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REMODELLING THE HUMAN WAY OF LIFE Sherwood Washburn and the New Physical Anthropology, 1950-1980 DONNA J. HARAWAY Man meets the problems ofthe atomic age with the biology of hunter-gatherers and many customs of times long past. (Washburn et al. 1974:7) Strong rhetoric /unctions like the skull-and-crossbones on a poison bottle. (Hui~inga 1934:294) With the tools of narrative history, a research program developed over many uncertain years by a heterogeneous collection ofpeople with problematic ties to each other may look like a plan, masterminded by a founding figure with sure access to unbounded resources. Graduate students who report perceiving their research choices as autonomous retrospectively describe their professional path as part of a planned pattern or historical tendency shared with their cohorts. A living, retired scientist can find his career in print, completed, divided into periods, given unauthorized meaning by its placement at putative historical boundaries, used for polemics unengaged and unimagined by the actors themselves. The bones of old papers can be discovered reanimated in the bodies of other professional and political publications, as the bones Donna J. Haraway is Professor, Board of Studies in the History of Consciousness, University of California, Santa Cruz, and is the author of several books, including the forthcoming Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention ofNature in LateCapitalism (1988) and Primate Visions: Science, Narrative, and Politics in Twentieth Century Sciences of Monkeys and Apes (1989). She is currently writing about the intersections of science fiction, fictions of science, and feminist theory, and about the symbology of biological bodies in high-technology cultures. 206 REMODELLING THE HUMAN WAY OF LIFE 207 offossil hominids can be reanimated in late twentieth-century United States sexual politics or international antiracist organizations. It is an old story that evolutionary functional comparative anatomy and historical narrative share principles ofcomposition. Allegorical narratives seem to order themselves easily in analogous series: the humanizing way of life posited for the ever older fossils, destined for only two hominid genera, Australopithecus and Homo (Mayr 1950, 1982a); the human way of life of universal man insisted upon in the documents drawn up by the victors (with a few breathtaking comments by the vanquished) of a world war; the primate way of life of monkeys trying to make a living on land constructed as nature in game parks established by colonial practice at the eve of decolonization; and the scientific way of life enacted in a research program in the post-World War II United States science establishment. All these can be reconstructed as elements of a unifying narrative about origins and ends, which turns out to be about the fruitful and always densely particular ambiguity offiction and fact in story-laden sciences about what it means to be human. What it meant to be universal man and to be human generically turns out to look very much like what it meant to be Western scientific men, especially in the United States, in the 1950s. The following reconstruction of the academic practices of Sherwood Washburn and his associates employs the same rehabilitative narrative technology for yielding a plausible account ofscientific life that my subjects needed for their own constructions of the human and hominizing ways of life in their evolutionary physical anthropology. The main thesis of this account of a research plan is that Early Man in Africa-the focus of the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research 's first effort to stimulate hominid paleontology-was conceived as the prototype of the United Nations' post-World War II universal man, in the ecological conditions of Cold Wat, global nuclear and urban proliferation, and struggles over decolonization. In that context, Early Man in Africa and UNESCO universal man became Man the Hunter, the guarantor of a future for nuclear man. In a twenty-year project of research and teaching, Man the Hunter embodied a socially positioned code for deciphering what it meant to be human -in the Western sense of unmarked, universal, species beingafter World War II. In a sense, this Man the Hunter was liberal democracy's substitute for socialism's version of natural human cooperation. Man the Hunter would found liberal democracy's human family in the Cold War's "Free World." His technology and his urge to travel would enable the exchange systems so critical to free world ideology. His aggressiveness would be liberal democracy 's mechanism ofcooperation, established at the first moment of the hominizing adaptation called hunting. Above all, Washburn and his peers were determined to...

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