Revue de Primatologie (Dec 2012)
On the state of nature and social life: thinking about humans and chimpanzees
Abstract
The anatomical similarity observed in chimpanzees and humans has been recognized since Linnaeus. The debates on the attribution of the human condition to non-Western people date back to the 15th century. However, only in the 20th century did Social and Cultural Anthropology demonstrate through ethnography that the Enlightenment project of defining an universal and unique humankind has a consistent and real face as a result of research and reformulation of ideas. Only since the 1960s has the cumulative knowledge on wild chimpanzee behavior informed us about their ability to produce and use tools, for social learning, and to produce unique patterns of collective behavior. Ever since, primatological and human evolutionary research has contributed to an understanding of a surprising and uncomfortable similarity of human and non-human behaviors as well as to their deep differences. The practice of studying similarities and differences lead us to the same dead end: nature (on the genetic, biological and ecological level) is highly influential in determining that chimpanzees and humans live as social or sociocultural beings. Furthermore, considering these discoveries we need to reflect on the new meanings and the new places of nature in our knowledge when considering the social life of chimpanzees and humans. Taking into account how the influence of nature is deeply associated with the way of life of chimpanzees and humans, we must ask to what extent nature influences the social or cultural processes and to what extent they are autonomous. Even though considering my previous propositions that only humans produce culture, which is an essentially symbolic phenomenon, wild chimpanzees also have an intense and complex social life. In other words, this text proposes reflecting on the degrees of autonomy of social and cultural phenomena in relation to chimpanzee and human evolutionary predisposition to social life and to symbolic production as well as on the adaptive and non-adaptive aspects of these phenomena. This analysis adopted Rousseau's theory on the “State of Nature” and “State of Society” considering modern primatology from an anthropological point of view resulting in the invention of two concepts: “nature social primate” “primate social nature” and “human cultural nature”.
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