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Towards an ethnography of African great apes

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 October 2004

BARBARA J. KING
BARBARA J. KING
Affiliation:
Department of Anthropology, College of William and Mary, Williamsburg, Virginia, USAb.king@wm.edu
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Abstract

How can biological and social anthropologists today relate to each other's work? Using my research in biological anthropology as an example, I show that the African great apes sometimes engage in meaning-making as they act together. That is, gorillas, chimpanzees and bonobos communicate, especially through gesture, in contingent and creative ways, going beyond a mere exchange of signals to achieve co-construction of meaning. I argue that when biological anthropologists join social anthropologists in studying meaning-making, the two disciplines are inherently in relation.

Type
Research Article
Information
Social Anthropology , Volume 12 , Issue 2 , June 2004 , pp. 195 - 207
Copyright
Cambridge University Press 2004

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Footnotes

This article was adapted from my plenary lecture at the ASA Decennial Conference in Manchester, July 2003. I want to thank Tim Ingold for this invitation. Support for the gorilla research described was provided by the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, the Templeton Foundation and the College of William and Mary. For research assistance, my thanks to William and Mary students Christy Hoffman, Rebecca Simmons and Kendra Weber, and to Lisa Stevens and the staff at the Great Ape House, National Zoological Park, Washington DC. I am grateful to Richard Fox and Peter Pels for comments on earlier versions of this paper, and to Charles Hogg for help with gorilla images.