Animal Lifestyles and Anatomies: The Case of the Prosimian Primates (review)

BOOK REVIEWS Animal Lifestyles and Anatomies: The Case of the Prosimian Primates. By Charles E. Oxnard, Robert H. Crompton, and Susan S. Lieberman. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1990. Pp. ix; 174. $35.00. Prosimians constitute nearly a quarter of extant primate species. They inhabit treed and shrubby regions ofAfrica, continental and insular Asia, and Madagascar . Their numbers and distribution are vastly reduced now in comparison with earlier epochs. Many of them are on the brink of extinction. Oxnard, Crompton, and Lieberman have served our order well by synthesizing current knowledge on selected aspects of prosimian niche preference and locomotor anatomy. Their project highlights not only some interesting resemblances and contrasts among lemurs, lorises, bushbabies, and tarsiers but also how urgent it is that we mount further studies before they and their habitats vanish from the earth. By combining locomotor (namely, various manners of leaping and moving quadrupedally), habitat (namely, canopy, undergrowth and size, and orientation of supports), and dietary preferences (fruit; gums and nectar; leaves, buds, and flowers; and animals), Oxnard and company sort the prosimians into five "lifestyle clusters of species": the Lorisinae; most of the Galaginae and the Cheirogaleidae ; Tarsius and possibly Galago senegalensL· and G. alleni; the Indriidae, Lepilemur, and possibly Hapalemur; and the Lemuridae, plus Daubentonia, and possibly Phaner. These groupings agree rather well with clusters of data from Oxnard's previous morphometric studies on hip and thigh morphology and overall limb proportions. Although the authors remark that this approach promises to inform interpretations of fossil prosimians, they make no attempt to do so here. Given the fragmentary nature of most fossil skeletons, the incompleteness of paleoecological data for virtually all localities, and, perhaps most tellingly, the gaps in naturalistic behavioral and ecological data for the very beasts on which this volume is focused, it is understandable why the the enterprise was not pursued beyond a promissory note. Although coauthored, Animal Lifestyles and Anatomies is very much an Oxnardian book. It is slim on text and superabundantly illustrated with geometric figures and drawings of prosimians, some of which are recycled from earlier publications. If there is a geometry of and numerological fit to nature, Oxnard is bound to find it. Chapter 1 dwells too much, to my taste, on Oxnard's past problems with locomotor classifications and statistical approaches, instead of introducing us directly to the subject and current methodology. Also, there are Permission to reprint a book review printed in this section may be obtained only from the author. Perspectives in Biology and Medicine, 34, 4 ¦ Summer 1991 617 too many repetitions for such a svelte volume. The print should be larger, especially considering the wide left-hand margins and expansive figures. All criticisms aside, I urge that Oxnard proceed apace to synthesize and analyze species of the Anthropoidea with a similar approach. Further, I hope that he will seek a publisher who will devise a series of transparent overlays that would allow direct visual comparisons of the star diagrams, and that an acronymic system (e.g., RnL, FlL, CrL, RcL, Can, Udg, Hsp, Vsp, Ssp, Lsp, CIm, SlQ, Scr, Frt, GmN, LBF, and Anm) will replace the numbers that mark 17 characteristics of niche, ringing the stars. Russell H. Tuttle Department of Anthropology University of Chicago The Normal and the Pathological. By George Conguilhem, with an introduction by Michel Foucault. Translated by Carolyn R. Fawcett. New York: Zone Books, 1989. Pp. 327. The reissued English translation of this book examines the notions of health and disease from both the redefinitions offered by scientific advances over the past 200 years and the broad intellectual influences that determine our concept of the pathological. The author exhibits many incisive insights and an intellectualism rarely encountered in modern attempts at characterizing medicine's infrastructure . The general construct of Conguilhem's thinking is based on recognizing that the history of science passes normative judgments about the science it studies; thus, he adopts a skeptical view about the distortion scientific ideology casts on its subject. He worried about how such ideology assumes existing science as its norm. A history of the pathological offered an excellent opportunity to examine the conception of norms, which in nineteenth-century medicine are especially...