对于黑猩猩文化的探讨论文~ POSITIVE PROSPECT OF CHIMPANZEE CULTURE STUDY Controversy on the presence of culture within primates’ communities hovers over the primatology academic field in the recent decades. It is no surprise that people tend to assume that human’s close relatives in the wild, such as chimpanzees, would demonstrate certain similar traits as human society, considering the two species were once tightly linked on the path of evolution. However, recent attempts by the primatologists have proven that finding convincing evidence of primate culture is no easy task. Chimpanzees, as the closest living relatives to humans, have been one of the most popular study subjects. Notable efforts have been made in studying chimpanzees’ behavior, both in the laboratories and in the wild, in order to locate determining evidence of chimpanzee culture. Despite that valuable findings have been made, skeptics still stand firm with their counter arguments. Up till now, none of the observational discoveries offering supportive evidence for chimpanzee culture have gone unquestioned.One main reason hindering the progress of discussion is the lack of widely accepted definition of culture (Laland and Hoppitt, 2017:150). Sociologists and anthropologists have long struggled with the concept of culture and the uniqueness of human culture. And by far, few propositions have stood up to challenges. The complexity of the issue lies in the absence of comprehensive understanding of culture’s impact on the shaping of human society, which in turn influences the determining factors of nonhuman primate culture. Conflicts arise in broad or narrow culture definitions as well. Too narrow a definition of culture may exterminate the entire purpose of studying primate culture, whereas broader definitions are too lenient that it diminishes the rigor of scientific studies, thus producing unconvincing or invalid findings. Another reason that may have resulted in the stagnation in nonhuman primate culture study is difficulty in manipulating experimental subjects. Unlike fish, birds or other species, whose cultures have been more thoroughly examined so far, nonhuman primates, like chimpanzees, are generally larger in size and require more activity space. Hence, creating an ideal experimental environment would require significant amount of funding and effort. Besides, constraining chimpanzees into a controlled area has been pointed out to produce inaccurate observation results and is considered unethical to the animals. Meanwhile, observations conducted in the wild are hardly systematic due to the distribution of chimpanzee communities and numbers of variants unaccounted for. Even though supportive findings of chimpanzees have culture have been made in the past years, all experiments or observations fall short on successfully ruling out individual differences, genetic or environment influences. As a result, the added difficulty in constructing conclusive argument for chimpanzees have culture is not to be neglected. Also, as Laland and Hoppitt (2017:156-157) pointed out, nonhuman primates tend to be subjected to stricter judging criteria when it comes to culture existence within their communities, to which the current ambiguous definition of culture may have lent a contributive force. For instance, Tomasello’s (1994) famous human culture triad: universality, uniformity and history, has been confronted for its appropriateness of application on human culture since it was first brought forward, let alone using it as a comparative standard between human and chimpanzee culture. As discussed earlier, the distinctiveness of human culture has not been clearly identified. If one ought to assume history a key feature that sets human culture apart, claiming that human culture has remained resilient through centuries, then it would render history an unjustified bar to judge whether chimpanzees have culture against, since the study of chimpanzees is yet to endure such a significant time span. Studies of chimpanzee brains have shown close resemblance to human brains. Rational assumptions have been made inferring that ample brain tissues would facilitate the development of community culture among the chimpanzees. Yet, concrete scientific findings have not been achieved. On the other hand, culture has been found to exist among animals with much smaller brain tissues, suggesting that brain size is not an essential factor of culture formation and dissemination. Nonetheless, one silver lining shed by anthropologist Pascal Boyer’s (1994) study on the Fangs, a group with transgenerational unshakable belief of ghosts, proposes culture relies heavily on cognition capability. Considering that bigger brains seem to hold an advantage in terms of cognitive machinery, and though still disputable, cognition has been linked with more active social learning and possible culture presence; in addition, definitive evidence of chimps’ social learning have been found in the laboratory, all of which are favorable indication of chimpanzees having culture (Boyd and Richerson, 2017). Gruber et al.’s (2017) discovery of chimpanzee’s “table manner”, though remain questioned by the skeptics, has paved a brighter path for the investigation of wild chimpanzees culture. Their field experiment made a somewhat successful attempt at controlling genetic and environmental factors by conducting observation on two adjacent Ugandan chimpanzee communities. The researchers reached the conclusion that, when encounter novel tasks, chimpanzees with the same genetic and environment background rely on cultural knowledge for solution. However, clear indication is lacking on whether the chimpanzees could have invented the solution on the spot, rather than solving it based on their community cultural practice (Call and Tennie, 2017). Similar arguments have been made against an observational discovery on chimps’ close relatives in the nonhuman primate family, Japanese macaques. The celebrated innovator, potato-washer, female Japanese macaque Imo, astounded the world with her initiation of macaque culture of food washing. Yet, it was later found through accumulated experiments that food washing has been a persistent feature in the macaque community, which does not necessarily require imitation or social learning to be picked up by other members of the group (Laland and Hoppitt, 2017:155). Thus, skeptics counter argue for the weakness of the evidence and question the validity of the original proposition. Still, the opposing party so far stands solely on their counter hypothesis, which awaits further testing. Although contemporary mainstream chimpanzee, or other nonhuman primate, culture studies still pace along the barrier of experiment subjects manipulation and thorough elimination of genetic, environmental and other participating factors’ influence on the observational conclusion, there is no doubt that significant advancements have been made in bringing such studies closer to laboratory experiment scrutiny. Solid evidence of chimpanzee culture existence is yet to be established, however, the relentless pursuit of generations of primatologists has contributed encouraging prospect of the field. With joint progression of sociological studies on more comprehensive appreciation of the uniqueness of human culture, future primatologists will benefit from working with a more manageable and operative culture concept, and therefore making chimpanzee’s potential cultural behavior more easily identifiable and more definitive. In the meantime, noticeable exploration of field experiments conducted by primatologists, such as Gruber et al. (2017), has heated up discussion on the likelihood of unobstructed observation of wild chimpanzees. To conclude, promising contributions have been made towards further studies of chimpanzee culture. And combined with existing laboratory discoveries and chimpanzee’s cognitive capability, it is reasonable to anticipate the establishment of hard evidence of chimpanzee culture. References Boyd, Robert and Richerson, Peter J. 2017 Culture, Adaptation and Innateness. In The Innate Mind: Culture and Cognition. Peter Carruthers, Stephen Stich and Stephen Laurence, eds. Oxford University Press. Boyer, Pascal 1994 The Naturalness of Religious Ideas: A Cognitive Theory of Religion. Berkeley: University of California Press. Call, Josep and Tennie, Claudio 2017 Animal Culture: Chimpanzee Table Manners? Current Biology 19(21):R981-3. Gruber, Thibaud, Muller, Martin N., Strimling, Pontus, Wrangham, Richard and Zuberbühler, Klaus 2017 Wild Chimpanzees Rely on Cultural Knowledge to Solve An Experimental Honey Acquisition Task. Current Biology, 19(21):1806-1810. Laland, Kevin N. and Hoppitt, William 2017 Do Animals Have Culture? Evolutionary Anthropology 12:150-159. Tomasello, Michael 1994 The Question of Chimpanzee Culture. In Chimpanzee Cultures. Richard W. Wrangham, William McGrew, Frans de Waal and Paul Heltne, eds. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. |
