”

And so this is the manner by which Haraway highlights the interdisciplinary nature of primatology in the 20th century. She writes about post-war “Macy Foundation conferences on cybernetics” in this way:

“The conferences “centered around functional analogies between the central nervous system and a class of machines in which information storage, communication, control mechanisms, negative feedback, and the ability to carry out mathematical and logical operations were of central importance” (Heims 1975: 369). The social mechanism of the Macy conferences made available for social-biological theory the ideas and techniques of systems and communications theories, the most potent fruits of wartime work on integrating biological components into comprehensive technical control systems. Neither the war nor the conference was a unique cause of subsequent scientific developments, but they were part of a cluster of social mechanisms that informed important figures across the life and human sciences about the promise of the new communications approaches. These people were linked in many ways: for example, location in Boston-Cambridge at M.I.T. and Harvard; ties between Harvard and the University of Chicago; connections between home institutions and federal science bodies with concerns spanning from defense to mental health; and formal and informal research interests across usual disciplinary boundaries. These scientists published widely, taught at major institutions, and were publicly identified with the promise of cybernetics. Wilson and Altmann inherited their approaches to animal behavior to animal behavior through these kinds of multiple connections. ”

Haraway also elaborates about sociobiology’s connection to these endeavours (a field full of notoriously racist people):

“If anything, sociobiology is a hyperhumanism, in some of its spokespersons' claims to provide an effective way to achieve goals of “human fulfillment” through accurate knowledge of the requirements of human design and redesign… The multiple connections of sociobiology to psychiatry are important, but even without such connections, the political meaning of scientific knowledge pertains. Science produces meanings and possibilities.”

The later third of the book, which focuses on women and feminist primatologists, also has some of the most fascinating portions of the text. One of my favourites was Haraway’s hilarious description of Jane Goodall during anticolonial struggles in the Belgian Congo making sandwiches for runaway settlers:

“En route to Gombe from Nairobi, the two women were delayed in Kigoma by an event that silently marked the post-World War II primate literature: the successful revolution against colonial rule in the Belgian Congo. Goodall’s account of the events reflected the view of her culture: “Violence and bloodshed had erupted in the Congo”; and “First, it was necessary to wait and find out how the local Kigoma district Africans would react to the tales of rioting and disorder in the Congo” (Goodall 1971: 26–27). Boatloads of Belgian refugees filled the town of Kigoma, 25 miles across Lake Tanganyika from the Congo. There, while George Schaller was forced to abandon his study of mountain gorillas in the Virunga Volcanoes of the Congo, Jane and Vanne Goodall spent their enforced delay in traveling to Gombe by fixing 2000 spam sandwiches for the fleeing Belgians (Goodall 1971: 27). A decade after the events, In the Shadow of Man’s chapter on “Beginnings” for the Gombe chimpanzee research is silent on the fact that 15 African nations achieved independence in 1960 alone. Those episodes of “rioting and disorder” had fundamental consequences for the primate story.”

There’s so much more, but I will finish with Haraway’s quick cursory summaries of how primatology was caught up in the struggles of feminist and women’s movements:

“A larger picture emerges if we consider the profusion of books focused on debates about sex and gender which take serious account of the work by women primatologists and reconstructed men primatologists. Every one of these books is part of a large international social struggle, especially from the 1960s on, about the political-symbolic-social structure, history (natural and otherwise), and future of Woman/women. The political struggles are not context to the written texts. The women's movements, for example, are not the “outside” to some other “inside.” The written texts are part of the political struggle, but a struggle conducted with very specific “scientific” means, including possible stories in the narrative field of primatology. By definition, the origin point has to be outside the history I will tell, therefore consider first the unique, renegade pre-1960s classic, a book that is to female primates and feminist primatology as Simone de Beauvoir's Second Sex is to feminist theory of the second wave: Ruth Herschberger, Adam's Rib (1948); it was reissued in paper in 1970, hardly an accidental date. Herschberger's dedication of the book to G. Evelyn Hutchinson recalls the crucial importance of pro-feminist men in the pre-history of feminist struggles for science.”

“Fedigan’s treatment of two authors, Lila Leibowitz (1983) and Richard Potts (1984), demonstrates her stakes in theorizing reduced sexual difference and deferring its salience to processes and moments outside the theater of origins of what it means to be human.
…Agreeing with Lovejoy that early humans hovered near extinction, Leibowitz argued that the sexual division of labor was nonetheless likely a very late human invention, so that for most of human evolution males and females engaged in largely similar productive activities facilitated by the key human invention, food-getting tools. In the narrative code of evolution accounts, late means less fundamental to human nature. Anything recent must surely be less “biological” and so easier to change. That structure is a narrative code, not a fact about change. The productionist emphasis of Leibowitz’s account is partly rooted in her marxism… Fedigan is looking for a narrative of human evolution that is not about the origin of home and family, a most unnatural preference… Here, Fedigan joins other feminist anthropological criticism that has highlighted the western cultural specificity of notions of “home,” the “domestic,” and women’s analytic assignment to locations in these curious theoretical spaces, which are imagined to have materialized in the species-making zone between hominoids and hominids…”

postscript: Haraway quotes a lot of marxists in this, though she admittedly has a habit of citing really marginal ones that seem a little weird to me. The two main ones she cites (with the exception of Lila Leibowitz), were Evelyn Reed (a trotskyist) and Adrea Skybreak (a maoist). This is an endnote Haraway includes:

“Compare Reed (1975) and Skybreak (1984) for different political moments in popular marxist struggles for beliefs, ideologies, and scientific doctrines on women's evolution and the origin of sexual inequality. They make intriguingly different uses of Engels. Reed was an anthropologist and a member of the elder generation of American socialists; Skybreak is a pseudonym for a writer who is both sympathetic to the (Maoist) Revolutionary Communist Party and well-informed about current debates in ecology and evolution. Skybreak also has a sense of humor.”

[Arda · Rating 4 out of 5]

Collected some notes on Haraway mostly from her contributions in journal articles:

The way we see things is not a passive act, yet the tendency to self-profess knowledge from a distance and assume relativism that comes from a static, masculine and dominant order, restrains the myriads of vision and sensory devices (Haraway, 1988).

Notes from Strat Comm:

Vision is not passive, Haraway confirms, but active, and in active vision, there is a need to understand how the relationships are formed. The tendency to self-profess knowledge from a distance and assume relativism that comes from a static, masculine and dominant order, restrains the myriads of vision and sensory devices.

Haraway challenges the separated gaze, the looking from a distance, and the presumption of knowledge about a given object. Just like we are aware that poetry and history present us with a certain perspective of the truth rather than the truth itself, science, she observes, is no different: what passes as “truth,” whether scientific or historical, is compromised, let alone manufactured. The scientific claim of knowledge (and assumed objectivity) is thus only an abstract assumption that is acquired from a distant, masculine gaze. Such knowledge that is based on an omniscient, disembodied approach, even if it assumes relativism, is nonexistent, for it is restricted in its own separation from the objects that are perceived. Supposed objectivity of this nature is a myth, she determines, for it bases itself upon a passive, stable and omniscient observation. Just like such totalitarian seeing (seeing from everywhere) is inaccurate and narrows perception, so is the notion of relative seeing (seeing from nowhere).

Haraway acknowledges that there are diversified ways of looking, and that the scientific claim of knowledge can be overly simplistic and confined in its nature, particularly because of its distant gaze that is disembodied yet centralizes itself as a dominant force of definition. Such observation, from a distance, does not work, for the privileged do not see things as they are. Haraway notes that it may in fact be more effective, in the effort to be objective, to see from inside, rather than outside: to see, with crucial examination, from the perspective of those within the setting – from those who are the marginalized themselves.

Haraway indicates that the examination of how things are seen is critical, as is the personal and collection inspection of what knowledge is considered as truth, and whether there is truth to begin with. Rather than take on a godly or relativist look at the world, she opts for acquiring different viewpoints and work towards achieving partial knowledge instead of supposing absolutist truth. She calls for an “embodied vision” – that which is seeing but is also seen, it is at a distance but also interacting and active. The purpose of objectivity, as she describes it, is to make sense of the world, to understand, to conceptualize, and to construct life. A distinction of objectivity is that which is knowledge-seeking, rather than knowledge-claiming. To work towards objectivity necessitates that one looks for ways to piece together the pieces of knowledge, critically and collectively, and for that purpose, she calls for an embodied, present, complex and critical searching eye.

[Virginia · Rating 2 out of 5]

Haraway is absolutely brilliant and this book is packed full of amazing concepts.

But she's almost unreadable. Gah. The writing is so damn painful that I'm not sure I'll ever be able to pick this book up again.

[Erica · Rating 4 out of 5]

Best academic chapter title of 1989: "Apes in Eden, Apes in Space."

[Molsa Roja(s) · Rating 5 out of 5]

Anything other than the top score would be a crime against humanity. Even if this is probably the least enjoyable book of all Haraway's collection, the mere idea of the effort -30 pages of bibliografy, just saying- she has done to analyze and tear apart a hundred years of such a prolific and entangled discipline as primatology is, is just mind blowing. Haraway goes from late 19th Century biological vision of the organism as a whole up to the feminist movements in late 20th Century, going of course through the whole cybernetic approach and the space program. Her work cannot be measured, not can her ability to determine the hidden discourses -not so hidden, sometimes- in scientific journals, books, reports, documentaries and even museums.

That being said, I must admit I suffered, as I'm not particularly interested in apes or primatology per se and her writing is extensive, not about the scientific facts per se but on the whole changing structure surrounding apes as a scientific object. As I had no idea of primatology prior to this reading, it was just plain boring at some points, and I even turned some pages quicker than you'd expect. Anyway, this is an extremely valuable work from Haraway.

[Annette Leiderer · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is a modern classic. Haraway changed the way western scientists debated and analyzed human-animal-relationships. To this day her language will fascinate especially German audiences, who are used to very dry science language, because Haraway did/does not conform - for good and hermeneutic reasons - to scientific traditions on how to write scientific prose.

[Arik · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fantastic scholarly work. Brilliant. Entertaining. Precise. Learned so much through the process of engaging with this work. Its extremely dense and left me extremely full. ❤️

[Tina. · Rating 3 out of 5]

I only read parts of this book, so my rating is reflective of only those parts. I enjoyed some chapters and found others, if not uninteresting, boringly written. Maybe I'll give this one a shot again some day.

[Kate · Rating 2 out of 5]

"The land divided, the world united."

"Man is the sex which risks life and in so doing, achieves his existence."

"Every specimen is a permanent fact."

"When we are afraid, we shoot. But when we are nostalgic, we take pictures."

"The eye is infinitely more potent than the gun."

[Michael Norwitz · Rating 4 out of 5]

Haraway's book assesses the influence of gender assumptions in primatology. She's obsessive about historical details which does not make this a particularly casual read, but her lucid assessments justify the books historical import.

[Risa · Rating 3 out of 5]

"Primate Visions: Gender, Race, and Nature in the World of Modern Science by Donna Jeanne Haraway (1989)"

[Shannon · Rating 4 out of 5]

Good, interesting to read about the politics of primatology. Definitely a different viewpoint than you usually get.

[Liamers Molloy · Rating 4 out of 5]

excellent