Monkey Business & Development

When I first heard of GW's Cotlow grant program, I thought, I have to apply. I guess even then I had the idea of possibly aspiring to get my PhD and thought this was a natural step: Get a small-scale grant, do something of my own creation; a solid first step.

I felt the pressure as I was supported by the university's Anthropology department on a fellowship. This meant that my tuition was paid for and I was given a monthly stipend. I worked, of course, for the department as a teaching assistant and I loved it. For four semesters, I was a graduate teaching assistant for a large undergraduate course, Introduction to Sociocultural Anthropology.

As I was funded by the department (which meant that they believed in my abilities as there were only three other TAs similarly supported by the department), I felt I needed to nail the Cotlow. But, the question nagged at me, what to study? Throughout my academic training, sometimes I’ve been at a loss in terms of what to research and write about. It’s funny: I feel I have so many ideas but sometimes, especially when the pressure’s on, they frustratingly don’t surface but instead remain scattered in the gray matter of my brain.

The Cotlow was no different. As the deadlines approached, I went to see the professor in charge of the program, the very same professor I TA'ed for. Now, I know what you’re thinking, “do I detect the pungent scent of a little favoritism at work here?” And, no, I can answer back honestly and instantaneously. The Cotlow program was administered by the professor with whom I worked closely but there was also a committee of professors who actually sat down together, looked over the students’ proposals, and decided on who was to get what to do which sort of anthropological investigation.

One fine early winter afternoon I sat with my professor in her office, housed, as it was in one of the three old townhouses the department occupied on G Street. Her office was lucky enough to have the front window, looking out onto G Street. It was one of those gray-white days when the sun is so slight, it’s hard to discern if it’s early morning or mid-day.

We sat down, amidst her African and Asian brica braca, and discussed what would be best for me to research and propose to study. At this time, I had been volunteering for almost two years as an exhibit interpreter at the Smithsonian National Zoo. As an exhibit interpreter at the Great Ape House, I greeted visitors and explained a bit about the natural history of gorillas, orang utans, lemurs, and gibbons.

The zoo was home to lowland mountain gorillas: Mopie and Kigali, Mandara and tiny Kojo, Baraka and Kwame. Of the orangs, however, Bonnie was my favorite. She was a little chubby and was born in 1976 like yours truly. She seemed to key into visitors; her keeper once told me that she thought Bonnie had a preference for red-headed humans. Bonnie often sauntered about her enclosure like a regular old human biped, waddling, a little choppy but with an idiosyncratic rhythm and a certain pride in her movements.

Through this experience, I learned a lot about great apes, especially their precarious status in the natural world, in their home environments in the mountains of Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo and, for the orangs, in Southeast Asia, Indonesia, Sumatra and Borneo.

At the zoo, I interacted with a varied swath of people: kids, the elderly, the overeducated, the unlettered. Some people would challenge me on evolution, belief in god(s), while others would ask who in a fantasy ultimate-fighting contest between a gorilla and a lion would win such an absurd contest. Other folks, upon seeing the orangs, would mention some Clint Eastwood movie I haven’t seen in which he wrestles an orang.

Others would call the gorillas “monkeys” which, I have to admit, made my skin crawl. I did my best, however, to be polite and informative and to tailor the information I provided to the people with whom I was speaking. Teens seemed to be the most disturbed by seeing the animals in what can be pretty grim, concrete enclosures. Perhaps they saw something of the confinement they themselves were fighting in the animals’ situation.

A unique feature of the zoo is its O Line, a series of towers connected by wires over which the orangs travel from the Great Ape House to the Think Tank, another zoo building in which they're sometimes housed. What’s amazing about the O Line is that it cuts across the zoo, even the zoo’s main visitor thoroughfare, Olmstead Walk, right over the heads of the visitors. The orangs are natural climbers in their home environments. For them, traveling the O Line is truly child’s play.

One of the jobs of the volunteers, however, is to monitor the orangs when they’re out on the O Line. No, not to be sure they don’t fall (which they won’t if they’re healthy and spry) but to be sure that if they do some “business” while out on the line (which inevitably happens because, after all, if you’ve gotta go, you’ve gotta go), the “business” doesn’t plummet down onto the heads of the visitors below, mouth agape in amazement. Crowd control can be tough at times.

There’s so much to tell about the primates. But I mentioned them as I wanted to explain my ethnographic project on flamenco of all things. Back on course, getting back on course. Back to that drab mid-winter afternoon in my professor's office: She asked me perkily, “So, what do you want to do your Cotlow on?” I had thought about this, obviously, and wanted to study orang utans in Sumatra and Borneo, particularly the “eco” tourism trade and how such an industry (and the tourists it brings with it) affects the animals, many of them in the process of being “rehabilitated” to the wild after being trafficked by the illicit pet trade that permeates many pockets of the world.

Quite an ambitious project for a grant program that typically doles out less than $2,000 a pop, my professor commented. That’s a cool idea but way too ambitious. What do I know about Indonesia? Had I ever been there? Do I speak the language? How much does it cost just to fly there? It was too much. What about doing a similar project but studying mountain gorillas in Rwanda or Uganda or Burundi or DRC? Nope, similarly too complicated, too involved, and too damn expensive. I was at a loss. I wanted to study these animals and still do. I guess my interest in primates was piqued as a child. How can we not look at them and see so much of ourselves gazing back? I wanted to be like Jane Goodall. Why couldn’t I have met Louis Leakey all of those many years ago and inspired him to advocate (and garner funding) on my behalf? Why couldn’t I be the next Birute Gladikas, living amongst and protecting Asia’s only great ape, the orang? Don’t really want to be like Dian Fossey, of course, as she was brutally murdered by apparently we still don’t know who for her work protecting the mountain gorillas. Remember Digit?

Fossey was incredibly close to Digit, a male silverback. He was found butchered on New Year’s Day 1978 with his head, heart, hands, and feet chopped off and missing. Fossey once wrote to L. Leakey of Digit and other gorillas in his troupe: "I just about burst open with happiness every time I get within 1 or 2 feet of them." Fossey and Digit would sit close; he would embrace her. They passed many hours together. After his murder, Fossey dangerously transformed herself from scientist to ardent conservationist. Some say (and I might agree) that she strayed too far from the professional and the scientific (the objective) and her connections with the gorillas of the Virunga volcanoes became too deeply personal.

She loved the gorillas. They were her family. After Digit and another male named Uncle Bert were murdered by poachers, she raised a cash bounty on the poachers’ heads. Dian herself was found dead at Karisoe on December 26, 1985.

But a Goodall or Gladikas I haven’t become. That’s okay, I guess. I thought I could get closer to what they do without being a primatologist myself by studying how conserving such endangered animals can help them while, simultaneously, not hinder an area’s (nor the people who live there) development.

Concentrating on international development while in graduate school, I researched how reserves such as Parc de Volcans, straddling Uganda, Rwanda, and DRC, is not an inherent good. The animal lover and nascent conservationist within me disagrees with my critical/skeptical self in that despite how such a park most probably benefits the animals within it, it does not help the humans beyond (and restricted by) its borders. Regarding many such parks, their boundaries and restrictions hamper the development of the people who live near it—they can’t enter the forest to gather wood or hunt; they can’t utilize its treasure trove of natural resources. Animal conservationists would say “good, that’s how it should be” but in my mind, prioritizing gorillas’ lives over those of humans seems like a zero-sum game.

Do we have to choose between improving the lives of humans and protecting gorillas’ natural habitat and their very lives? Is gorillas’ extinction inevitable? In the 50 years? Or the next century? know, I usually consider myself an optimist but I think their extinction in the wild is a foregone conclusion. Why? Why can’t we intervene and protect them? Why can’t we create reserves in which they can live the lives they’re meant to have? Why can’t we keep the people who need access to the preserves’ trees and natural resources out?

But those people are also just trying to survive. Those people are also just clinging to fraying threads. They’re on the margins and they’re suffering. It’s easy for us in the Western, privileged, obese industrialized worlds of the United States and Europe and Canada to want to protect the gorillas (and we should) but we can’t forget about the people who are their neighbors. Let’s not demonize those who sneak into the forest and pilfer lumber. I bet, if those people had the luxuries and excesses and choices we have, they won’t do what they’re doing either.

That’s what ecotourism might offer. If the local people, those closest to the gorillas, see that foreigners come to see the gorillas and that they happily pay a fat U.S. dollar or Euro (and then some) to do so, they will do their damnedest to protect them. One of a plethora of problems, however, in this scenario, of course, is that a sickening percentage of the revenue generated by ecotourism doesn’t go or get to the local people. It goes to big airline conglomerates and to the U.S.- or European-based travel companies and booking agencies that plan and execute such “adventures.”

I’d love to be involved in a multinational and multilateral development project in the volcanic mountains of Africa or the steamy jungles of Borneo and Sumatra that changes the equation and pays dividends to the local people, something that’s sustainable and in which the local people are invested. Gorillas and orangs are for us all to enjoy. They’re part of nature’s marvels and mystery. Let’s pay those closest to them to protect them, not someone in a cubicle in London or downtown DC. This all takes a lot of coordination. Green/eco/sustainable tourism is a big business and a rapidly emerging trend. My initial Cotlow idea was to explore it, to experience it firsthand, and see where it works and doesn’t and why.

I had read some things about what it’s like to go on a gorilla trek. Many of the parks, recognizing that the animals are their best resource, develop and enforce a series of regulations in terms of who can visit them and how best and least intrusively to go about it. For example, the groups of paying foreigners who want to see the gorillas are kept small in number. If anyone is sick, they’re not allowed to enter the forest as many diseases that pester humans readily jump from us to our third-closest relatives (chimps and bonobos being our second-closest relatives). The visitors are only allowed within so many feet of the gorillas. While many of the groups of gorillas visited by the groups of tourists are acclimated to humans, they are still wild animals and a male silverback will not hesitate to charge if he feels his harem and offspring are threatened by the humans.

The fees to see the gorillas in the mist are as steep as the mountains the coveted animals inhabit, as they should be. The visit is short, time-wise. Going to see the gorillas in their natural habitat is a very pricey venture. That’s good. People will pay. Law of supply and demand. The sad thing in this transaction, however, is that the local people who are most essential to being part of this complicated arrangement can never afford the fees to go and see the gorillas. How can a person feel invested and want to protect a marvelous thing they haven’t yet seen first-hand because they can’t afford it? Conservation in the abstract is just that, inherently tenuous and short-lived.