Frans de Waal - Chimpanzee Politics: Power and Sex among Apes

My eyes were not the only ones riveted on the drama in the colony: the apes, themselves, kept a close watch as well. A few of them look on while Nikkie (background, left) is waking up Yeroen with an intimidation display.

Items that cannot be quantified and graphed run the risk of being tossed aside as mere "anecdotes." Anecdotes are unique events from which it is hard to generalize. But does this justify the contempt in which some scientists hold them? Let's consider a human example: Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein describe in The Final Days Richard Nixon's reaction to his loss of power: "Between sobs, Nixon was plaintive.... How had a simple burglary done all this? ... (He) got down on his knees ... leaned over and struck his fist on the carpet, crying aloud, `What have I done? What has happened?"'

Nixon was the first and only U.S. president to resign, so this really can't be much else than an anecdote. But does this diminish the observation's significance? I must admit to a great weakness for rare and peculiar events. As we shall see, one of my chimpanzees had tantrums similar to Nixon's (minus the words) under similar conditions. I learned from my earlier study that in order to analyze and understand such events one needs a diary that conveys how things unfolded, how each individual got involved, and what was special about a situation compared to previous ones. Instead of merely counting up and averaging chimpanzee behavior, I was intent on injecting historiography into my project.

Thus, upon arrival in Arnhem I opened a diary. Since little happened initially, I filled it with notes about personalities and behavior patterns that struck me as unusual. As a result, however, I was getting into a chronicling mode, sensitive to shifting social relationships, ready for the political drama that was to come. When at last it did explode, I filled page after page with impressions, predictions, corrections of earlier impressions, but most of all the bare facts. Fascinated and emotionally engaged, I spent day-in-day-out and thousands of hours on a wooden stool overlooking the island, intent on producing the most detailed record ever of a power struggle, human or nonhuman. It is only in sifting through my copious notes, years later, that the connections between various events fell into place, and Chimpanzee Politics began to take shape.

The book caused little controversy when it first appeared, in 1982, with the publishing house of Jonathan Cape, in London. In both popular and academic reviews it was welcomed rather than attacked. In hindsight, this is understandable as its underlying premise perfectly fit the Zeitgeist of the 198os in which attitudes toward animals were rapidly changing. Having worked largely in isolation from the emergence of cognitive psychology in America, I had not realized that I had not been alone in the exploration of this new intellectual territory. This circumstance illustrates how scientific developments in different corners of the world are often connected by thin threads of shared ideas. They are never totally independent. Thus, Donald Griffin's The Question of Animal Awareness did not surprise me when I first read it, just as Chimpanzee Politics evidently did not surprise most primatologists.

If we follow Harold Laswell's famous definition of politics as a social process determining "who gets what, when, and how," there can be little doubt that chimpanzees engage in it. Since in both humans and their closest relatives the process involves bluff, coalitions, and isolation tactics, a common terminology is warranted. The title of my book drove this point home. Whereas several political scientists had no objections, one among them felt a need to delineate humans as quite different.' As so often in the history of ape-human comparisons, ad hoc changes were made in the definition of a phenomenon so as to exclude the primate data. At a symposium on the application of political theory to animals, Glendon Schubert proposed that the term "politics" be reserved for processes within groups of at least one hundred individuals without kinship ties. This obviously excluded most social animals, as well as many situations in which humans play power games.