Abstract
The driving force behind the mixed-methods ethnoprimatological endeavor is to effectively conserve nonhuman primates. In this article, I argue that ethnoprimatological research can meet this goal only by discarding the purely science views of conservation that dominate the current literature. By considering more than local ecological perceptions, their ideological agendas, and their levels of power via a political ecology framework, ethnoprimatologists can simultaneously socialize the ecosystems we study and contribute our ethological skills to advance traditionally humanist disciplines’ increased attention to a wider field of agents and structures that matter. I support these arguments through an examination of farmer–green monkey (Chlorocebus sabaeus) relations in St. Kitts. Kittitian farmers’ narrative revealed three scales that collectively construct what is locally known as “the monkey problem:” increased rates of local contact between farmers and monkeys on farms, contestations over the future of St. Kitts’ land, and global debates over appropriate strategies to manage the monkey population. I show that although “the monkey problem” in St. Kitts does not involve an endangered or threatened species, my analysis of this construct has implications for primate populations that are threatened. This is because the root cause of this “problem”—the globalized discourse of nature conservation overpowering and problematizing local views about people–animal interactions—characterizes so many of the locales home to primates of conservation concern.
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Acknowledgments
I am grateful to the University Wisconsin–Milwaukee for the Chancellor’s Golda Meir Library Scholar Award and Dissertation Fellowship, which funded a portion of this work. Thank you to Dr. Erin Riley and Dr. Sindhu Radakrisha for inviting me to participate in this special issue and the “Expanded Ecologies: Theoretical and Methodological Advancements in the Study of the Human–Nonhuman Primate Interface” session at the 2016 joint meeting of the International Primatological Society and the American Society of Primatologists. I want to thank my Ph.D. adviser, Dr. Trudy R. Turner, for her life-changing suggestion that I do my doctoral research in St. Kitts and for her mentorship over the last 13 years. I would also like to thank the St. Kitts Biomedical Research Foundation and RxGen for institutional support during my early work on St. Kitts and for continued support and collaboration. Collecting these data would have been impossible without the support of the St. Kitts government, specifically the Ministry of Agriculture, Department of Agriculture, the Department of Physical Planning and Environment within the Ministry of Sustainable Development, and the National Archives. I am thankful to each and every member of these organizations for their contributions to and support of this project, but must single out the help I received from Dr. Timothy Harris, Mr. Eugene Hamilton, Dr. Hermia Morton-Anthony, Mr. Gene Knight, Mr. Ashton Stanley, Mr. Alistair Edwards, Ms. Natasha Daniel, Mr. Thomas Jackson, Mr. Melvin James, Mr. Randolph Edmeade, Mr. Eduardo Mattenet, and Mrs. Victoria O’Flaherty. Within the Department of Agriculture, I am especially grateful to my friends Kevin Jeffers and Mark Archibald, who accompanied me every day in the field and who taught me so much about St. Kitts. I want to also thank all of the extension officers within the St. Kitts Department of Agriculture, specifically Nigel Walters, Mark Adams, Oswald Brown, Ronnie Thomas, Stuart Versailles, Ian Chapman, and Lionel Steevens. Finally, former Permanent Secretary of Agriculture, Mr. William F. Dore, was an incredible resource regarding St. Kitts’ agriculture. I must also thank my field assistants, Lindsay Mahovetz, Elizabeth Crabtree, Caitlin Jean Hannah, and Roland Eve, for their friendship and tireless work collecting crop loss data with me in the field, and two of St. Kitts’ best monkey trappers, Gilbert “Sully” Gordon and Joseph Cabey, for their help and insights regarding monkey behaviors. Finally, I would like to thank the mentors and colleagues who have contributed valuable input on material contained in this article: Dr. Carolyn Jost Robinson, Dr. Erin P. Riley, Dr. Agustin Fuentes, Dr. Roberta Palmour, Dr. Susan Kenyon, Andrea Eller, Dr. Jackie Eller, Dr. Aileen Mill, Dr. Pete Robertson, Dr. Steven Rushton, Dr. Tracie McKinney, Dr. Nin Cameron-Smith, and Dr. Michael Muehlenbein.
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Dore, K.M. Ethnoprimatology without Conservation: The Political Ecology of Farmer–Green Monkey (Chlorocebus sabaeus) Relations in St. Kitts, West Indies. Int J Primatol 39, 918–944 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10764-018-0043-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10764-018-0043-9