By studying the distribution of humans and chimpanzees in Guinea, XIXe century to the present day, we can highlight the interaction between the dynamics of the species and that of the environment. In doing so, Vincent Leblan reflects on the conditions of possibility of a true history of animals.
Here is an innovative book – it is not so common – with an excellent title and an enticing subtitle, but which can be confusing. Better to keep in mind the title of the thesis, defended in 2008, which forms the subject of the text: “Spatial analysis of the relations between humans and chimpanzees”.
Even so circumscribed, this work is original and reads with great interest, despite its material and conceptual density. It goes beyond a strictly human approach to animals, where we are interested in men and not in animals, a reading still very much in the majority in scientific production. It proposes that the human and social sciences take hold of the subject of concrete interactions between men and animals themselves, by placing themselves in the wake of the work of Frédéric Joulian and Véronique Servais for monkeys, and of English-speaking ethnologists or sociologists, such as David Goode, on the subject of pets.
A historical analysis of the environment
An anthropologist himself, Vincent Leblan intends to distance himself from the sociological and cultural approaches taken by certain primatologists, which he considers too imbued with biologism, too inclined to “biologize” culture (because we must now speak of the sociology and culture of primates in general, and of chimpanzees in particular). Drawing in particular on the approaches of the British anthropologist Tim Ingold, the author postulates that the capacities and properties of chimpanzee individuals and groups result from their engagement in their environment, with dynamics of learning and transmission, and therefore from their interactions with other living things: humans, animals, plants.
By becoming “salient” for these chimpanzees, the environment, in the broad sense, makes them develop skills. The state and evolution of these skills require taking into account the evolution of the environment, environmental changes causing the development of new skills while creating variability between individuals and between groups.
Hence the priority given to a historical analysis of this environment. The historian can only welcome this bold commitment of an anthropologist in a diachronic approach, most of his colleagues, as well as ethnologists and sociologists, preferring to get rid of history by postulating a major break between the “ancient” past and the “liberated” present, independent for 30 or 40 years (which means that the date of this very hypothetical break, which historians never find, has gradually moved from the 1950s to the 1980s).
However, while he does engage, and in a beautiful way, in a historicization of the environment, Vincent Leblan does not go as far as the evolution of chimpanzee behavior, which he evokes in an introduction rewritten and updated for the publication, addressed in a few pages at the end of the book. His aim is to study the geographical distribution of humans and chimpanzees in a territory of Guinea XIXe century to the present day, and thus to analyze the possibilities and situations of relationship between the ones and the others.
Presence of chimpanzees
After a presentation of the territory and an attempt to reconstruct the dynamism of human settlement, according to cultural, religious, demographic, and notably migratory factors (chapter 1), Vincent Leblan addresses the evolution of the plant environment (chapter 2) by using the literature of naturalists from the XIXe century, to topographic maps from the first half of the XXe century and oral testimonies, questioning at length the first two types of sources. Conclusion: the reality is not a simple and linear scenario (progress of crops, decline of forests), but a sawtooth evolution of forests, fields and fallow land throughout the period studied, according to economic and political cycles.
This rereading is extended to the presence of chimpanzees (chapter 3), by deconstructing the accounts of naturalists and inhabitants and by developing an ingenious methodology for the current situation. The difficulty in seeing chimpanzees, who flee from humans, is overcome by the use of their traces: nests at the top of trees and feces on the ground. Let us salute this pioneering approach, because the search for animal traces will become fundamental in the future development of an animal history, so as not to remain limited to human testimonies. It is a question of making these animal actors speak by using various means, from the archaeology of bones and tools for primates to genetic research.
For the time being, the chimpanzee distribution maps corroborate an intuition deduced from other sources: this distribution is not the opposite of human presence, but it is much more complex, with even places of high density of men and monkeys, due to a fluctuation of the environments and a multiple appropriation of these environments by the chimpanzees.
The author arrives at the question of the spatial interpenetrations of humans and chimpanzees. First in the forests (chapter 4), by studying hunting: the usual, regulated by beliefs and customs; the commercial, very intrusive and destructive. Then in the fields and fallow lands (chapter 5), where the study of the traces shows different uses of these anthropized spaces depending on the days, the moments and the groups of chimpanzees, these animals adjusting their spatial behaviors to agricultural dynamics, enjoying themselves in the fallow lands, rich in plant diversity and closed to humans by their abundance, and not afraid to adopt new environmental aspects, such as oil palms which can serve as places of consumption and nesting, because they have become “significant”.
The author is aware that it would be necessary to address simian psychology to understand this, but he refrains, for the moment, from going further and concludes with the conviction that behaviors are the product of an incessant interaction between the evolutionary dynamics of the species and the historical dynamics of the environment.
Debate and avenues for reflection
Ultimately, this is a beautiful, thoughtful, detailed study, particularly in terms of concepts, epistemologies and amply deconstructed sources, which makes you think and asks questions on every page, which also makes you make remarks, proof of its richness. Here are three.
Vincent Leblan criticizes here and there the conservationist approach developed since the XXe century. Rightly so, to show that the “forests with chimpanzees, countryside without chimpanzees” scheme is too simple. But in a questionable way, when he claims that human activity has only a small impact (p. 188) or when he castigates the policy of protected areas (p. 216). He is part of the tendency of anthropologists to excuse local populations and condemn actions of Western origin. But the fact that there are chimpanzees in anthropized areas does not exclude a decline in their population. The author also admits that the “satellite observation of the shrinking of chimpanzee habitat on a continental scale (…) is not to be doubted” (p. 223).
By reasoning more on presences than on densities (obviously difficult to estimate in history), the author sometimes approaches the other guilty pleasure of anthropologists, ethnologists and sociologists concerned with historicizing: that of no longer putting a barrier between the present and the past, but of leveling this past, by postulating a continuous chimpanzee presence (p. 119), without many jolts, human activities hardly affecting it – but without proving it and therefore by fabricating a “flat” history. However, the variation of intensities in history is much more important than simple presence or pure absence. Whether there are a few chimpanzees or hundreds does not forge the same dynamic with the environment.
Finally, Vincent Leblan is often harsh on the natural sciences. If the human sciences must assert their presence and their specificity, we should not add a second disdain to a first disdain. This has long been the case with regard to animals. The author of these lines, who began his research in the 1980s, can testify to this: how many smirks and acerbic remarks has he not encountered from “humanist” colleagues? The turnaround of the latter dates back only ten years. So let us not replace a disdain for the subject with a disdain for the methods.
During the long absence of the human sciences, which Vincent Leblan himself acknowledges (p. 212-213), primatologists have constructed a social and cultural approach to the great apes as best they could, with their training, their background and their means. It is now necessary to exchange between the human sciences and the natural sciences, to cross concepts and methods, and even to construct common procedures so as not to replace a reductive all-biological approach with an equally reductive all-sociological approach.
That said, we hope for an extension of this work, particularly concerning the numerical and behavioral variations of chimpanzees. Let’s bet that with his upcoming secondment in Guinea, Vincent Leblan will provide us with other pioneering works. In short, we are impatiently awaiting the sequel!