CHAPTER SEVEN

SCIENCE, IDEOLOGY AND HUMAN ANCESTRY

by
Robert M. Young
All our attempts to frame human nature are beset by problems around the concept of
ideology. This is as true of Darwinian biology and the problem of the place of humanity in
nature as it is of the psychoanalytic understanding of t the unconscious. The concept of
ideology refers to legitimation and to the intrusion of values into putative facts. At a deeper
level, it refers to how frameworks get constituted and how criteria for acceptable
conclusions get established on the basis of value systems or world views. There are two
particular concepts at work here. One is social location or interest group; the other is power.
Ideologies reflect social locations and serve established or aspiring powers.
Recent work has made it clear to those with eyes to see that there is no place in science,
technology, medicine or other forms of expertise where you cannot find ideology acting as a
constitutive determinant. My own research has been concerned with the biological and
human sciences, with particular reference to their bearing on conceptions of human nature.
This biases the examples which I explore. In biology you can find ideological determinants
in conceptions of microprocesses, and you can go step by step from there to the most
general features of organisms and on to social systems, cultures, larger political systems,
even the world and the universe. That is, in a way, what we mean by a world view, for
example, when we say that science is a world view and that the scientific revolution of the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries could have made other conceptual choices than it did.
This is especially true of the way some of its leading figures dealt with the role of purposes
or final causes in scientific explanations, i.e., they banished them from the so-called
mechanical philosophy and thereby created a sub rosa theme in the history of science which
re-admitted values and purposes at levels which were fundamentally important but not
apparent on the surface of scientific writings (Young, 1989a). As a result, ideology is
pervasive but often implicit (Young, 1977).
When I canvassed various examples I might have gone into to try to make my main point
about what has happened to the concept of ideology, I thought of many too many, too
easily. One is at the cutting edge of popular expositions of natural science, Richard
Dawkins' writings on The Selfish Gene (1976) and The Blind Watchmaker (1986). These are
widely regarded as among the best writings about the world view that follows from neoDarwinian evolutionary thinking. Another candidate for illustrating ideology at work is
Darwin's concept of natural selection, the explanatory principle which lies at the heart of
biological change, as fundamental as gravity is to physics and affinity is to chemistry
(Young, 1985a, ch. 4, 1992). Biological and social theory are mutually constitutive in the
concept of social Darwinism, which has had a renaissance in social policy and debates
about the economy of nature in these hard times (Young, 1985). There are debates about
these issues especially among advocates of close readings of Darwin's research
materials, an activity which is too often conducted at the expense of assessing the role of
broader and deeper determinations (Bohlin, 1991) but I would still claim that the
constitutive role of ideology is well-established for all but the most blinkered textual
exegete.
As we have seen, the ideology of biologism carries over in the social sciences into
functionalist explanation in psychology, sociology, anthropology, economics (Young,
1981). It turns up again in architecture and town planning (Meller, 1990), while an even

more general version of the same way of thinking - systems theory - is to be found in all
sorts of disciplines (Boulding, 1985; Lilienfeld, 1978), including psychiatry and family
therapy (Treacher, 1986). Functionalism uses an orgasmic model of systems as the basic
reality, draws on concepts of structure and function from physiology and stresses
adjustment or adaptation as a goal for organisms, social groups or whatever (Gouldner,
1970; Demerath and Peterson, 1967).
There are links between functionalist thinking and theology in the past and present. In the
past, functionalism developed as a secularisation of natural theology, whereby there was
mutual harmony, directed by Divine plan. All was for the best in the best of all possible
worlds. Whatever was was as it should be and coadapted to what else there was (Paley,
1802; Young, 1985a, ch. 5; Brooke, 1977, 1979, 1991). These ideas became secularised
during the nineteenth century and were expressed in physiological analogies applied to the
social realm in the work of Herbert Spencer (Greene, 1959; Peel, 1971; Young, 1970, ch. 5;
see below, ch. 8).
In the early twentieth century the admixture of respectable physiology and confident
extrapolation to society became characteristic of a whole school of writers, led by Lawrence
Henderson on the fitness of the environment and the social system (1913, 1970; Heyl, 1968)
and Walter Cannon on The Wisdom of the Body (1932; Benison et al., 1987; Cross and
Albury, 1987). The sociological version of functionalism eventually came full circle, and its
scientistic analogies were applied to the history and sociology of science itself, in the work
of Robert K. Merton (1938, 1968). A theological version of this way of thinking a basis
for mutual harmony has recently been revived in the Gaia hypothesis. An eminent
scientist, James Lovelock, invites us the see the universe and all that is in it as a vast,
mutually adaptive system in which all parts are in equilibrium with all others. His notion of
Gaia is thought to ensure the co-ordination (Lovelock, 1979, 1988).
One way of thinking about the role of ideology in all these disciplines is to see their
concepts as part of an overall ideological project the naturalization of value systems
which have a conservative tendency. I have listed the above concepts and disciplines in the
service of the claim that there have been fairly convincing ideological critiques across a
broad range of scientific ideas, and I have cited publications referring to each of them.
The same can be said of many other individuals and their work, although I will refrain from
annotating every example. I am thinking of Isaac Newton and esoteric knowledge (Rattansi,
1973); of Mary Shelly and Erasmus Darwin on theories of life (Jordanova, 1986; McNeil,
1987); of Gall and Spurzheim on phrenology, and the origins of brain research, of other key
figures in the history of brain research in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, e.g.,
Magendie, Broca, Ferrier, Sherrington, Pavlov, Eccles (Young, 1970, 1995); of the history
of the dispensing of patronage of the natural, social and medical sciences by the Rockefeller
charities (Brown 1979, 1979a; Abir-Am, 1982; Kohler, 1991); of some of their most prolific
protgs, the molecular biologists, whereby there flowed from Watson and Crick's double
helix a whole plethora of developments, leading to a belief that genetic engineering can
voluntarily reshape all of life, including humanity, eventually virtually at will (Yoxen, 1983,
1986). Once again, there are admirable learned writings on each and every one of these
subjects.
But they are twice-told tales, and I don't want to tell them again. I want instead to offer a
single quotation and then explain why I gave up on setting forth a version of the expositions
listed above. The quotation is most interesting. I was reading the television review in The
Observer (28 October 1990), when I saw a passage I had also laboriously copied off a video
of a natural history television programme. I had the same experience as the reviewer, John
Naughton. He was completely bowled over by one sequence. He wrote, 'The dominant
image of the week came... from Part Four of "The Trials of Life" (BBC 1), in which

Whispering Dave Attenborough finally hit his stride. The programme dealt with the grisly
subject of how animals hunt and are hunted. It started with some relatively innocuous piracy
practised by seabirds on one another, then moved to some truly terrifying footage showing a
pack of killer whales catching and apparently torturing seal cubs.
'It was the closing sequence of the film, however, which will live forever in the minds of all
who saw it. Mr. Attenborough gave a breathless running commentary as a group of
chimpanzees closed in on a hapless colobus monkey which they then proceeded to
dismember. As the hunters went for the kill, the rest of the group cheered and shrieked in an
orgy of savagery.
'Creeping up on them as they digested their meal, Attenborough turned to the camera and
said: "These bloodstained faces may well horrify us. But we might also see in them the
faces of our long-distant hunting ancestors. And if we are appalled by the mob violence and
blood lust we might see in that, too, perhaps, the origins of the teamwork that has, in the
end, given human beings many of their greatest triumphs." It was a sobering moment, for
which he had chosen just the right words. People said that if he lived to be a hundred, Mr.
Attenborough would never cap the scene in "Life on Earth" in which he was cuddled by a
huge gorilla [and whispered so as not to alarm the beast]. Well, they were wrong.'
I thought of spending an entire chapter on unpacking that quotation, because of its Social
Darwinist assumptions about 'man the hunter', because of the kind of voyeurism involved,
because of the belief that these were the origins of co-operation in the history of the division
of labour. The whole topic of science as ideology is there in one short passage.
After I had thought through all of the above possible ways of making my point about the
concept of ideology it began to dawn on me that there is definitely something pass about
the framework of ideas and issues within which the science/ideology dichotomy is a central
problem. It also dawned on me that it is more that two decades since I first wrote an article
which treated science as ideology (Young, 1971). Today, however, 'ideology' is one term in
a dichotomy, the other member of which can no longer sustain its role as Other in a sharp
split. The forebears of the modern formulation of ideology in the writings of Karl
Mannheim set a deeply ambivalent task. The original Ideologues of the French
Revolutionary period set out 'to subject the ideas of science to the science of ideas'. This is
an intriguing phrase, setting a self-contradictory task. It tacitly assumes that there was some
stand-point for the science of ideas which would allow one to view presumably with an
advantage more illuminating than scientific objectivity the ideas of putatively objective
science (Rosen, 1946; Temkin, 1946; Lichtheim, 1967).
I suggest that a deeper shift was occurring, one which was characteristic of another concept
that has earlier and later connotations, just as 'ideology' has. That concept is 'positivism'
(Kolakowski, 1972; Simon, 1963). We juxtapose the nineteenth-century positivism of
Auguste Comte and his British part-allies, Mill, Spencer, Harrison, with idealist science
(Annan, 1959; Eisen, 1964, 1967). Yet they were actually in opposition to realist science in
arguing that something not objective, in the sense of being separate from human
consciousness, was the true source of knowledge: phenomena. Similarly, the original
Ideologues - Cabanis, Destutt de Tracy were arguing that there was a discipline about
something intra-human ideas to which the ideas of science are accountable and which
they considered to be more epistemologically basic. So ideology, then as now, doubted that
nature speaks for itself and asks where else we ground knowledge (Thompson, 1990, ch. 1;
Eagleton, 1991, ch. 3).
In its Mannheimian form, the concept of ideology juxtaposed situationally-contingent
knowledge with situationally non-contingent knowledge. Where, if at all, that boundary
could be drawn has been the subject of an ongoing debate within the discipline Karl

Mannheim founded when he wrote Ideology and Utopia (1929-31), subtitled An

Introduction the Sociology of Knowledge. The startling and subversive claim of his position
was, as I have already mentioned, that knowledge has a sociology, that is, it is socially
located and therefore contingent (pp. xxiii, 36, 68-9, 185, 269). This undermined the notion
that knowledge could be like natural science was supposed to be: neutral, objective, above
the contending forces in society and culture. In the end, Mannheim believed that the
sociologist of knowledge could find an interest-free vantage point. He adopted a position of
'relationalism' which eschewed the toughest epistemological questions (pp. 70, 71, 77, 166,
253).
Once the question about whether or not there can be situationally non-contingent knowledge
(outside of purely deductive systems) was put, there seemed to be no obvious stoppingplace (Berger and Luckmann, 1967; Habermas, 1971; Young, 1971, 1973). History and the
human sciences were ideological. Was economics? Perhaps there was soft economics
economic policy which is ideological, and tough economics mathematical economics
which was still scientific. What about psychology? Is psychoanalysis ideological, while
behaviourism is scientific? There was a time when behaviourism presented itself as 'purely'
scientific. Nowadays it would be more likely to be seen as more nearly purely ideological.
Psychoanalysis went through a very scientistic phase from the mid-1930s until the 1960s,
but is now largely proud of its humanistic strains (Rayner, 1990; Young, 1986, 1992a). I've
already touched on the recent inroads into the claimed objectivity of biology. Then there are
chemistry and physics.
Successive waves of challenges to the objectivist account did not stop at the threshold of
natural science. Those who sought to separate the substance of knowledge from its context
(or, in its Popperian form, the context of justification from the context of discovery) often
lost hold of their neat distinctions. Where Robert Merton opened the door to the sociology
of scientific knowledge with his studies of Puritanism and the Scientific Revolution (1938),
others went to the heart of physics, for example, Paul Forman (1971), in his work of
Weimar Culture and quantum physics how the latter adapted to the former.
My own work on evolutionary biology and ideology attempted to go to the basic
assumptions of Darwinian evolutionary theory and the functionalist sciences, while Steve
Cross, Edward Yoxen (1981) and others addressed themselves to other aspects of biology
organismic, functionalist and molecular biological research. I shall return to some of
these questions below.
For the moment, however, I want to recall my point about the concept of ideology feeling
pass, because the science/ideology dichotomy no longer feels dichotomous. This is not
only because the concept of ideology seems less scandalous than it did two decades ago.
Indeed, the subject has received sustained attention (Harris, 1968; Larrian, 1970; Plamenatz,
1970), and there is something of a new vogue for writing about ideology: witness more
recent books on the subject (albeit not concerned with natural science) by Thompson (1984,
1990), McLellan (1986), Susser (1988), Zizek (1989), and Eagleton (1991). Let us pause to
recall how scientists and philosophers of science (left, right and centre) squealed in the
1970s that to bring ideological analysis into science would lead (how quaint it sounds to the
1990s ear, jaded by the fragmentations and nihilism of postmodernist discourse) to
unthinkable relativism.
I have never thought of myself as a relativist, but I vividly recall how academically
eminently radical scientists sought to burn me and others at the stake for mounting
ideological critiques of biological (Young, 1977) and IQ research (Levidow, 1978). By
using the concept of ideology in our own view of science, instead of labelling conservative
and reactionary science as ideological and therefore wrong, we were joining the polluters
and abandoning the left's claim to special affinity to the truth. 'Science as ideology', like the

subsequent provocative phrase, 'science as culture', was thought to betray the bedrock of
realism in the theory of knowledge of orthodox Marxism. The goal of all good socialists, as
one put it, should be to wash science again and again, until the stain of ideology was
removed. Left science was to be the whitest on the block, and we polluters were claiming to
find ideology everywhere. One critic went so far as to say that one might as well have put
'shit' in place of 'scientific fact' in one of my arguments, so prurient was my position. We
were violently attacked in The Socialist Register (Rose and Rose, 1979, etc.), subjected to a
whispering campaign (including the allegation that we had obscure CIA connections), and
given the right of reply, only to have that reply rejected, so we published it ourselves (RSJ
Collective, 1981).
While orthodox scientists, historians and philosophers were defending those ramparts, the
citadel of science was being both outflanked and undermined in so many ways that we
modern-day ideologues should, by contrast, have looked tame. Indeed, the safety of the
received view of science free of metaphysics and world views if they but knew it, had
long-since been in peril. Eminently unradical philosophers of science had already
historicised and exposed the philosophical muddles in the most basic ideas of science. I am
thinking of the subversive metaphysical explorations of the contradictions even the
absurdities in the world view of modern science penned by Alfred North Whitehead in
Science and the Modern World (1925) and by Edwin Arthur Burtt in The Metaphysical
Foundations of Modern Physical Science (1932). I have touched in these matters in chapter
one, particularly as they bear on postmodernism and ideas of human nature.
A related challenge was being mounted by Arthur O. Lovejoy, whose The Great Chain of
Being: A Study in the History of an Idea (1936) was the model for research in the history of
ideas and the periodical his research inspired, The Journal of the History of Ideas (1940-). I
shall never forget the thrill of reading that book the first time in 1960. I suppose you could
say that it set the course of my whole research career. At one level the notion that ideas
have histories is eminently respectable, but at another, the claim that scientific ideas have
histories, whose study could be a legitimate domain of research, relatively independent of
empirical data, was anathema to traditional inductivist and hypothetico-deductivist notions
of science and of scientific progress. Science is not just or even largely about facts: it
is about traditions and ways of looking at things. The history of ideas was, in its way,
profoundly ahistorical in its willingness to eschew the social context of scientific research,
its roots in the productive process and other aspects of the socio-economic and cultural
base.
What was subversive about all this was twofold. It expressed the vicissitudes, the
contradictions, the compromises, illogicality and sheer orneriness of what had been hailed
by idealisers of the great scientific revolution of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and
the subsequent progress of the advancing 'edge of objectivity' (Gillispie, 1960). It also
showed how much continuity there was between Late Renaissance thought and the
supposedly New Philosophy of the virtuosi of the Royal Society and their Continental
correspondents. Neo-Platonism and Hermeticism were rife in the thinking of writers who
were being hailed as making a decisive break with superstition. What was being represented
by historians who were sycophantic to the self-conceptions of scientists as a radical
epistemological break was nothing of the sort, or, to put the point more modestly, was
nothing like as complete as its celebrants were prone to claim. ('Epistemological break' is an
anachronistic phrase from the 1970s; what they thought had occurred was an end to
epistemology, replaced by a linear notion of positive science, which made philosophy
largely redundant, except as a handmaiden to science itself.) This was especially true in
chemistry and what was later to be called biology. William Harvey may have been hailed as
a mechanist in Descartes' Discourse on Method (1637, Part Five), but he was a devoted
Aristotelian when he was at home and never tired of saying so (Young, 1989a). Similarly,
chemistry was much, much slower to break with alchemy and to become fully mechanistic

and atomistic than reductionists would have us believe.

Eminent historians like Owsei Temkin (1946) and George Rosen (1946) wrote about
medicine and ideology in one framework of discourse. Leonora C. Rosenfeld (1941) and
Aram Vartanian (1953, 1960) showed that debates about human nature and mechanist
reductionism of animals and humans were utterly philosophically-led (Young, 1967), while
Walter Pagel (1951, 1967) made similar claims for the histories of physiology and
medicine. E. J. Dijksterhuis (1950) and C. C. Gillispie (1951) showed, respectively, that the
mechanization of the world picture and the origins of scientific geology were inseparable
at the very moment of scientific triumph from theological preoccupations and
controversies. Not science versus theology but science in the context of theology. The
mechanical philosophy of Robert Boyle was integral with his natural theology. Newton's
mathematical principles were of a piece with his Biblical ruminations. Charles Lyell's
uniformitarian geology was carefully composed so as to be consistent with his views on
Genesis, and he never deviated from believing in the separate creation of man, no matter
how much he conceded to Darwin with respect to the evolution of other forms of life.
Similar claims about science being conceived within a framework of basically theological
assumptions were later to be convincingly made about Darwin (Moore, 1979; Desmond and
Moore, 1991, but cf. Young, 1994), Wallace and their generation (Smith, 1972; Durant
1979).
By virtue of these and other excellent historical researches, science came more and more to
be seen as rooted in wider intellectual history, conceived in the broadest cultural terms,
although there was much less tendency to root it in contending class forces and movements
in the socio-economic base. We were made privy to sects and interest groups, but their
social and economic bases were not explored until much later. Even so, the notion of the
unencumbered scientific mind testing value-neutral facts as they bore on purely intellectual
hypotheses never had a chance at the hands of unblinkered historians of thought.
In the 1950s and 1960s, N. R. Hanson (1958), Gerd Buchdahl (1969), A. C. Crombie
(1959), Mary Hesse (1980) and others enriched our understanding of the philosophical
bearings of scientific thought. A subsequent generation, including P. M. Rattansi (1973),
Charles Webster (1975), Quentin Skinner (1969) and John Dunn (1969), linked those ideas
to wider political and social concerns. Thereby the epistemological goals of modern science
came eventually to be rooted in genuine social history, not merely the history of ideas.
Related work was occurring in Renaissance studies, showing how strong were the
continuities between Renaissance thought and aspects of the scientific revolution which had
been underemphasised. The leading lights in this work were D. P. Walker (1958) and
Frances Yates (1971). She was a delightful women who looked rather like Miss Marples
and was as good at unravelling mysteries. I vividly remember the raunchy way she once
said, with glee, 'Next I'm going to get Descartes,' meaning that she would knock him off his
ultra-rationalist pedestal by showing his links with the very traditions we think of him as
having eschewed.
Cartesian dualism is in no way a clear distinction between two forms of ontologically basic
kinds: extended substances and thinking substances. Descartes conceptions of body and of
mind make up an historic compromise between the claims of the church, certain notions of
the individual soul and the requirements of his peculiar version of mechanism. Cartesian
dualism was a resolution of historical forces rather than a scientific law. The process that
led to it is more like the way a secular law gets codified than it is like a Platonic Form,
written in the fabric of Being. It is an historical compromise which, as Whitehead stressed
so eloquently, is then subjected to the fallacy of misplaced concreteness (1926, esp. ch. 3;
see above, ch. 1), whereby our abstract notions get seen as the most concrete rendering of
reality, rather than as ideas that should be changed if, as this one certainly has, they serve us

ill, according to particular value choices which are in conflict with those which dictated the
original conceptualisation. And yet Cartesian dualism is one of the most basic ideas in the
modern world view (Young, 1989; 1994a, ch. 1).
I am suggesting that the union of the history of ideas with the history of culture played a
very subversive role with respect to received accounts of the history of science and its
epistemological status as a bastion of rationalism. The science/ideology dichotomy was very
hard to maintain if one read the writings of historians and philosophers who were not cut off
from the connections or articulations of science. Twentieth-century positivism saw to it that
most scientists had no inclination to study the writings of the thinkers whom I have listed,
and people like Charles Singer (1959) provided them with the decontextualised histories of
scientific discoveries which perpetuated their isolation from the determinations that
constitute ideas in science, just as they do in other dimensions of culture.
I'll only sketch the other movements which have undermined the science/ideology
dichotomy. I have stressed various aspects of the history of ideas, because it is easy to think
of that discipline as pass, rather than realising how subversive it was, long before anyone
set out as an avowedly political project to push against the distinction between
science and ideology. The history of ideas provided the essential basis for joining forces
with social and cultural studies.
Other ways of challenging the rationality and autonomy of science have a more
contemporary ring. I am thinking of neo-Marxist ideas of nature in which nature is seen as a
societal category with a history (Lukcs, 1923; Schmidt, 1972; Young, 1985b). Science has
always accepted the concept of natural history; it is a more radical thought that nature has a
history, that it is inside history, in so far as we can know it (Gold and Young, 1982). Nature
outside history is a noumenon a thing in itself, unknowable, in principle. Lukcs essayed
on this, just as Gramsci wrote about the historicity and ideological determination of notions
of matter and the atom (Gramsci, 1971, pp. 446, 465-66). Other Marxists have dwelt on the
mediations between socio-economic base and intellectual superstructure (Young, 1985a, ch.
6).
Alongside politically committed ideas of this kind are nominally apolitical approaches such
as contextualism, social constructionism, the anthropology of knowledge in the abstract and
fieldwork anthropological studies in labs, studying a particular tribe, its belief system and
its ritualistic practices, moving from Robin Horton's (1967) juxtaposition of African
traditional thought with Western science to Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar's (1979)
investigation of the culture of a particular lab.
The person whose theoretical and applied work I have found astonishingly fruitful with
respect to science, nature and other social practices is Mary Douglas, whose Purity and
Danger (1966) and essays 'In the Nature of Things' (1975, pp. 210-29) and 'Environments at
Risk' (1975, pp. 230-48) never cease to prove helpful in surprising directions. Her insight
that 'Dirt is matter out of place' may be the single most fruitful notion for the insight that
how we see any part of the world and life is inescapably inside a belief system, no matter
how esoteric that bit of the world may be from fundamental physical particles to the
universe. I find this approach worth more than reams of what is on offer as 'the social
studies of science', even though much of that tendency also acknowledges a debt to her
ideas.
The philosopher whose work has, for me, been as important as Douglas' is Richard Rorty,
whose Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1980) and essays collected in The
Consequences of Pragmatism (1982), Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (1989) and
Philosophical Papers (1991) dethrone the category of science and place it on a par with
other classificatory categories of librarianship, i.e., just one kind of story-telling. His

assertion that 'Truth is made and not found' is as insightful as Douglas' anthropological
version of the same conventionalism. Hers is tribal; his is epistemological. He offers a
devastating critique of the high tide of the philosophy of science when logical positivism
claimed hegemony for science above other forms of knowing (Rorty, 1982, ch. 12).
All of which brings me to Donna Haraway, to whose work I shall devote the rest of this
chapter. In particular, I want to celebrate her masterpiece, Primate Visions: Gender, Race
and Nature in the World of Modern Science (1989), which is among the dozen best books I
have ever read. Before going any further I should declare an interest. She is generously
cited in my work, as I am in hers. I have made a television film in which her ideas loom
large (Postle and Young, 1982) and have published her essays (Haraway, 1991). But make
no mistake. I do not praise her because I made the film and published the essays; I did those
things because I admire her and her work enough to put serious time and resources into
trying to make them better known.
She is a feminist, rather loosely a neo-Marxist and (until a paper to which I shall allude
below) a postmodernist. Her topic is the use of primates as a model for humans. This topic
is at the intersection of many issues, as I shall try to indicate. Primatology is the discipline
in which we create a pedigree for the concept of humanity in the family, society, et cetera,
which we want to legitimate. It its therefore a contested terrain. She traces the vicissitudes
of this modelling through the histories of disciplines, research careers of individuals, the
rise of institutions and research facilities, granting bodies, personal patronage, the relevant
aspects of political, geopolitical, imperialist, social and cultural history, adverts, films,
television programmes, you name it.
She even points out that one of the people who sought to teach language to apes, Roger
Fouts, was an adviser for the latest remake of 'Tarzan' - 'Greystoke: The Legend of Tarzan,
Lord of the Apes' (1984; Haraway, 1989, p. 132). Tarzan was a vastly popular embodiment
of the idea of a gentle bond between simians, other aspects of the (Rousseauesque) 'state of
nature' and humankind. African animals, our kin, had something to teach us about a caring,
thoughtful state of nature, if we approached it in the right frame of mind. The Johnny
Weissmuller film series (p. 155) was part of the common experience of my generation, and
subsequent actors' portrayals have been staples of children's television since the 1950s. The
l984 Earl of Greystoke is Tarzan's latest incarnation, based on the best version of recent
studies of animal behaviour that consultancy fees can buy.
Part of the richness of Haraway's explorations lies in the interweaving of the academic, the
popular and the commercial in illuminating how we come to think of our place in the
economy of nature. She grants that there are many subjects in the history of biology and
anthropology which could serve her purposes in writing Primate Visions. She chose primate
sciences because 'monkeys and apes, and human beings as their taxonomic kin, exist on the
boundaries of so many struggles to determine what will count as knowledge' (p. 13). There
follows the first of innumerable lists of disciplines and issues, each concerned with border
disputes (p. 14), leading to the general issue: she wants to 'set new terms for the traffic
between what we have come to know historically as nature and culture' (p. 15).
I have been a student and admirer of her work since I first encountered it during a visit to
Johns Hopkins in 1979, but nothing in my previous reading of it prepared me for the rich,
highly-textured, highly-articulated, multi-layered, genuinely profound text that constitutes
the book. Her work is heir to all the traditions I canvassed above, and she is quite explicit
about their roles in her thinking. She studied biology as a graduate student at Yale, where
the influence of G. E. Hutchinson fostered a broad, cultured sense of biological meanings.
Interdisciplinary studies at Yale provide both a model and many of the case studies for her
research as an historian. She joined the faculty at Johns Hopkins, perhaps the leading
institution in upholding the Germanic ideals of scholarship in graduate work (Geiger, 1986).

It is the place where A. O. Lovejoy (1948) founded the discipline of the history of ideas,
and Owsei Temkin set the highest standards in culturally and philosophically based
historical studies of medicine and biology. She moved from there to the University of
California at Santa Cruz, whose unique program in History of Consciousness offers an even
broader perspective on human self-reflectiveness and where Norman O. Brown (1959) and
Hayden White (1984) are colleagues whose historical and historiographic perspectives are
very enabling.
What strikes me as so powerful about her story is that she sets new standards for sheer
immersion in the texture of the history of ideas, institutions, research traditions, individuals'
reflections in themselves. It is exhausting to read, and her style makes no concessions to
mellifluous cadences, yet it is very, very exhilarating. It is 'too much' in the best sense. She
takes us through the minutiae of complex networks, the mediations, the resolutions of forces
that lead to scientific patronage, conception, research, publication and dissemination. The
texture is so fine, the networks so highly-articulated that any hope of maintaining a
dichotomy between the substance and the context of science or between science and
ideology becomes a forlorn one. Context and substance are not just interdigitated but
inextricably intertwined or mutually constitutive.
This is all quite deliberate. She says at one point, 'I will periodize primatology in order to
confuse the inside/outside boundary. My argument is not that "outside" influences have
continued to determine primatology into the period of problem-oriented, quantitative
studies, but that the boundary itself gives a misleading map of the field, leading to political
commitments and beliefs about the sciences that I wish to contest. My periodization takes
pleasure in confusing boundaries' (p. 125). She concludes, 'I do not wish to tell a causal tale,
but to multiply associations and clusters, so that the chronology of discoveries and
explanatory transitions in primatology becomes provocatively problematic. The main point
is not that the following associations are indisputable, but on the contrary, to illustrate how
a chronology is necessarily a political history' (pp. 125-6).
Most of the comments on this book that I have read have been very uncomprehending,
especially in the British press. Readers don't know what the hell to do with it. They say, in
effect, 'All this is very interesting and industrious, but the thesis is unproven'. They don't
grasp that it is the cumulative weight of textured entanglement that makes her case. It is not
an argument in the ordinary sense. It's more like the Tar Baby: the more you make contact
with it, the more you get stuck into it ('Born 'n bred in the briar patch! Born 'n bred in the
briar patch!'). Some commentators have been irritated, a few hostile to her avowed (but
utterly unstrident) feminism, some are sardonic and patronising, unable to acknowledge her
consummate knowledge of her chosen domains of study and their myriad interrelations. I
say shame on those critics. Her book reminds me of Black Athena, Martin Bernal's critique
of received views on the origins of classical Greece's putatively purely Aryan civilisation.
(Indeed, she pays tribute to his work in a recent essay Haraway, 1992a, p. 331) Once one
has been immersed in his or her argument, one is left wondering how anyone could have
thought otherwise.
It bulges; it overflows; it spills out concepts: stress, patronage, aspects of functionalism,
how television documentaries get sponsored, how films about cyborgs get made, how
science fiction gets written, why women do or don't get jobs in academic departments, who
their partners and lovers are or were, the impact of divorces and of sexual practices and the
bearing of these experiences on what gets published and on how primates get seen and
conceptualised. There is a relentless quality about it. All very 'unscientific' but a cornucopia
of scholarship and insight of the sort one gets in bull sessions among researchers and
students in a field when one is being told what really went on.
Indeed, her own research is an example of the kind she describes. It is a nodal point or

intersection in a very gratifying network of mutually influencing scholars, especially

including Steve Cross, William Albury, Constance Clark, Ludi Jordanova, Karl Figlio and
me. There is a long, long list of acknowledgements, appropriately including seventeen of
her own doctoral students. She shows how such debates and patronage networks end up
defining a discipline. Here is an example: 'Debates raged about whether the peaceful
chimpanzees and gorillas or the tight-assed baboons were the better model for "man's"
evolutionary past and so future hopes. Books were published on the connections of primate
studies to man's putative propensities toward xenophobia and territoriality. E. O. Wilson
named "the xenophobic principle" in Sociobiology (1975). Man's natural aggressiveness
versus his peace-loving capacities were argued on college campuses while the Vietnam War
killed the Vietnamese and the darker-skinned and white working-class contemporaries of
the young people in the audiences' (p. 126). There follow two pages of titles of books in this
particular time frame which justified 'man the hunter', man the aggressor, e.g., The
Territorial Imperative, The Social Contract, The Hunting Hypothesis, The Naked Ape, The
Human Zoo, The Imperial Animal, On Aggression, The Inevitability of Patriarchy, on and
on. After softening us up with this saturation bombardment of otherwise risibly implausible
titles by eminently respectable people, she asks how else than by reference to the
geopolitics of the period can one account for such an outpouring of books providing a
pedigree for what the American government was up to in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
The result is that one is at first alarmed by her apparently sly elision between Wilson's
sociobiological categories and the Vietnam War, only to find it appropriate in the light of
the accumulating list of warmongering titles. I have read those books and lived though those
times, and I am sure she is right.
She tells a parallel story about the National Geographic specials, which are among the mostwatched programmes in television history. Five of them have been about nonhuman
primates: Miss Goodall and the Wild Chimpanzees (1965), Monkeys, Apes and Man (1971),
Search for the Great Apes (1975), Gorilla (1981), and Among the Wild Chimpanzees
(1984). To celebrate nine years of underwriting the series, Gulf Oil launched an advertising
campaign with a full-colour photo, showing 'two wrists and hands reaching in from opposite
sides of the page to meet in gentle embrace. The hands are richly sensuous; they fill the
space in which they intertwine. One is white, young, with well-trimmed nails; the other,
about the same size, is brown, hairy, showing signs of a harder life. Both hands are open
and vulnerable' (p. 133). The advert is entitled 'Understanding is Everything', and the text
says, 'In a spontaneous gesture of trust, a chimpanzee in the wilds of Tanzania folds his
leathery hand around that of Jane Goodall sufficient reward for Dr. Goodall's years of
patience"' (ibid.).
Donna Haraway asks, 'What mediates spontaneity?... when may (white) woman best
represent (species) man? How do the race, species, gender, and science codes work to
reinvent nature in the Third World for First World audiences within post-colonial,
multinational capitalism?' (pp. 134-5). Her reply provides a characteristically bold synthesis
of science as legitimation and as available for appropriation for the purposes of corporate
image: 'Gulf took on sponsorship of the series the same year the giant company, ranked
number 8 among the Forbes 500 and traditionally one of the Seven Sisters of international
oil companies, was in the news for major slush fund scandals to U. S. and overseas
politicians, resulting in the forced resignation of the Chairman of the Board. The 1970s
were not only scandal-ridden for the oil giant; they were also economically disastrous
because of the formation of OPEC (Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries) and
Kuwait's subsequent takeover of its oil fields. Gulf moved from the unbeatable ally of
British Petroleum, ruling the rich oil fields of a small Middle Eastern country, from which
Gulf's profits amounted to more that a $1 million per day in the mid-1970s, to a supplicant
for crude oil from an assertive Kuwaiti government. The years of intense media focus on the
system of international oil profits and politics and on the "energy crisis" brought a new form
of advertising by the energy multinationals. Ads were full of scenes of natural integrity and

environmental restoration and preservation through the enlightened, scientifically guided

practices of giant companies. It was a good time for Gulf to associate itself with the thesis
that "no thinking person can share in the destruction of anything whose value he
understands... Association with the National Geographic Society and with the television
specials is only one aspect of Gulf's lively concern for the environment. But it is an
especially proud one"' (p. 135). It is also 'association' in another sense. It is hoped that as a
result of their generous patronage of such lovely television specials we will not associate
Gulf Oil with scandal, economic imperialism and despoiling of nature but with the gentle
symbiosis between this gracious woman, her fellow-creatures and a pastoral rendering of
the earth.
Science, its ideological bases, popularisation and wider ideological and hegemonic purposes
are here intertwined in a multilayered message. This example reminds me of a Sunday
magazine photograph which I once analysed (Young, 1985, p. 625). It depicted Richard
Dawkins, looking like a cross between a choirboy and a movie star, a wise, bearded, elderly
Charles Darwin, Konrad Lorenz (a founder of ethology, a Nobel Laureate and a follower of
Hitler in the 1930s), Robert Ardrey (a playwright and conservative autodidact who also
essayed on the biological inevitability of private property, hierarchy, patriarchy,
competition, etc.), E. O. Wilson (the father of recent sociobiology, offering a much-disputed
basis for many of the same things in the behaviour of ants and other organisms in the
evolutionary chain). All were pictured alongside Watson and Crick's double helix.
Biological inevitability is conveyed at many levels in a single collage. It comes across as a
unified story, legitimated by the strands of DNA twisting down the side of the picture. I
agree with Donna Haraway that people actually learn their deepest assumptions about
nature and humanity in this mixed up way. They do not pause (nor are they invited to do so)
to discriminate between the level of molecular biology, fairly close extrapolations, mixtures
of original work and wild overgeneralizations, and frankly popular and propagandist
potboilers.
She also enlightens us about how and why 'King Kong' was made, though I'm sorry to
report that there is no analysis of the macho classic 'Any Which Way but Loose', which
teams Clint Eastwood as a bare knuckle street fighter with a particularly pugilistic chimp.
Instead, we are treated to innumerable examples of the patronage of the Rockefeller and
Wenner-Gren foundations (whose financial resources came from exploitative technologies)
and the Josia Macy Foundation (money from Macy's department store). Their vast funds
have been used across a wide range of fields to support a (relatively enlightened) version of
stable, biologicstic order in animal and human social affairs. Whole disciplines and
innumerable institutions were directly established by these patrons, notably the Yale
Institute of Human Relations (pp. 71-3, 220), the Tavistock Institute of Human Relations
(Dicks, 1970), sociobiology (in an earlier incarnation), molecular biology (Abir-Am, 1982),
the integration of biological, medical and social sciences (pp. 103-4; Brown, 1979, 1979a),
world-wide organisations for the promotion of western ideas about medicine and mental
health (p. 104; Fisher, 1978).
It is not too much to say that these activities (and many more not listed here) were part of a
world-wide conspiracy to palliate class conflict and make the world safe for international
monopoly capitalism. Organismic thought became the universal rhetoric, prestructuring
assumptive worlds so as to make people less likely to think in terms of contradiction,
dialectic, or any other model not compatible with market notions of competition and
distributive justice. Individuals, groups, industries, nations all could be seen as having an
essential contribution to make to the smooth running of 'the social organism' (the title of a
pioneering paper by the evolutionary philosopher, Herbert Spencer, 1860; see below, ch. 8),
just as cells, organs and systems play their parts in the overall physiology of the biological
organism.

The larger goals were quite explicitly spelled out in the foundations' internal documents. In
some cases the aims were avowed in the projects, for example, the Rockefeller-funded
Trilateral Commission for world order, drawing on leaders from around the globe, rather
like a super United Nations. (the land for whose New York headquarters they also donated)
with the philanthropic oil family as hosts. This world-wide scheme is helpfully examined in
a collection edited by Holly Sklar (1980). There was also the Rockefeller Foundation's huge
programme in promoting the so-called Green Revolution for a single world system of
agriculture in the guise of ways of increasing crop yields in the Third World. The manifest
project was intensive cultivation, requiring expensive fertilisers; the latent and final effect
was the world-wide demise of the peasant farmer, whose small plot was integrated into
'economically viable units', suitable for world crop markets.
The research projects, ongoing support of scientific meetings and seminars and the funding
of institutions and careers created a relatively stable set of interrelating subcultures, whose
participants got doctorates, jobs, publications, and achieved the colonisation of other
academic and research institutions and professional organisations, periodicals and curricula.
She shows us exactly how it's done.
For example, 'The hoped-for unity of the sciences through the new communications theories
was actively promoted by an important social mechanism immediately after World War II:
the series of ten Macy Foundation conferences on cybernetics, beginning in 1946 with a
meeting entitled "Teleological Mechanisms in Society" and ending in 1953 with the last of
the conferences entitled "Cybernetics: Circular Causal and Feedback Mechanisms in
Biological and Social Thought". These meetings had profound consequences for cybernetic
evolutionary theories of animal behavior developed in the 1950s. The Macy Foundation
sponsorship grew out of its commitment from its origin in 1930 to a holistic approach to
health through the integration of biological, medical and social sciences.... The Foundation's
special technique was the conference series, in which about fifteen scientists were invited to
form an original nucleus to meet for two days at least once a year for three to five years.
Between 1940 and 1950, the Foundation sponsored 132 conferences with over 800
participating scientists. The interdisciplinary emphases of Macy, coupled with its long-term
interest in mental health, human relations and the physiology of integrative, homeostatic
processes, led the Department of State to ask the Foundation in 1946 to conduct sessions on
human relations in the Department, drawing on its resources in clinical psychology and
cultural anthropology. In 1948, Macy facilitated the London International Congress on
Mental Health, which preceded the founding of the World Federation of Mental Health,
charged with applying mental health principles to human relations within and among
nations and serving as a consultative organization to UNESCO and the World Health
Organization' (pp. 103-4). They also funded a series of annual interdisciplinary conferences
on The Central Nervous System and Behavior, which sought to integrate psychology and
neurophysiology, as discussed above in chapter six.
That example of the Rockefeller Foundations role in the patronage of ideas is
complementary to how ideas get wedded to personal research pedigrees and lineages. At the
dawn of the era of foundation funding, the careers of Robert Yerkes and James Rowland
Angell showed how the combination of ideas and access to patronage could build
intellectual empires. Haraways succinct accounts of status convey this well: 'The
connection of Yerkes with human engineering were direct and multi-levelled. He held a key
place in liberal corporate reform linked to human engineering institutionalized thorough the
National Research Council, its Division of Psychology and Anthropology, the Engineering
Foundation, the Research Information Service, the Personnel Research Foundation. Yale's
Institute of Psychology and Institute of Human Relations, the Rockefeller and Carnegie
philanthropies, and critical people like James Rowland Angell, the president of Yale who
helped Yerkes build his primate laboratory. Angell had been a prominent advocate of
"functional psychology" at the University of Chicago early in this century. He chaired the

Department of Psychology at Chicago from 1905-19, was dean of the university faculties
from 1911-19, and acting president from 1918-19. He chaired the National Research
Council from 1919-20, was president of the Carnegie Corporation from 1920-21, and
president of Yale from 1921 until 1937. Angell was a director of the New York Life
Insurance Company and the National Broadcasting Company, served on the National
Committee for Mental Hygiene, and was a trustee of the Rockefeller Foundation from 192836. Angell and Yerkes planned Yale's graduate-oriented Institute of Psychology, funded by
the Laura Spellman Rockefeller Memorial in 1924. Angell paradigmatically represented the
elaborate interconnections of university, industry, philanthropy, and science policy in the
development of the material structures and ideologies of the scientific management of
society' (p. 67).
In her chapter on 'Remodeling the Human Way of Life: Sherwood Washburn and Physical
Anthropology, 1950-80', Haraway shows how a highly contentious social Darwinist idea
'man the hunter' gets embedded in doctoral theses, careers, publications and the curricula
of institutions: 'Washburn actually did little observing of living primates in the field; but his
students at Chicago and Berkeley defined a major body of primatological practice. Prior to
the time [1955-6], only two Ph.D.s (one of them Washburn's) had been earned in
anthropological departments for some branch of primatology since the publication of Robert
and Ada Yerkes's monumental tome, The Great Apes, in 1929. Between 1960 and 1979,
there were to be 161 more (although only a portion of them were behavioral field studies)
with others still in departments of psychology and biology or zoology. Of the first
nineteen of those in anthropology, fifteen were supervised by Washburn; of forty-seven
behavioral primatological doctorates in anthropology prior to 1979, twenty were granted at
Berkeley, which also awarded fourteen of the forty-two anatomical primate Ph.D.s... The
nearest competitors were Chicago, where the Washburn influence remained after he left,
and Harvard, under his former student, Irven DeVore' (p. 218).
She concludes this detailed account by spelling out the colonization of institutions:
'Although after 1970, the number of primate students not associated with Washburn
increased, his students dominated the field in the United States in the 1960s and have
remained a force well beyond. They got important jobs during the period of the subject's
institutional consolidation (up to 1975), e.g., at the Davis, Berkeley, San Diego, and Santa
Cruz campuses of the University of California, and at Harvard, Chicago, Stanford,
Pennsylvania, Oregon, and Texas. They in turn supervised the dissertations of a large
percentage of the next wave of field workers. While the dense institutional network
associated with Washburn does not indicate a tight intellectual community, it does indicate
patterns of access to careers, recognition, and publication, as well as shared explanatory
background and assumptions about field practice, which were to be the basis of both
criticism and revolt' (p.223). She elsewhere describes Washburn only half-ironically
as a 'patriline', 'a very visible father in the primate order' (Haraway, 1991, p. 850).
After the account of Washburn's influence, she plunges straight into a similar patronage
network founded by David Hamburg, whose accounts of human stress built on the
foundations laid by Washburn. Hamburg extended evolutionary models of human nature
into psychiatry and went on to become Chief of Adult Psychiatry at the National Institutes
of Mental Health and president of the National Academy of Sciences Institute of Medicine
(pp. 223-6). Her account here makes contact with the American mental health establishment
and reminds us that the Rockefeller charities were also active in Britain in funding the
Tavistock Clinic and the Institute of Human Relations, host to John Bowlbys biologistic
version of psychoanalysis, to socio-technical systems theory (a form of scientific
management, coupled to the understanding of unconscious motives) and the applications of
systems theory to psychotherapy. The British mental health professions have also been
deeply influenced by Rockefeller patronage and the forms of thinking promoted by its

largesse.
When she turns, in Part Three, to detailed examination of the ideas and careers of women
scientists, the tone changes radically. She sets out to explore primatology 'as a genre of
feminist theory', using as her case studies Jeanne Altmann, Linda Marie Fedigan, Ardrienne
Zihlman and Sarah Hrdy (there is a summary of their problematics on p. 350), with a reprise
on science fiction, especially a story by Octavia Butler about Lilith, whose biology is
complex and has been altered by intervention and whose ruminations about her life provide
the book's final sentence: 'I suppose I could think of this as fieldwork but how the hell do
I get out of the field?' (p. 382). This is a perfect succinct rendering of the epistemological
problem posed by the constitutive role of ideology in theory, the conundrum of selfreference and the ineffability of objectivity.
Throughout the final chapters Haraway dwells on how people in less than powerful
situations, and perhaps not keen to be in them, negotiate meanings. Indeed, the whole book
is about the origins, negotiation, deployment and propagation of meanings. In that sense, all
of the things I have stressed above about power, status and careers are secondary.
She says early on, 'Such structures enable and constrain meanings: they do not directly
produce them' (p. 111). There are other determinants of knowledge, including animals and
other objects. 'But these objects are radically mediated for us.' The meanings in a particular
tradition are not merely bad science or ideology. They are 'that which can be known in a
particular time and place, called Nature'. 'Meanings are applications; how meanings are
constituted is the essence of politics.... Semiosis is politics by other means' (ibid.).
Throughout the book and most eloquently in the closing chapters she is contesting the
very conceptions of Nature and the ways that they have been produced, the very ones that
she has so wonderfully described in her analytic narratives of the history of patriarchal
primatology. At bottom, you see, this is a work of feminist epistemology in practice, offered
as an example of what it advocates. (Just how inclusively she thinks of 'sexual politics' is
evident from a list of topics which fills page 351.) There are innumerable startling passages
in the final chapters. For example, 'Jane Altmann's career and writing may serve as an
allegory for feminist queries about gender and science, i.e., about relationships between
positioning as a gendered social subject and the production of knowledge and the
philosophy of science' (p. 305). Again: 'But category formation at all the powerful nodes in
the apparatus of knowledge production can, perhaps, be thoroughly destabilized. If those
unsettled conditions can be produced in a discursive field, like primatology, then
fundamental change transformation in the generative field is just possible.
Destabilizing the positions in a discursive field and disrupting categories for identification
might be a more powerful feminist strategy than "speaking as a woman"' (p. 310).
She has no time for feminist readings of nature which are a mirror image of patriarchal
ones: 'Feminist projects in science are distinctly not feminine science. Rather, what might
be problematically named feminist science in local practices destabilizes meanings of both
sex and gender and restructures the "science/gender system" as it maps the field of
meanings ordered by the axes of nature/science and sex/gender. It is specifically the
permanent tension between construction and deconstruction, identification moves and
destabilization moves, that I see, not as uniquely femininst, but as inherent to feminism
and to science. Both feminist and scientific discourses are critical projects built in order to
destabilize and reimagine their methods and objects of knowledge in complex power fields.
Addressed to each other, western and feminist scientific discourses warp each other's story
fields and redraw possible positions for claiming to know something about the world,
including gendered social space and sexed bodies' (p. 324).
She is determined not to suck nature up into ideology. Animals are really out there and have

a certain refractoriness to our plots. Animals are not '"pre-discursive bodies" just waiting to
validate or invalidate some discursive practice, nor are they blank screens waiting for
people's cultural projections. The animals are active participants in the constitution of what
may count as scientific knowledge. From the point of view of the biologist's purposes, the
animals resist, enable, disrupt, engage, constrain, and display. They act and signify, and like
all action and signification, theirs yield no unique, univocal, unconstructed "facts" waiting
to be collected. The animals in behavioral biology are not transparent; they are dense. Like
words, machines, equations, institutions, generic writings, people, and landscapes, the
animals have specific kinds of solidity in the apparatus of bodily production' (pp. 310-11).
Just before the end of the book she puts her overall project very clearly and, in doing so,
gives an apologia for some of the more trying and challenging aspects of her style:
'Throughout Primate Visions, I have read both popular and technical discourses on monkeys
and apes "out of context". My hope has been that the always oblique and sometimes
perverse focusing would facilitate revisionings of fundamental, persistent western narratives
about difference, especially racial and sexual difference; about reproduction, especially in
terms of the multiplicities of generators and offspring; and about survival, especially about
survival imagined in the boundary conditions of both the origins and ends of history, as told
within western traditions of that complex genre. Primate Visions is replete with
representations of representations, deliberately mixing genres and contexts to play with
scientific and popular accounts in ways that the "original" authors would rarely authorize.
But Primate Visions is not innocent of the intent to have effects on the authorized primate
texts in both mass cultural and scientific productions, in order to shift reading and writing
practices in this fascinating and important cultural field of meanings for industrial and postindustrial people.
'Primate Visions does not work by prohibiting origin stories, or biological explanations of
what some would insist must be exclusively cultural matters, or any other of the enabling
devices among primate discourses' apparatuses of bodily production. I am not interested in
policing the boundaries between nature and culture quite the opposite, I am edified by
the traffic. Indeed, I have always preferred the prospect of pregnancy with the embryo of
another species... Gender is kind, syntax, relation, genre; gender is not the transubstantiation
of biological sexual difference. The argument in Primate Visions works by telling and
retelling stories in the attempt to shift the webs of intertextuality and to facilitate perhaps
new possibilities for the meanings of difference, reproduction, and survival for specifically
located members of the primate order on both sides of the bio-political and cultural divide
between human and animal' (p. 377).
The conclusion I draw from her work is this: If science is culture, and if culture is not to be
ontologically and epistemologically privileged (in the way the 'science of ideas' was
privileged by the French Ideologues), then the concept of ideology no longer has a
privileged or scandalous conceptual space to occupy. It has no Other with which to be in
contrast; it is pass, because positivist and objectivist notions of science, no matter how
qualified and rehabilitated, are utterly discredited. There is no way to 'get out of the field'.
There are only contested terrains, and it behoves us to get off the terrain of 'we caught you'
critiques and to construct our own accounts, our own artefacts, our own natures and Nature.
After all this heartfelt and fulsome praise, I want to add two notes of severe regret on behalf
of inner and outer reality. In the past she has been hostile to psychoanalysis. In a footnote to
Primate Visions she seems to have moved nearer: 'Lurking just underneath the discussion of
difference throughout this book has been feminism's relations to psychoanalytic theory,
especially Lacanian versions. It is too late to force this potent monster up from the depths,
breaking the surface tensions of my discussions of difference, to join the monkeys and apes
in the upper stories of the primate text. Let the beast continue to inhabit the fluid regions
that threaten to flood the primal scenes where "almost minds" communicate' (p. 431 n6). I

find this coy and evasive and believe strongly that the psychoanalytic dimension
including and especially the kinds of critiques of its appropriation by anthropologists and
functionalist social scientists which she would be likely to mount is essential to the
overall critical and reconstructive project to which her work is a central contribution. I
would go further and say that the integration of the kind of critical understanding of nature
and gender and other animals which she does so well, on the one hand, and critical
approaches to psychoanalysis, on the other, is an urgent desideratum, a project to which I
offer this book as a beginning. I fear that I may not have got much further than juxtaposing
them, putting them between the covers of a single volume, as it were. If that is all I have
done, as was said in the determined days of the 1960s, even in a march of ten thousand
miles, one has to take the first step.
I also think that when, in work not reviewed in this essay, she turns to the positive project of
reconstituting Nature and human nature (which she calls 'artifactualism'), a healthy dose of
(especially Kleinian) psychoanalysis would add a cautionary note. There is more than an
hint of voluntarism and idealism in her positive programme, and I am also left with a
nagging sense that we may never emerge from the realm of discourse into more traditional
politically and economically contested terrains, with their own stubborn refractorinesses.
Remaining on the terrain of discourse tempts one to a sense that perhaps our good will and
our serious and sustained studies might win the field of contested meanings. For all my
admiration of her work, I sometimes feel seduced away from both the outer and the inner
worlds and into a playful space, where it would not be right to remain for too long, lest I
forget the long-term goals of changing ourselves and the world.
The inner world (not solely the immunological one which she does address with
characteristic subtlety) has its own stubborn but not, one hopes, utterly unmodifiable
'second nature' (see above, ch. 3) The unconscious aspects of human nature, in its individual
and collective manifestations, are not transparent any more than primates or modes of
production are: they are dense, though not impenetrable, just as she rightly insists that the
subtler ways of other primates are. The concept of second nature allows us to say that ways
of being, thinking, behaving and organising economies are deeply sedimented and
experienced as 'natural' as biological or 'first nature'. Nevertheless and however
refractory they are, they are also potentially modifiable as a result of appropriate, patient
struggle to gain insight and to change.
One last point. After I had drafted all of the above and decided to offer her work as central
to my case for setting aside the science/ideology dichotomy, a new paper by her turned up
in the post. It is entitled, with characteristic terminological cussedness, 'The Promises of
Monsters: A Regenerative Politics for Inappropriate/d Others'. In a footnote in which she
ruminates the categories of modernism, postmodernism and (what Bruno Latour wants to
call) 'amodernism', she concludes that science studies can no longer remain immune to
cultural studies. Indeed, the concluding sentence of her recent book of essays says, 'Science
is culture' (Haraway, 1991, p. 230). In the new essay, she argues the case: 'Further, the
addition of science studies to cultural studies does not leave the notions of culture, society,
and politics untouched, far from it. In particular, we cannot make a critique of science and
its constructions of nature based an ongoing belief in culture or society. In the form of
social constructionism, that belief has grounded the major strategy of left, feminist, and
anti-racist science radicals. To remain with that strategy, however, is to remain bedazzled
by the ideology of enlightenment. It will not do to approach science as social or cultural
construction, as if culture and society were transcendent categories, any more than nature or
the object is. Outside the premises of enlightenment i.e., of the modern the binary
pairs of culture and nature, science and society, the technical and the social all lose their
constitutive, oppositional quality. Neither can explain the other' (Haraway, 1992a, p. 330).
I would, of course, add that the same is true of 'science and ideology'. Where we go from

here is not to a particularly epistemologiclly safe project. I suppose it's rather prosaic: the
task of telling the best stories we can. Her own ruminations also point to telling stories:
'When the pieties of belief in the modern are dismissed, both members of the binary pairs
collapse into each other as into a black hole. But what happens to them in the black hole is,
by definition, not visible from the shared terrain of modernity, modernism or
postmodernism. It will take a superluminary SF journey into elsewhere to find the new
interesting vantage points' (ibid.).
At a recent event at London's determinedly avant garde Institute of Contemporary Arts I
overheard a young couple discussing the formation of a Donna Haraway reading group. I
remember well how, in the 1970s, my contemporaries and I felt that we had to be in a
reading group to sustain the morale and will power to read Marx's Grundrisse. It is a sign of
the times that Primate Visions is the equivalently post- or a-modern challenge to the
imagination and to solidarity in cultural politics.
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