We Both Wait Together

Poaching Agustin Fuentes
by Matei Candea, Durham University

Cite as: Candea, Matei (2011) We Both Wait Together. Kroeber Anthropological Society Papers 99/100: 148-151 (Download article PDF)

Poachers, whether of animals or of papers, must first themselves be captured by their prey, attached and drawn to it. Some papers capture you slowly, through a diffuse and pervasive intoxication; others capture you swiftly and instantly, springing a trap in one paragraph or even one sentence. In the case of Agustin Fuentes’ paper “Naturalcultural Encounters in Bali” (2010), I can pinpoint the precise moment when the trap was sprung and I became utterly captured by his account of Balinese temple macaques and their humans. The line comes from a Balinese bus driver sitting outside a temple on a slow tourist day. Speaking of the macaques who are sitting nearby, enjoying the same shade, the driver says: “They are here, we are here, as long as they don’t damage the (side) mirrors on my minivan, we both wait together” (2010:612). What are they waiting for? Fuentes quotes a young tour guide in another temple: “We are both waiting for the tourists, we’ll both go to work soon” (612).


A Balinese Macaque in the Ubud Monkey Forest playing with a tourist’s camera.

Fuentes’ paper describes interspecies interactions between macaques and humans in Bali from a novel and methodologically experimental perspective: himself a primatologist by training, Fuentes brings together the insights of primatology and socio-cultural anthropology in order to map the multiple ways in which the biological, social, epidemiological, economic, cultural, and geographic worlds of these two primate species intersect and interface. His paper describes Balinese temples as spaces of encounter for the multiple and diversely aligned (or misaligned) interests of macaques, local ritual specialists, farmers, primatologists, and tourists. A similarly entangled naturalcultural world is the focus of my own ongoing ethnography of a research station in the South African Kalahari (Candea 2010): it involves not macaques but meerkats, not temple specialists engaged in otherworldly macaque-mediated transactions, but behavioral biologists, who track the meerkats in search of insights about the evolution of cooperation or altruism. In other respects, our accounts resonate: in the Kalahari, as in Bali, there are tourists who are in search of an authentic interspecies encounter and who, by local standards, seem to “get it wrong,” just as there are local farmers who are happy with a clearly demarcated boundary, and politely uninterested coexistence with the macaques and meerkats, respectively. Unlike Fuentes, however, I am coming to this naturalcultural, scientific-social tangle from a social-cultural anthropological background. It is almost as if Fuentes and I were turning opposite corners to behold the same scene. Almost, but not quite – for the symmetry of that metaphor belies a subtle but important difference in our perspectives. Interdisciplinarity is part of the method in Fuentes’ account; it is part of the ethnography in mine. It is this asymmetry between our accounts that forms the ferment, the productive surplus which this “poach” is trying to capture.

Take for instance this image of macaques and tour guides waiting together to go to work on the tourists. It struck me because of its resonance with another instance of waiting together, drawn from my own fieldwork. Every morning before sunrise, I would walk with one of the volunteer meerkat researchers to the burrow where a particular meerkat group had spent the night. Then, the volunteer and I would sit and wait quietly for the sun to rise and the meerkats to emerge from their burrow, groggy and skittish, so we could go to work.

These two ethnographic vignettes of waiting together form a slightly odd pair. Not unlike the tour guides and the macaques themselves, the two situations clearly have some things in common, but the differences between them are just as striking. On the one hand, both cases involve a triangular relationship, in which two parties share a focus on an absent third party. In both cases, there are humans and non-humans involved, and in both cases, the two parties waiting together are in a relationship of significant otherness, if I may poach Donna Haraway’s phrase (Haraway 2003), a relationship that involves and marks a difference. But in the first case the difference is inter-specific (macaques and human tour-guides, waiting for human tourists), while in the second, the difference is interdisciplinary: a biologist and a social anthropologist, waiting for the meerkats. The question is, what difference does this difference between differences make?

First of all, asking about differences between interspecific and interdisciplinary differences reveals a particularly neat parallel within Fuentes’ paper: a correspondence between the interspecies encounters the paper describes, and the interdisciplinary tools which are used to describe them. In order to study interspecies encounters, Fuentes deploys and expands the biological concept of niche construction to great effect (Fuentes 2010:603-605 and passim). Macaques and humans co-construct a naturalcultural niche, which involves gifts and thefts of food, but also various affective, economic and epidemiological flows. Simultaneously, Fuentes is making his own move of interdisciplinary niche construction. The paper, alongside a number of Fuentes’s other recent publications, exemplifies and partakes in the construction of a new interdisciplinary space named “ethnoprimatology,” which “attempts to integrate models of behavioral and ecological data collection from primatology, ethnographic practice (formal and informal) from social anthropology, and demographic, sociostructural and community-based assessments from geography, sociology, and a broader anthropology” (2010:601).

Reading together, as I am doing here, the interspecies and interdisciplinary aspects of the paper produces unexpected interpolations, as questions and images bleed over from one to the other. For instance, in talking about interspecies niche construction, Fuentes highlights the multiplicity of possible relations, ranging from affection to violence: he describes affectionate temple workers some of whom encounter macaques as emissaries of spiritual forces, local farmers who tolerate macaques but expect them to respect private property and will attack them if they raid crops. He also describes tourists who mistakenly believe themselves to be in a harmonious interspecies “relationship of touching and intermingling with fellow primates” (613), and can pay the price for their error, such as the Swiss woman who after taking a macaque baby from its mother for a quick interspecies cuddle ended up with 140 stitches.

One could ask symmetrical questions of the interdisciplinary project outlined in the paper. The idea of an integrated interdisciplinary approach maps most directly onto the theologically harmonious relationship between temple workers and macaques. But what is the interdisciplinary equivalent of the farmer’s neatly drawn and policed boundaries, of crop raiding and retaliation? I am thinking here of Fuentes’ own run-ins with unsympathetic reviewers who asked, “Where is the science?” (602). What might be the interdisciplinary equivalent of the Swiss tourist’s over-familiarity, of thinking one is in a harmonious “relationship of touching and intermingling” when one is in fact just an interloper into an unfamiliar world? As a social-cultural anthropologist blundering in a post-doctoral way into the issues and concerns of Science and Technology Studies (STS) and the philosophy of science, I sometimes fear it is only a matter of time before I inadvertently grab someone’s baby and get my 140 stitches.

And what, to return to my initial example, might be the interdisciplinary equivalent of “waiting with?” In order to answer this question, I will take a detour through Eduardo Viveiros de Castro’s kinship mnemonic for distinguishing between western mononaturalism and the ontological orientation he describes as amerindian perspectivism (2004; 1998). Viveiros de Castro reflects on an equivocation around the Cashinahua term txai. In his example, Brazilian visitors whom the Cashinahua addressed as txai correctly identified that the word expressed an emphatic sense of welcome through the idiom of kinship, and consequently translated it as “brother.” As Viveiros de Castro notes, however, txai means anything but brother: it means something more like “brother-in-law,” referring to “any man whose sister ego treats as an equivalent to his wife” (2004:17). Viveiros de Castro expands on this contrast: Western mononaturalism is epitomised by the dictum that all men are brothers, related by their common biological or at least metaphorical tie to a common ancestor. Evolutionary biology underwrites and expands this way of thinking relationship well beyond the human, tracing the biological relatedness of life forms. By contrast, Viveiros de Castro argues that amerindian perspectivism is epitomized by the thought that all men are not brothers but cross-cousins, or potential brothers-in-law:

As a general model of relationship, the brother-in-law connection appears as a cross connection with a mediating term, which is seen in diametrically opposite ways by the two poles of the relation: my sister is your wife and/or vice-versa. Here, the parties involved find themselves united by that which divides them, linked by that which separates them (Strathern 1992:99-100). My relation with my brother-in-law is based on my being in another kind of relation to his relation with my sister or my wife. (Viveiros de Castro 2004:18-19)

So where does this leave our macaques, tourists and meerkats? Well, one might say, “waiting with” is also a relation based on being in another kind of relation to a third term: the macaques and the tour guides are in a very different relationship to the tourists, just as I and the volunteer are in a very different relationship to the meerkats. Which is partly why “waiting together” is a very odd and provisional kind of relationship. It is “inter-patient,” rather than straightforwardly “inter-active” (Candea 2010:249).

There is a model of harmonious interdisciplinarity which flows from the mononaturalist mold: humans and alloprimates are biological brothers, and this is what enables anthropologists and primatologists to be brothers too: in this story, we, of course, are the younger brothers, who inherit the slightly murky terrain of the socio- cultural, while our elder biologist brothers build a solid house on nature. By contrast, a model of interdisciplinarity as “waiting together” would stress the divisions at the heart of what unites us. In sum, I am suggesting that Agustin Fuentes’ article, poached in meerkat juice and amerindian perspectivism, might end up tasting like a manifesto for an inter-patient interdisciplinarity.

References

Candea, Matei (2010) “I Fell in Love with Carlos the Meerkat: Engagement and Detachment in Human-Animal Relations.” American Ethnologist, 37(2):241-258.

Fuentes, Augustin (2010) “Naturalcultural Encounters in Bali: Monkeys, Temples, Tourists, and Ethnoprimatology.” Cultural Anthropology, 25(4):600-624.

Haraway, Donna (2003) The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness. Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press.

Strathern, Marilyn (1992) Reproducing the Future: Essays on Anthropology, Kinship, and the New Reproductive Technologies. New York: Routledge.

Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo (1998) “Cosmological Deixis and Amerindian Perspectivism.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 4(3):469-488.

Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo (2004) “Perspectival anthropology and the method of controlled equivocation.” Tipití (Journal of the Society for the Anthropology of Lowland South America), 2(1):3-22.

Poaching at the Multispecies Salon

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