|
Biruté Galdikas
Reflections of Eden: My Years with the Orangutans of Borneo
Boston: Little, Brown & Company, 1995.
Anne Russon
Orangutans: Wizards of the Rainforest
Toronto: Key Porter Books, 1999.
Linda Spalding
A Dark Place in the Jungle: Science, Orangutans and Human Nature
Chapel Hill: Algonquin of Chapel Hill, 1999.
Book Review by Leesa Fawcett
1
York University, Ontario, Canada
As I read these books, I kept wondering who was being saved
and who was doing the saving. All three books are about the
endangered orangutans (Pongo pygmaeus) of Borneo, although the
perspectives vary drastically and sometimes harshly. Galdikas’s
book is largely a descriptive and personal memoir chronicling
her incredible 25 years of living with ex-captive and wild
orangutans. Russon has written an excellent photographic coffee
table book with research emphasis on orangutan intelligence and
imitation. Spalding is a fiction writer and was originally asked
to write a biography of Galdikas. The result is her first
non-fiction book, an account of her quest and eco-tourist
journey.
The plight of the last of the arboreal great apes often is
demoralizing, and the innumerable players, politics, and
passions involved in their struggle to survive are perplexing.
These are troubling books to read, especially together, and so
they should be. The biological conservation of any species by
people who “come-from-away,” if told with any integrity, is
bound to be fraught with complications. That many of the
orangutans in these books are ex-captives being rehabilitated to
the wild adds to this vast cross-cultural, cross-species
complexity.
Primate semblance and kinship to human beings place them in a
precarious boundary position. Orang hutans, the Malay words for
“people of the forest” have been used as a food source, coveted
as status symbols, and captured as “pets” in Asia. Now, great
apes are being elevated in the hierarchy of species to a level
closer to humans (witness the recent great ape protection law in
New Zealand), but “they” are never allowed to get too close. I
disagree with the reproduction of hierarchical human
elitism?favoring primates and megafauna?into many animal welfare
and rights circles. Human arrogance still will insist that most
animals stay “othered,” always in comparison to us as not-us,
never quite measuring up. As Haraway (1978) has said, “We polish
an animal mirror to look for ourselves.… The science of
non-human primates, primatology, may be a source of insights or
a source of illusions. The issue rests on our skills in the
construction of mirrors” (p. 37).
The anthropologist Louis Leakey mentored and encouraged Jane
Goodall to study chimpanzees and the late Dian Fossey to
research mountain gorillas, both in Africa. He picked Birute
Galdikas to study orangutans in Indonesian Borneo. Known as
“Leakey’s angels” or the “trimates,” I do not doubt that the
research, commitment, and life stories of these three women have
shifted public knowledge about great ape conservation in
positive directions. Galdikas’s memoir seems inextricably bound
up with Leakey, Goodall, and Fossey. She uses the cat’s cradle,
a string game that Leakey liked to play, to illustrate her
belief that larger patterns were at work in her life. It is
clear to me that Galdikas knows how to work hard, wait, and
struggle for what she wants. What is less clear when I read
Spalding’s gentle condemnation of her is whether Galdikas
understands the fine interplay between her privilege, class, and
culture. More troubling are the shadowy interfaces between
science, rehabilitation, conservation and personal attachment.
Situated, Embodied Field Work
While travelling in Sumatra in 1981, I hiked up a volcano.
Although tired, hot, and hungry at the time, I still can feel
the sheer joy and awe of seeing a wild, reddish orangutan
swinging by, watching from overhead. I have great respect for
people, like Galdikas, who do field work. It takes courage,
tenacity, patience, and independence to stay in the field and
remain true to yourself and your research. I have worked as a
field biologist in remote places and under harsh conditions,
studying whales in Newfoundland and the Galapagos and crocodiles
in northern Australia. As a marine biologist, I know all too
well how hard it is for women to work in the field in mostly all
male company, often under arduous conditions. There also is the
intense concentration and single-mindedness of observing another
being, collecting moments of life histories.
Often, there is the shock of the intrusion of the “outside”
world. For example, Galdikas and her former husband Rod
Brindamour (who helped her in her research and took many of her
finest photographs) were deep in a swamp, immersed in black
water, following three wild orangutans when an immense sound
exploded overhead. Sugito, their first rescued, orangutan infant
leapt into her arms, and the forest went deathly silent. They
heard the Concorde’s sonic boom as it flew over them on a
demonstration flight from Europe to Australia. Galdikas saw it
as the infringement of technology on the purity of nature and
that “humankind was trying to supplant God in the ordering of
time, nature and the earth” (p.163). Sometimes, with the
solitude and extreme independence that fieldwork demands, people
can forget their origins and our interdependence, human with
“more-than-humans,” Abrams (1996) with cyborgs, and with
globalized technologies.
Gender, class, and nationality play important roles in these
books both unconsciously and subtly. All three authors are women
traveling, studying, and thinking about orangutans and their
rainforest world. While reading Spalding’s elusive search for
contact with Galdikas, I was struck by the accounts of Galdikas’
battles with neighbors and her demand for loyalty. Who was loyal
to whom? Certainly, Galdikas was loyal to many rehabilitant
orangutans, but was she loyal to her workers, to her Indonesian
hosts? An uneasy feeling reminded me that the subjugated
position of being gendered female does not absolve women from
colonizing and oppressive tendencies. Struggling with one
oppression does not necessarily guarantee insight into another,
and unfortunately can function to screen a broader vision.
Russon is a psychologist, Galdikas an anthropologist, and
Spalding a writer. All three are white, Canadian, middle class
women with different frames who have intimately encountered the
Dayak culture of Kalimantan. Russon acknowledges early in her
book that the Dayak peoples of Borneo have a profound knowledge
of, and respect for, orangutans, and cites Indonesian orangutan
researchers. Spalding formed a close friendship with her Dayak
guide, Riska, and, in subsequent trips between Canada and
Indonesia, helped edit her life story (Orpa Sari, 1999).
Galdikas has lived the longest in Kalimantan .She is married to
Pak Bohap, a Dayak, and they are the parents of two children.
Russon’s coffee table book contains exceptional photographs and
includes a list of organizations concerned with orangutan
welfare, a bibliography, and an index. To me, this book seems
the most comprehensive, as Russon describes the natural history
and plight of orangutans. Galdikas’s book is largely
autobiographical, full of detailed, personal accounts of living
with, and following, ex-captive orangutans and some wild ones. I
was surprised that Galdikas did not have a reference list, nor
did she cite many other contemporary researchers. Spalding is
the neophyte to orangutans and the rainforest, and her book is a
combination travelogue and exploration of single motherhood. She
writes beautifully and honestly, illuminating the insoluble
layers of orangutan conservation.
Animals Thinking
With my long-standing interest in animal consciousness, I find
Russon’s research on rehabilitant orangutan intelligence
fascinating and generative. She reports that they imitate their
human companions in many different ways. They ride in canoes,
plan, deceive, and steal food from storerooms, imitate teeth
brushing, sawing logs, hammering nails, shooting blowguns, and
washing laundry. Apparently, they are mechanical wizards, able
to unlock all sorts of enclosures. Over the decades of exclusion
by intelligence, researchers have compiled lists of traits
animals must have to prove they can think. These include neural
and brain complexity, memory and learning, reason or conceptual
thought, language, culture, self-awareness or
self-consciousness, tool use, individual recognition, play and
laughter, and a sense of the future. This list is by no means
exhaustive. As soon as an animal passes one of the test
criteria, we immediately devise another (Midgley, 1978). The
question then becomes, is a human centrally a test-passing
animal? For example, after chimpanzees were known to use tools
(twigs) to fish termites out of their underground nests (Beck,
1986), the criteria then became that animals were thinking only
if they used tools to make tools. The complex physics and
kinesthetics of clambering successfully through the rainforest
and the detailed mental maps necessary for them to find ripe
fruit are perhaps just the edges of orangutan intelligence.
Only Russon seriously takes up the question of the ex-captives
being bicultural. As I read the authors’ encounters with
ex-captives, I worried that the “bi” part of the cultural
exchange was dangerously skewed toward the human side where
human skills are much more valued. As the orangutans learned
human social skills and human versions of rainforest skills,
what was irrevocably lost? I am reminded of anthropologist and
animal activist, Noske (1989), who, more than a decade ago,
lamented that we need to approach other animals reciprocally to
learn from their cultures. I wish the anthropologist Galdikas
had shown more of the same attitude. I wish there were more
acknowledgments of what we do not know, and may never know,
about orangutans. I want us to be conscious of our own limited
imaginations about the lives of other animals. Still, I do not
despair. Galdikas and others made huge gains in meeting and
getting to know animals in their own worlds, a dramatic
departure from, and resistance to, Western science’s
objectification of animals. These orangutans are “subjects” to
the authors, but they do not have to be “like me” to gain
admittance into the realm of subjecthood. Politics of
Conservation
I was unnerved at times by the admirable and extraordinary
attachment of Galdikas to some of her rehabilitant orangutans.
It was not the attachment that unnerved me but the unexamined
importance of it for her. Calling themselves kindred spirits,
she deeply identifies with and compares her life history to
Akmad’s, a brutally kidnapped orangutan. Obviously, this was a
remarkable relationship for her but I wondered what it meant to
the orangutan? She writes that Akmad had only one ambition in
life and that was to be Galdikas’s foster child. Although
Galdikas acknowledges that she was able to choose freely while
Akmad’s choices were often forced upon her, I was disconcerted
by the simplicity of what seemed her unconscious constructions
of motherhood. She cites herself as the first human being in
history who truly was an orangutan infant’s grandmother. How
does she know that Dayak people or other Indonesians have not
had similar experiences with orangutans? Clearly, this speaks to
incredible attachments but the descriptions seem to lack
recognition of the power differentials at play. We must always
be vigilant about who does the naming and who is named in
cross-species relationships.
Russell (1995) visited Camp Leakey and wrote a thesis about the
ecotourist experience and the social construction of orangutans.
With participant observation of some Earthwatch volunteers,
Russell reported dominant narratives of “Orangutan as Child,”
“Orangutan as Pristine” (only wild orangutans count, not
ex-captives), and the ecotourist “Orangutan as Photographic
Collectible.” Despite the obvious identification and nurturance
involved in “Orangutan as Child” constructions and actions, they
have their shadow sides, including narcissistic anthropomorphism
and increased disease transmission.
It is a hazardous borderland between empathy, saving
individuals, and the conservation of populations and habitats. I
was on the board of directors of Wildcare, one of Toronto’s
first wildlife rehabilitation centers, started by friend and
veterinarian Jackie Jenkins. I was lucky to be in the auspicious
company of long-time animal conservationists and activists John
Livingston and Barry Kent MacKay. Working with grassroots animal
rehabilitation people (known affectionately as the squirrel
woman, the fox man, the raccoon woman) one of our biggest
dilemmas was the identity and umwelt of each animal. When is a
blind, flightless, one footed, Great Horned owl living in a
suburban basement no longer an owl? What is co-created when an
orangutan is fed daily, and learns to beg, mooch, and steal
food? To whom am I accountable as researcher, activist,
ecological citizen? I do not pretend to have tidy answers, but I
know that we need to make acquisition of knowledge an ethical
and political responsibility. As feminist philosopher Code
(1987) would advise, we need an “epistemic responsibility” for
these troubled times. Reading these books sheds light on what
responsibility is entailed in making knowledge about orangutans;
but the books also demonstrate that the paths are not yet clear.
Spalding and Russon write about the “Bangkok Six, “ the “Taiwan
Ten,” and the effects on Galdikas’ scientific reputation and the
politics at Camp Leakey. Hundreds of orangutans were being
smuggled out of Asia in the exotic pet trade. The first media
case was the six ex-captive orangutans confiscated at the
Bangkok airport in 1990 and sent to Galdikas for rehabilitation.
Within months, all had fallen ill and only one is thought to
have survived.
In late 1990, when ten captive but healthy orangutans were
discovered in Taiwan, the Indonesian government planned to send
them to Smits’ rehabilitation center in Wanariset. Galdikas and
her supporters took charge of the Ten and took them to her house
in Jakarta. A year long struggle ensued. The conflict escalated
when Indonesian officials tested the Ten for disease and
discovered that one had hepatitis B and two had tuberculosis.
Each side accused the other of infecting the apes. Eventually,
arrests were made, and the orangutans were taken to Smits’
facility. In 1992, Park authorities took control of orangutan
rehabilitation in Tanjung Punjin, and Earthwatch stopped sending
volunteers to Galdikas’s orangutan project.
What lines are crossed in these situations when lives, careers,
egos,and politics are tightly woven together? When conservation
work morphs into illegal acts by powerful individuals, who
benefits and why? I think all researchers have a responsibility
for the knowledge they make. Their care and moral obligation
should be to specific, whole biotic communities (more-than-human
and human) in particular times and places. I fear many of us
lose sight of the multiple communities to whom we are
accountable.
I came of age, so to speak, when faced with the dilemma of
endangered humpback whales entangled in endangered fishers’ nets
in Newfoundland (working with Jon Lien and the Whale Research
Group, Memorial University). Both these endangered communities
predicted the crash of the cod stocks. My traditional,
scientific schooling trained me to attend to only one community
and to the reigning hypothesis and data at hand. My work, my
friendships, and my responsibilities extended across at least
three communities?cetacean, scientific, and fishing. Facing the
various tensions and conflicts in that experience and taking
responsibility for the messiness transformed me.
Rehabilitation seems a messy business. Russon reports that
rehabilitation practices have changed, partly because of the
fear that ex-captives were crowding out, instead of renewing,
wild populations. Smits’ facility is known for its tough love
approach, minimal human contact, and concern with orangutan
health, socialization, and forest skills. Although success rates
are hard to confirm, Russon writes that in seven years Smits’
Orangutan Reintroduction Project has taken in 400 orangutans,
whereas in 25 years Galdikas’s Camp Leakey had between 100 and
200 ex-captives. Because numbers can be politically constructed,
I was more persuaded by Russon’s account of the captive-reared
orangutans who learned enough forest knowledge to survive the
devastating effects of the fires and droughts in 1997.
Restrained human dependency and contact, careful disease
monitoring and treatment, and their release into areas without
wild orangutans replaced Galdikas’s approach of unlimited human
contact and Camp Leakey’s fostering of bicultural orangutans.
There are doubts and questions about both approaches, and more
longitudinal research is needed.
Meanwhile, the wild population continues to decline, in large
part because of commercial logging, mining, and human predators.
Here, Galdikas’s predictions are only too true. I remain
steadfastly wary of judging or being party to a righteous
conservation agenda that does not take adequate account of the
linked oppressions that define place and culture. Canadians have
enough extinct and endangered animals and indigenous peoples to
be ashamed of on our own, and I claim no immunity from the
concerns I raised as I read these three books.
The magnificence of orangutans shines out of all three books,
particularly Russon’s and Galdika’s. I would wager that the
invaluable role orangutans orchestrate in rainforest
regeneration and seed dispersal is just a smidgen of how much
they are inextricably “people of the forest.” We know the
mirrors scientists make to glimpse other species are not tabula
rasa. We must write by the light of mirrors that also reflect
upon human strengths, weaknesses, and possibilities, at the same
time keeping alive the unknown and the shadows as we acquire
knowledge to save our kin. These three books give us glimpses of
the solidarity that might then be born.
References
Abram, D. (1996). The spell of the sensuous: Perception and
language in a more-than-human world. New York: Pantheon Books.
Beck, B. (1986). Tools and intelligence. In R.J. Hoage & L.
Goldman (Eds.), Animal
Intelligence. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press.
Code, L. (1987). Epistemic responsibility. Hanover, NH:
University Press of New England.
Haraway, D. (1989). Primate visions: Gender, race and nature in
the world of modern science. New York: Routledge.
Midgley, M. (1978). Beast and man. New York: Meridian/NAL.
Noske, B. (1989). Humans and other animals. London: Pluto Press.
Orpa Sari, R. (1999). Riska: Memories of Dayak girlhood. (Edited
by Linda Spalding.) Toronto: Alfred A. Knopf .
Russell, C. (1995). The social construction of orangutans: An
ecotourist experience. Society and Animals, 3 (2), 151-170.
Note
1 Correspondence should be sent to Leesa Fawcett, Faculty of
Environmental Studies, York University, Ontario, Canada.
For Abstracts of all issues, including the most current, click
Article
Abstracts
To order Society &
Animals Journal, go to our secure online
ordering page
You
can Search the online issues of Society & Animals, as well
as the entire Society & Animals Forum (formerly PSYETA)
website,
for topics and keywords of your interest:
|
