Chimpanzee Culture Wars: Rethinking Human Nature Alongside Japanese, European, and American Cultural Primatologists

"Do apes share with humans the capacity to acquire qualities not inherent in their nature?

Debates within the field of primatology over the last century keep coming back to this fundamental question, which compels us to reexamine our understanding of culture and of the nature-culture divide.

This book is an ethnography that examines both the modern history of this controversy and its contemporary manifestations in both Japanese and Euro-American primatology.

In so doing, it reveals the diversity of views on culture in the community of primatologists.

The Kyoto School of primatology first proposed - in the 1950s - that nonhuman primates possess culture.

Kyoto primatologists were ridiculed at the time by European and American sociocultural anthropologists and primatologists, who dismissed such views as anthropomorphic wish fulfilment.

Decades later, starting in the 1980s, Japanese cultural primatology was given a second look as Euro-Ameri