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Paper short abstract

True symmetry between humans and nonhumans cannot be built through collaborative patchwork. It requires a new research culture with dual training across the life and social sciences to create an epistemological/methodological lingua franca. Examples are based on fieldwork and the dual program PARP.

Paper long abstract

Multispecies approaches call for rethinking social research by including nonhuman actors. Yet, human participants remain the primary interpretive instrument regarding nonhumans. Based on long-term etho-ethnographic fieldwork with “the last talking apes” and the pedagogical experience of the newly founded Primate Anthrozoology Research Program (PARP), I argue that true symmetry between humans and nonhumans cannot be built through collaborative patchwork. It requires a new research culture with dual training across the life and social sciences. The social scientist must learn the methods that make nonhuman animals’ actions legible—acquiring enough life-sciences literacy to see, hear, and question what animals are already saying—not to eliminate disciplines, but to create an epistemological and methodological lingua franca spoken with different accents across fields. By keeping the life sciences at arm’s length, we fail to address concerns such as nonhuman politics, personhood, nature-cultures, and symbol use, leaving these questions largely to the life sciences to address empirically on their own (while not fully equipped with the conceptual apparatus required). We need more social scientists willing to meddle in the mud of numbers, experimental designs, field experiments, microanalysis of gestural communication, bioacoustics, eye-tracking technologies, artificial intelligence software…not to analyze discourse about these resources but to employ them in ethnographic work, adapting them and creating new methods when necessary. Do we need symmetry? As we face an unprecedented extinction crisis, who among us would not want to help lead the effort to fathom what animals think of us—and of the world we are leaving behind?