NATURE|Vol 460|6 August 2009 OPINION In Notebooks Me, environmentalist from New Guinea (Oxford Tarzan was instantly popular. The tale of this University Tarzan! Or Rousseau Among the Waziri aristocratic hero, the orphaned son of John Press, 2009), Quai Branly Museum, Paris, France Clayton (Lord Greystoke) and his wife Lady tropical biologist Until 27 September Alice, raised by the female ape Kala whose Vojtech Novotny own infant had been killed, retains its appeal. describes vividly Summer visitors to Paris might hear Tarzan’s Burroughs turned his writing into a business, what it is like to distinctive roar above the sound of traffic. producing 22 Tarzan adventures that led to work deep in the The subject of an exhibition at the city’s Quai 42 feature films, 15,000 comic books, and innu- malaria-infested Papuan rainforest. Branly Museum (Musée du Quai Branly), the merable cartoons and television series. Sharing his personal experiences fictional loin-clothed hero provides possibly It is surprising that France’s national museum of setting up a research station in the most oblique take on Darwinism seen of non-European indigenous art, cultures and this remote and lawless place, he during the bicentennial year. civilizations, with its enormous collection of reflects on the clash between the Tarzan! Or Rousseau Among the Waziri uses African, Asian, Oceanic and American arte- cultures of Papua New Guinea and this cultural icon to examine depictions of the facts, has devoted an exhibition to Tarzan. Europe. Novotny is humbled by the African jungle and the relationships between “Our exhibition allows the public to discover folk knowledge of local tribes, and humans, apes and other animals in it. What how Tarzan, an icon of popular culture, was colourfully describes their customs is surprising, on rereading Tarzan of the Apes created and to decipher the heroic myth that and interactions with loggers and almost a century after its first appearance in the he embodies,” says exhibition curator Roger conservationists. October 1912 issue of US magazine The All- Boulay, an ethnologist. Story, is author Edgar Rice Burroughs’s evident The subtitle ‘Rousseau Among the Waziri’ The urban interest in nature versus nurture. He studied On links Tarzan to the eighteenth-century philos- wilderness is MISSION/ARCHIVES STANISLAS CHOKO STANISLAS MISSION/ARCHIVES the Origin of Species closely. opher Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s ideas on human the home of “I was mainly playing with the idea of a contest perfectibility, in evolving from a primitive naturalist Lyanda between heredity and environment,” Burroughs natural state to civilized society. The Paris exhi- Lynn Haupt. READING ECOLOGY wrote in Writer’s Digest in 1932. He selected an bition reminds us that Tarzan was instructed In Crow Planet infant child “at an age at which he could not have in etiquette and was taught to speak French (Little, Brown, been influenced by association with creatures of by Lieutenant Paul d’Arnot, the naval officer 2009), she his own kind” and placed him in “an environ- he had rescued from African cannibals. Later, weaves into a ment as diametrically opposite that to which he as they walked up the coast together for four series of stories had been born as I might well conceive”. weeks to reach a river port, Tarzan metamor- the science, history and mythology of phosed under d’Arnot’s instruction these independent and charismatic into the white-clad Monsieur Tar- birds. Crows are noisy, boisterous zan, unfazed by cutlery and dinner and quick to learn and adapt to urban conversation. life. Through her closely observed The exhibits include ethnographic portraits of these creatures, Haupt objects and stuffed African animals urges us to pay more attention to from several French museums; as well nature within our city landscapes. as original comic strips and film and television clips, which fuelled the pub- John Kricher lic’s vision of a fantasy Africa. Juxta- tackles the posing the comic-book imagery with history of less familiar African artefacts shows ecology in his that our understanding of Tarzan owes new book, as much to drawings by Tarzan illus- The Balance trators Burne Hogarth and Joe Kubert, of Nature and to film actors including Frank (Princeton Merrill and Johnny Weissmuller, as it University does to Burroughs’ text. Press, 2009). Arguing that nature is The exhibition redefines Tarzan as far from poised and is constantly in a twentieth-century ecowarrior, ahead flux, he asks why we hold on to the of his time in fighting animal poach- idea of ecological balance. He finds ers and slave traffickers. It encourages that the roots of our desire for order us to look beyond clichés to what it is are ancient, and predate Aristotle. But to be human; part of the animal king- solutions to today’s environmental dom but with the capacity to reason problems require us to take a more © 1936 MGM, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED/© TARZAN (TM) AND EDGAR RICE BURROUGHS (TM) OWNED BY EDGAR RICE BURROUGHS, INC. AND USED BY PER INC. AND USED BY EDGAR RICE BURROUGHS, BY OWNED (TM) AND EDGAR RICE BURROUGHS (TM) TARZAN RESERVED/© MGM, ALL RIGHTS © 1936 — and to take considerate actions. ■ dynamic view of nature. Ultimately, Early ecowarrior? The exhibition examines film depictions Colin Martin is a writer based in London. he explains, evolution is the driver of of the African jungle and its inhabitants through Tarzan. e-mail: [email protected] natural systems. J. B. 691 © 2009 Macmillan Publishers Limited. All rights reserved.