BOOK REVIEW SECTION REVIEW ESSAY Shadows, Saviors And
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BOOK REVIEW SECTION REVIEW ESSAY Shadows,Saviors and Fieldwork:Orangutan Conservation and Research BIRUTÉ GALDIKAS. Reflections of Eden: My Years with the Orangutans of Borneo. Boston: Little, Brown & Company, 1995. ANNE RUSSON. Orangutans: Wizards of the Rainforest. Toronto: Key Porter Books, 1999. LINDA SPALDING. ADark Place in the Jungle: Science, Orangutans and Human Nature. Chapel Hill: Algonquin of Chapel Hill, 1999. As I read these books, I kept wondering who was being saved and who was doing the saving. All three books are about the endangered orangutans ( Pongo pygmaeus ) of Borneo, although the perspectives vary drastically and sometimes harshly. Galdikas’s book is largely a descriptive and personal memoir chronicling her incredible 25 years of living with ex-captive and wild orangutans. Russon has written an excellent pho- tographic coffee table book with research emphasis on orangutan intelligence and imitation. Spalding is a fiction writer and was originally asked to write a biography of Galdikas. The result is her first non-fiction book, an account of her quest and eco-tourist journey. The plight of the last of the arboreal great apes often is demoralizing, and the innu- merable players, politics, and passions involved in their struggle to survive are per- plexing. These are troubling books to read, especially together, and so they should be. The biological conservation of any species by people who “come-from-away,” if told with any integrity, is bound to be fraught with complications. That many of the orangutans in these books are ex-captives being rehabilitated to the wild adds to this vast cross-cultural, cross-species complexity. Primate semblance and kinship to human beings place them in a precarious bound- ary position. Orang hutans , the Malay words for “people of the forest” have been used as a food source, coveted as status symbols, and captured as “pets” in Asia. Now, great apes are being elevated in the hierarchy of species to a level closer to humans (witness the recent great ape protection law in New Zealand), but “they” are never allowed to get too close. I disagree with the reproduction of hierarchical human elitism - favoring primates and megafauna - into many animal welfare and rights Society & Animals 9:1 (2001) ©Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2001 circles. Human arrogance still will insist that most animals stay “othered,” always in comparison to us as not-us, never quite measuring up. As Haraway (1978) has said, “We polish an animal mirror to look for ourselves. ... The science of non-human pri- mates, primatology, may be a source of insights or a source of illusions. The issue rests on our skills in the construction of mirrors” (p. 37). The anthropologist Louis Leakey mentored and encouraged Jane Goodall to study chimpanzees and the late Dian Fossey to research mountain gorillas, both in Africa. He picked Birute Galdikas to study orangutans in Indonesian Borneo. Known as “Leakey’s angels” or the “trimates,” I do not doubt that the research, commitment, and life stories of these three women have shifted public knowledge about great ape conservation in positive directions. Galdikas’s memoir seems inextricably bound up with Leakey, Goodall, and Fossey. She uses the cat’s cradle, a string game that Leakey liked to play, to illustrate her belief that larger patterns were at work in her life. It is clear to me that Galdikas knows how to work hard, wait, and struggle for what she wants. What is less clear when I read Spalding’s gentle condemnation of her is whether Galdikas understands the fine interplay between her privilege, class, and culture. More troubling are the shadowy interfaces between science, rehabilitation, conserva- tion and personal attachment. Situated, Embodied Field Work While travelling in Sumatra in 1981, I hiked up a volcano. Although tired, hot, and hungry at the time, I still can feel the sheer joy and awe of seeing a wild, reddish orangutan swinging by, watching from overhead. I have great respect for people, like Galdikas, who do field work. It takes courage, tenacity, patience, and independence to stay in the field and remain true to yourself and your research. I have worked as a field biologist in remote places and under harsh conditions, studying whales in Newfoundland and the Galapagos and crocodiles in northern Australia. As a marine biologist, I know all too well how hard it is for women to work in the field in mostly all male company, often under arduous conditions. There also is the intense concentration and single-mindedness of observing another being, collecting moments of life histories. Often, there is the shock of the intrusion of the “outside” world. For example, Galdikas and her former husband Rod Brindamour (who helped her in her research and took many of her finest photographs) were deep in a swamp, immersed in black water, following three wild orangutans when an immense sound exploded overhead. Sugito, their first rescued, orangutan infant leapt into her arms, and the forest went deathly silent. They heard the Concorde’s sonic boom as it flew over them on a demonstra- tion flight from Europe to Australia. Galdikas saw it as the infringement of technol- ogy on the purity of nature and that “humankind was trying to supplant God in the 90 Book Review Section.