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"Primates Fiction."
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One gorilla : a counting book
Count from 1 to 10 with a variety of primates: gorillas, gibbons, mandrills, and others.
Book
Pulp Fiction: Why Some Populations of Ripe-Fruit Specialists Ateles chamek and A. marginatus Prefer Insect-Infested Foods
Fruit pulp is an easily handled energy source for many frugivorous species but generally has little protein. Accordingly, ripe-fruit specialist primate species with diets dominated by fruit pulp risk protein deficiency. While some species use leaf and flower buds, young leaves, and arthropods as an alternative protein supplement, highly frugivorous spider monkeys (Ateles spp.) use protein-rich young leaves and/or fig fruits. However, not all spider monkey populations have access to abundantly available figs. Comparing infestation frequencies of fruits on trees with those eaten by spider monkeys, we tested the hypothesis that, under such circumstances, spider monkeys preferentially choose those nonfig fruits with pulp infested by insect larvae (a highly protein-rich resource). We predicted that: (i) a large proportion of plant species eaten by Ateles would have insect larvae-infested fruits; and (ii) Ateles would actively select infested fruits. We tested these predictions with Ateles chamek and Ateles marginatus on the banks of the Tapajós River, Brazil. Across a 13-month sampling period, we recorded 27 plant species in the diet of the 2 Ateles species. Of these, 23 (85%) had larvae-infested fruits when sampled; 11 species (40%) had high levels of individual fruits infested (35-78%). We used Ivlev Values to quantify selectivity for infested/uninfested fruits in 20 plant species. Infested fruits were positively selected in 12 species (60%), while aversion to infested fruits occurred in 4 species (20%). This covert carnivory/faunivory in spider monkeys is a largely overlooked aspect of their feeding ecology. This situation would be nearly impossible to ascertain from behavioral observations alone, showing the value of integrated, multimethod approaches. The strategy used by Ateles spp. on the banks of the Tapajós highlights the flexibility of primate foraging choices and the importance of indirect source of protein to ripe-fruit specialist primates.
Journal Article
Banana Sunday
Kirby is about to start a new school with three talking primates, eggheaded orangutan Chuck, Go-Go the gorilla, who is hungry and tired in equal measure, and spider monkey Knobby, who has a fondness for romance.
Book
What makes people approve or condemn mind upload technology? Untangling the effects of sexual disgust, purity and science fiction familiarity
The idea of separating a person’s consciousness and transferring it to another medium—'mind upload'—is being actively discussed in science, philosophy, and science fiction. Mind upload technologies are currently also being developed by private companies in Silicon Valley, and similar technological developments have received significant funding in the EU. Mind upload has important existential and ethical implications, yet little is known about how ordinary people actually feel about it. The current paper aims to provide a thorough moral psychological evaluation about various cognitive factors that explain people’s feelings and reactions towards the use of mind upload technology. In four studies (including pilot) with a total of 952 participants, it was shown that biological and cultural cognitive factors help to determine how strongly people condemn mind upload. Both experimental manipulations in a laboratory and cross-sectional correlative online study designs were employed. The results showed that people who value purity norms and have higher sexual disgust sensitivity are more inclined to condemn mind upload. Furthermore, people who are anxious about death and condemn suicidal acts were more accepting of mind upload. Finally, higher science fiction literacy and/or hobbyism strongly predicted approval of mind upload. Several possible confounding factors were ruled out, including personality, values, individual tendencies towards rationality, and theory of mind capacities. Possible idiosyncrasies in the stimulus materials (whether consciousness is uploaded onto a computer, chimpanzee, artificial brain, or android; and whether the person’s body physically dies during the process) were ruled out. The core findings inform ongoing philosophical discussions on how mind upload could (or should) be used in the future, and imply that mind upload is a much more salient topic for the general population than previously thought.
Journal Article
Primate Visionary: Peter Dickinson’s Eva and the Environmental Uncanny
Peter Dickinson’s YA novel Eva is thematically concerned with the bioethics of the posthuman in an age of ecological catastrophe. Eva also in many ways exemplifies the new materialist challenge to species ontologies, not least in its affirmation of how transspecies neuroplasticity undoes ontological divisions between humans and apes and so destabilizes taxonomy and selfhood. But Eva also demonstrates, in its visionary placement of the human within the nonhuman and subsequent meditation upon the complexities of symbiogenetic form, that the most effective YA speculative fiction engaging ecological catastrophe and its impact on the adolescent body may have to do so by engaging an environmental uncanny whose “interventions” (Ghosh, 31) of the nonhuman confound conventional strategies of representation.
Journal Article
Selfies and Self-Fictions
Through what fictions do anthropologists become co-present in ‘the field’? And what happens when ‘the field’ becomes co-present in anthropologists’ lives? In this article, I reflexively contrast two experiences of fieldwork connectedness: first, the changes to my interactions with Bidayuh villagers in rural Borneo since 2003, and, second, my recent engagement with the social media-scape of orangutan conservation. Both examples shed light on the methodological and ethical questions about the self-fictions through which anthropologists create our presence in the field—and how those fields assert their presence beyond our research projects. Recent technological developments, I suggest, thus underscore fundamental questions of how to calibrate fieldwork relations and where to locate the boundaries and openings of the anthropological self—a process that we cannot entirely control.
Journal Article
The Absence of Animals in Kafka's Fiction
Although one might expect that a high aggregate number of named animal species in an author's works would code for an animal-centric theme, Franz Kafka's case proves that such a statistical inference is problematic, if not outright flawed. This essay offers an exception (or perhaps correction) to the main assumption of stylometrics, which maintains that style and content can be assessed by frequency counts. Kafka's writings on animals defy straightforward assumptions about how language conveys meaning.
Journal Article
Post-Colonialism and Sci-Fi as Pedagogy: Film as a Vehicle for Understanding
Post-Colonialism has proved to be challenging for students studying the Global South especially in the United States. Books like Edward Said's Orientalism have proved difficult to read. Bringing in Sci-Fi movies would assist students in their search for understanding. This article hopes to illustrate the Post-Colonial themes in three movies: Soylent Green, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, and Planet of the Apes. These movies discuss the process of colonisation and decolonisation: invasion, domination, exploitation, self-governance, and then revitalisation. The movie Planet of the Apes shows the process of colonialisation through dehumanisation. For instance, the character Taylor is given the name 'Bright Eyes, a name you give to a pet. Here, the colonizer alters the environment, culture, beliefs, and identity of the colonized through a process of dehumanisation. Similarly, in the movie Invasion of the Body Snatchers, humans must join the alien race as a way to advance themselves. This 'civilization process' is the justification for colonisation and leads to the destruction of earth's entire indigenous population by destroying their identity. Lastly, Soylent Green is about the recovery of self, exercising cultural revitalisation through ceremony. Specific scenes that display this is the sharing of a meal using ingredients from a past life as well as Sauls assisted suicide. Recalling the past in this manner helps to find, and then retain, an identity ostensibly lost to changes in power relations brought on by colonialisation. Thorn, the main character, then exposes the fact that soylent, the main food supply for the poor, is human meat. Hence, revitalisation and resistance are tied together, as working to recover a lost identity is a clear threat to the prevailing Eurocentric order. Thus, bringing in Sci-Fi movies might help facilitate the process of teaching Post-Colonial perspectives.
Journal Article