APAvar: Ruth Bleier (Ed.) (1988). Feminist Approaches to Science. Pergamon Press.
Link: https://archive.org/details/feministapproach00ruth/page/n4/mode/1up
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Main entry under title Feminist approaches to science. (The Athene series)
Rouse ye, my people, shake off torpor, impeach the dread boss monkey and reconstruct the Happy Family.[^2]
[^1] This chapter has been edited from Donna Haraway's article, "Primatology Is Politics
by Other Means," Philosophy of Science Association 1984 (Vol. 2). East Lansing, MI:
Philosophy of Science Association. Copyright 1984 by The Philosophy of Science
Association. Used with permission.
[^2] Mark Twain (March 5, 1867). Barnum's First Speech in Congress. New York Evening Express, as quoted in Harris (1973, 190-191).
The science that is the study of monkeys and apes, primatology, is a major area of feminist concern about the tangled relations of gender, knowledge, and power. This is true both because women have contributed significantly to these areas of biology and anthropology and because these sciences are important in debates about human, perhaps especially female human, nature. Men and women are primates; we consider ourselves to be animals in the taxonomic order primate, at least since the 1758 edition of Carl Linnaeus's Systema Naturae. From the perspectives of the natural and social sciences constructed within this framework since the 18th century, the other primates have a series of special relations to human beings. They are privileged beings for understanding "nature" and "culture," among the principal analytical categories Western people have used to theorize their histories and experience. Monkeys and apes are mirrors for human beings in our aspect as animals. They reconstructed to tell us what is "beneath," "at the heart of," or "outside" of language-using animals; that is, ourselves.
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pages 79-80
It is the social authority to write scientific accounts of what are called wild primates that concerns us in this essay. A scientist is one who is authorized to name what can count as nature for industrial peoples. A scientist "names" nature in written, public documents, which are endowed with the special, institutionally enforced quality of being perceived as objective and applicable beyond the cultures of the people who wrote those documents. How have white feminist women contested for meanings of nature in these social and symbolic conditions?
In the historical, philosophical, and social studies of science, it has become commonplace to note that "facts" depend on the interpretive framework of theory, and that theories are loaded with the explicit and implicit values of the theorizers and their cultures. Thus, all facts are laced with values. Clearly, I have set up my story of primatology to explore the connections of facts and values in an area of biology and anthropology that functions simultaneously as natural science, political theory, and science fiction.
But values seems an anemic word to convey the multiple strands of meaning woven into the bodies of monkeys and apes. So, ==I prefer to say that the life and social sciences in general, and primatology in particular, are story-laden; these sciences are composed through complex, historically specific storytelling practices. Facts are theory-laden; theories are value-laden; values are story-laden. Therefore, facts are meaningful within stories.==
The story quality of the sciences of monkeys and apes is not some pollutant that can be leached out by better method, say by finer quantitative measures and more careful standards of field experiment. Improved method matters, as it does in any human craft. Improved method, including improved ways of asking questions, is a collective achievement, and stories are not equivalently good. The point is not that one account of monkeys and apes is as good as another, since they are all "merely" culturally determined narratives. Rather, I am arguing that the struggle to construct good stories is a major part of the craft. There would be no primatology without skillful, collectively contested stories. And, there would be no stories, no questions, without the complex webs of power, including the tortured realities of race, sex, and class — and including people's struggles to tell each other how we might live with each other.
The sciences have always had a utopian character. In their efforts to describe the world, to understand how it actually "works," scientists simultaneously search out the limits of possible worlds. What determines a "good" story in the natural and social sciences is partly decided by available social visions of these possible worlds. Description is determined by vision; facts and theories are perceived within stories; the worlds for which human beings contest are made of meanings. Meanings are tremendously material forces--much like food and sex. And, like food and sex, meanings are social constructions that determine the quality of people's lives.
That is why the intersection of feminist and colonial discourse in the sciences of monkeys and apes matters. Monkeys and apes have been enlisted in Western scientific story telling to determine what is meant by human: what it means to be female, to be animal, to be other than man. As white women achieved the social and symbolic power conferred by scientific degrees and the ability to watch nonhuman primates as principal investigators, rather than zoo visitors, they brought with them histories, experiences, and world views that reconstructed basic stories in primatology. They changed the facts of nature by changing the visions of possible worlds, and it has been hard, complicated work. Primatology is the scene of a feminist scientific revolution, one that has changed the way both men and women practice their science, at least sometimes and in areas of considerable importance.