Introduction

Despite a fundamental commitment to the comparative cross-cultural approach, many anthropologists (and other social scientists) have long resisted, both implicitly and explicitly, the extension of a cross-cultural to a cross-species framework. No working anthropologist today, whether biological or cultural, will deny that this resistance exists, whether or not they themselves feel it. What does the study of nonhuman primates – prosimians, monkeys, and apes – have to do with anthropology anyway? This is a question that often lurks just beneath the surface in many departments where biological anthropologists (specifically primatologists) compete for resources with social and cultural anthropologists. Primatologists in anthropology departments grow accustomed, early in their careers, to being asked to relate their material to humans, and to explain how and why they belong in an anthropology department. Many become resentful of this sentiment and refuse to defend their right to membership in the discipline, taking the position that they are interested in nonhuman primates in their own right, as an end in itself. This is valid and understandable. Just as a Hadza researcher would tire of being asked to relate her findings to the!Kung, and a baboon researcher would tire of being asked to relate his findings to chimpanzees, those who study any of the 250 species of nonhuman primates tire of being asked to relate their findings to one other species: Homo sapiens.