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THE BID-POLITICS OF A MULTICULTURAL FIELD Donna Haraway The Mirror and the Mask: The Drama of Japanese Primates Japanese field study of an indigenous monkey inaugurated post-World War II naturalistic studies of nonhuman primates. The origin of the post-war primate story is within non-Western narrative fields. In the beginning, Japanese primatology was both autonomous and autochthonous-but not innocent, not without history. Human and animal, the actors and authors appeared on an island stage that was not set by the story of Paradise Lost. The Japanese monkeys became part of a complex cultural story of a domestic science and a native scientific identity for an industrial power in the "E/east." Japanese primate studies originated in 1948 among a group of animal ecologists , including Imanishi Kinji, who had earned a doctor of science degree from Kyoto University in 1940. In the first generation ofJapanese to pursue studies of animals in their natural environments, Imanishi led expeditions to several areas outside Japan. The Japanese primatologists were well aware of the Western work, and they cited Yerkes, Carpenter, and others with appreciation and critical evaluation. But the Japanese forged an independent primatology, whose characteristics were part of cultural narratives just as they have been in the West. As tropical primates have been mirrors for Western humans, domestic Japanese monkeys have been mirrors for their skilled indigenous observers. Before turning to primates, Imanishi studied Japanese wild horses. In 1950 Imanishi and Miyade Denzaburo formed the Primates Research Group. Provisioning began in 1952, about the time of the establishment of the Kyoto University Anthropology Research Group. In Tokyo a medically oriented Experimental Animal Research Committee started up, and in 1956 the Kyoto and Tokyo groups established the Japan Monkey Center, followed in 1967 by the national Primate Research Institute of Kyoto University. By 1961, more than twenty Japanese macaque groups had been provisioned and brought into systematic observation.1 In 1961 the Japanese began langur monkey studies, with the cooperation of Indian scientists in India, and launched the Kyoto University African Primatological 378 I Objectivity, Method, and Nature: Value Neutral? Expedition. In 1965 they initiated a long-term chimpanzee project in Tanzania's Mahale Mountains.2 In 1972, Japanese workers started groundwork for their study of pygmy chimpanzees in Zaire.3 Westerners were unaware of the Japanese work until after 1956. About 1957, Yale medical primatologist Gertrude van Wagenen found a book with a picture of monkeys in a bookstore in Japan. She wrote Stuart Altmann at the National Institutes of Health and then sent him the book, which was Japanese Monkeys in Takasakiyama by Itani Junichiro (1954).4 The Jesuit John Frisch, Sherwood Washburn's graduate student at the University of Chicago, translated the book and subsequently wrote a description of Japanese primate studies for Western readers. Altmann had several Japanese articles translated and published.s Japanese workers were invited to the Primate Year at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences in 1962-63. The National Institute of Mental Health funded the first English translation ofJapanese primate studies, and after that the Rockefeller Foundation sponsored translation from the Japanese journal Primates , published in English after the first two issues, reflecting international language politics. From about 1959-60, Japanese and Western workers have been in regular contact, despite on-going difficulties of linguistic, cultural, and scientific communication. National Primates It is ideologically and technically relevant that the Japanese studies were initiated on a species, Macacafuscata, native to Japan. Although Japan had been a colonial power since the late nineteenth century, Japanese founding frameworks for watching monkeys and apes did not depend on the structure of colonial discourse -that complex search for primitive, authentic, and lost self, sought in the baroque dialectic between the wildly free and subordinated other. Rather, Japanese monkeys have been a part of the construction of a specifically Japanese scientific cultural identity. Constructing that identity has been a major theme in recent Japanese social, cultural, and intellectual history.6 Japanese monkeys might be viewed as actors in a Kabuki drama or a Noh performance. Their stylized social gestures and intricate rule-ordered lives are like dramatic masks that necessarily both conceal and reveal complex cultural meanings about what it means to be simultaneously social, indigenous, and individual for Japanese observers. Seeking the truth of nature underneath the thin, often obscuring layer of culture, the Westerner tends to see in our primate kin a deeper shared animal nature. In contrast,' perhaps, Japanese primate observers have...

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