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A Conversation with Irven Devore

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A Conversation with Irven Devore Annual Reviews Conversations Presents A Conversation with Irven DeVore Annual Reviews Conversations. 2012 Abstract First published online on November 14, 2012 The Annual Review of Anthropology presents Dr. Irven DeVore, The DOI of this article is: Professor Emeritus of Anthropology at Harvard University, in 10.1146/annurev-conversations-010913-100006 conversation with Dr. Peter Ellison, Co-Editor of the Annual Review of Annual Reviews Audio interviews are online at Anthropology and Professor of Anthropology and Human Evolutionary www.annualreviews.org/page/audio Biology, also at Harvard University. In this interview, Dr. DeVore talks about his life and career, describing how he went from social Copyright © 2012 by Annual Reviews. All rights reserved anthropology to studying and filming baboons and other primates in Africa, to observing the Bushmen of the Kalahari and the Pygmies. Dr. DeVore was one of the first to incorporate sociobiological theory into his work, a decision that would prove as fundamental as it was challenging. In his own words, he would have to “turn [his] back on everything [he’d] understood until that point in anthropology.” This interview was conducted on May 22, 2012. View video of interview online. 1 A CONVERSATION WITH IRVEN DEVORE Peter Ellison: I’m Peter Ellison, John Cowles Professor of Anthropology and Human Evolutionary Biology at Harvard University and Co-Editor of the Annual Review of Anthropology. I’m talking today with my long-time mentor and friend, Professor Irven DeVore, the Ruth B. Moore Professor of Anthropology, emeritus, at Harvard University. Professor DeVore and I have known each other for all of my professional career and a good portion of his. Professor DeVore, your career has been truly remarkable. It reads as if it were three people’s careers, covering some of the most pivotal events in biological anthropology, including primate behavior, hunter-gatherer studies, and the introduction of evolutionary theory into the understanding of human behavior. And yet, you were trained as a social anthropologist. I’d like to start, if we might, by asking you to recall the beginning of your relationship with the late Sherry [Sherwood] Washburn, and explain to us how you ever decided to study the social behavior of baboons. Irven DeVore: It was an accident, really; I was a social anthropology major as an undergraduate at the University of Texas and was admitted into the social program at Chicago for graduate school, and [that was] all I ever intended to do. At the end of my first year, I went out to do fieldwork with the Mesquakie Indians and had a quite an eventful summer, but one that was not terribly satisfying. I began to think seriously about social anthropology and whether I was really fitted for it. I’ve been equally interested in animals since I was young. At the age of six, I had 25 different animals; my parents are very long suffering. I’ve always been interested in understanding their behavior. I was a social anthropology major as an undergraduate, and then I was admitted into Chicago, and I had never given any thought to animal behavior as a serious enterprise; it was a hobby. I didn’t know that you could do that. I came from a pretty impoverished part of east Texas. But during that summer of fieldwork after my first year—I had a summer out on the Mesquakie Indian Settlement in Tama, Iowa—for the first time I had to confront seriously what it was like to do serious social anthropology. I began to feel, more and more, that I was not suited for it, at least, the way it was understood at that time; this feeling grew over the years. I’ll explain. I felt like I was not ready to be a really good parent until I was about 40. That’s a strange time in the human career, but by then I knew that, in our culture, a good parent had to fill in for the aunts and uncles, the grandparents, the nephews and nieces, the cousins—all of those people who were a support group. We banish, so to speak, our nuclear families to isolation in tall apartment buildings, and anyone who’s had a child with colic for two straight nights and is trying to go to graduate school knows why the temptation is almost overwhelming to smother it. For millions of years, hundreds of thousands of years, we had this tight social group around us. Almost immediately, when the mother was getting frazzled, one of these women—it was almost always a woman—would come over and take the baby, feed it and calm it down, and maybe sleep with it. We don’t have that, and we don’t even think that we should be prepared to give those kinds of things. Then I thought, “Social anthropology is wearing on me because I don’t think that the people who write up the monographs are really prepared to do it. They’re just too young.” Here you have a graduate student just out of college—probably about 22, or 23, early or midtwenties—going out to a strange place, when maybe they’ve never been more than two states away from home. Here they are in Fiji, and they’re sitting and talking to people who have been grandparents and parents since they were 14, and trying to understand them. What happens is the anthropologist discovers herself or himself reflected in all of these conversations, but you’re not allowed to write 2 DeVore that up, or you shouldn’t, because who wants to read about brown-skinned Americans, so to speak? You’ve got to find an angle, and always the anthropologist finds an angle that is new. It’s an original contribution and knowledge—well I’m rambling on about this, but I came to feel it very strongly, only I never gave up that feeling, really. Of course there are people who can rise above those limitations, but it is a serious limitation. The other thing that bothered me particularly was that—as opposed to science, where if you perform an experiment and find something novel and it’s important, five or six other people are down at the labs early the next morning trying to replicate it—in anthropology, if you dare to go to the village that some anthropologist has been to before, you would have been driven out of the profession. That’s just not a gentlemanly thing to do. So what are we left with? A gazillion individual accounts of cultures and no comparative work at all. That was the mood that I was in when I came back from that fieldwork. Sol Tax was a marvelous man, one of the great men of the twentieth century in many, many ways. Anyway, he was head of something called action anthropology, which we were doing out in Mesquakie country in Tama. By the way, they were called Sac and Fox during the Plains Indian days, and they call themselves Mesquakie, so I’m sorry if I’ve confused people. We talked about my experience, and he said, “We’d like you to take over the project.” This was very flattering. I thought, “Wow, this might be my big chance,” so I said, “Let me think about it over the weekend.” Sol and I had gotten to be very close, so I came back in, and I said, “I’m just not the person to do that.” He said, “I’m sorry to hear that. Do you like animals?” I said, “I love animals.” He said, “I want you to meet someone.” We walked down the hall. He opened the door, put his hand in the middle of my back, shoved me in, and said, “Sherry, here’s your man,” and turned and left. Here’s a guy whom I’d never seen before. He turned out to be Sherwood Washburn, one of the two or three most eminent physical anthropologists in America. He bounded up out of his chair and came over and shook my hand. He said, “So you’re going to be my teaching fellow.” I said, “There’s some mistake.” I had four years of public speaking in high school and four more in college; I was a national debate champion. “I don’t feel like I need the teaching experience, and I have a fellowship that pays all of my expenses. I just don’t want to do it.” He said, “I didn’t ask you.” Peter Ellison: Sounds like Sherry. Irven DeVore: That’s Sherry. Sherry was a man of strong opinions, but he was not usually that brusque. Anyway, that was the best thing that ever happened to me. Within two or three weeks, I just adored the man. He had more ideas per day than I had heard from all of my other contacts in anthropology in my whole career, which was not that long. He just spun ideas off, and they were original, and they were fun, and they were not all true or all even worth following up. Part of the job of a graduate student was to help separate the dross from the gold. Anyway, he was just so exciting to be around. If he had tried to recruit me to go on a Mars expedition and study paramecia, I would have done it. If he said it was important, I would know it was. The interesting thing was that he had just come back from a field trip in Africa, and he was over there doing anatomy on baboons.
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