Paper short abstract:

Drawing upon the life and work of a chimpanzee mamed Nim Chimpsky, this article discusses the the relations of humans and other species. While experiments with the sociality of chimpanzees are often misguided, it is argued, they usually bring home important points about ourselves and our relations to other species.

Paper long abstract:

Chimpanzees seem to occupy a special position in recent writings on the nature-society divide, as a liminal species at the main border of modernist discourse. Partly drawing upon the life and work of Nim Chimpsky (1973-2000), a chimpanzee raised in experimental and familial settings in the US in order to test hypotheses about innate and acquired mental capacities, especially language, this article discusses the history of comparisons of chimpanzees and people and, more broadly, the relations of humans and other species. If one takes Chimpsky's near-namesake Noam Chomsky seriously, assuming that language as we know it rests on an innate language "device", one is inclined to ask what such a device consists of, how it developed, and what might be learned through comparisons of humans, other primates, and other "lower" species, an issue only recently addressed by Chomsky himself (see Hauser, Chomsky, and Fitch 2002). I shall argue that academic debates about language and mind generated by Chimpsky, other chimpanzees, and their human and non-human collaborators reflect different understandings of the nature-society divide and what used to be called the "animal kingdom." While experiments with the language and sociality of chimpanzees and other species are often non-conclusive and sometimes misguided, they usually bring home important points about ourselves and our relations to other species.