VISUAL STORIES ABOUT PRIMATES AND PRIMATOLOGY AS STORIES OF SOMETHING MORE

Mikhel Dmitry Victorovich

DOI: 10.23951/2312-7899-2021-3-116-139

Information About Author:

Dmitry Mikhel, Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration, Russian Federation. Institute of Social Science and Humanities Information of Russian Academy of Science, Russian Federation. World History of Russian Academy of Science, Russian Federation. E-mail: dmitrymikhel@mail.ru

The aim of the study is to analyze a series of visual stories characterizing the cultural experience of perception of primates and primatology in the Soviet Union in the 1930s and in the United States from 1963 to the present. The object of the study is illustrative materials for the book The Chimpanzee Child and the Human Child (1935) by Nadezhda Ladygina-Kots; photo and film materials of the mid-1930s depicting experiments with chimpanzees that were conducted in the laboratory of Academician Ivan Pavlov in Koltushy; photos and videos of Jane Goodall’s field research work in Gombe National Park, Tanzania, presented in the publications of “National Geographic”; a series of films about the Planet of the Apes created by the 20th Century Fox during 1968–1973. The article argues that visual stories about primates and primatology are always stories about something more because they are another type of text that unfolds according to how we see and feel it, how we experience it, and what we still know about the objects that are reflected in these images. This article discusses the following questions: What did these stories tell their contemporaries about? What can they tell us today? What else can we learn about through these visualizations? The article shows that the visual narrative, presented in the illustrations for the book by Ladygina-Kots, can be considered not only as another type of narrative about research work, but also as a story about the private life of a female scientist, who turned it into a field of scientific experiment. Images of chimpanzees participating in the experiments of the scientists of Academician Pavlov’s laboratory, presented in the issues of the Ogonyok magazine of 1934 and 1935 and in the popular science film Rosa and Rafael, can be perceived as a fragment of a visual narrative about the greatness of Soviet science and the Soviet way of life. Photos and videos of Jane Goodall’s work in the African forest, which were produced by National Geographic, are undoubtedly a story about the hidden dream of Western civilization about how to return to the primitive paradise, which has long been lost. The epic film Planet of the Apes, created by Arthur Jacobs and his team, is nothing more than an experience of visualizing the long-standing fears of American society preoccupied with racial conflicts and the uncertainty of its future. Visual stories about primates and primatology are always stories about what else can be seen over time.

Keywords: visual stories, primates, primatology, Nadezhda Ladygina-Kots, Academician Pavlov’s chimpanzees, Jane Goodall, National Geographic, Planet of the Apes

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Issue: 3, 2021

Series of issue: Issue 3

Rubric: ARTICLES

Pages: 116 — 139

Downloads: 726