Salvage and self‐loathing: Cultural primatology and the spiritual malaise of the Anthropocene

Abstract

We understand our time as one in which human culture remakes nature. But Japanese and Euro‐American primatologists have come to question whether humans are the only primates capable of culture. Chimpanzee ethnographers observe different chimpanzee communities which share much of their lives with different human communities. The resulting diversity of cultures has become the eye through which all scientific claims about chimpanzee nature must pass. The practices constituting cultural primatology, however, turn out to be as much about knowledge as about care. Wild chimpanzees and their cultures teeter on the brink of extinction as human cultural activities destroy their habitats. Cultural primatology reanimates anthropology's original 18th‐century question of human nature in the 21st‐century context of the Anthropocene: if it is not simply culture, then what has enabled modern humans to radically transform their environments and to outcompete other primate cultures and species? How should we evaluate and narrate the story of our savage success?