Rachel Mayeri

Project Series 39: Rachel Mayeri Home Page Introduction:Cinema as Primatology | Essay by Doug Harvey | Interview with Deborah Forster

Project Series 39: Rachel Mayeri
October 31- December 20, 2009

	Baboons as Friends, 2008 Video Still

Interview with Deborah Forster
by Rachel Mayeri

Deborah Forster has been involved in field research of baboons in Kenya, at a research site directed by Shirley Strum (a professor of biological anthropology at UCSD), since 1989. In 2000, short of completing her Ph.D. in Cognitive Science at UCSD on baboon social dynamics and cognition, she began research consulting for Nissan Design America. Since 2006 Forster has continued to pursue ethnographic research for design in the context of architecture education, and in architecture-as-community activism with Teddy Cruz. She consults simultaneously in several other projects ranging from urban ecology to human cognitive development.

Deborah has collaborated with me on many levels of the Primate Cinema project. Thoroughly involved in Baboons as Friends, she shot the footage of baboons and explains the dynamics in the narration. I invited her to co-teach the first workshop on How to Act like an Animal. Through her, I’ve learned a lot about the current state of the fields of primatology and cognitive science, critiques of scientific practices in science studies, some practical information about animals, and about play.


Rachel Mayeri: When we first met I was fascinated by the cross pollination you were making between your work as a consultant at a car design company and your study of the group dynamics of baboons. How did you use your baboon research for your work with designers?

Deborah Forster: I deliberately connect with the baboon-world as a pedagogical tool. When the automotive design studio wanted to reconsider what “social space” means in a car, I spent an afternoon videotaping a group of youngsters we sponsored hanging out at a local video arcade. I filmed “nature documentary” style with no interaction or interviewing on my part. Later I showed my baboon field footage from Kenya – “Social Dynamics 101” – followed with scenes from the video arcade, and asked the designers: “Is the video arcade designed to respond to the needs of human primates?” Initially skeptical of my motives in showing them footage of baboon sex and politics, they had an aha moment, because, when exposed to the fluidity of a baboon troop eeking out their complex life on the savannah, it was painfully obvious that the video arcade was inadequate. Like many public spaces too often segregated by age and by activity – homogenously conceived to accommodate no one but the average video arcade visitor –
the game stations were all the same size, confronting little kids, and their parents, with challenging adjustments. Caretakers who came with young kids old enough to roam freely had nowhere to sit or anything to accommodate their adult needs. Seeing primate groups in their natural habitat where things are far from idyllic, and yet life is organized so that it accommodates the varied needs and hybrid learning conditions for everyone, was an experience that stayed in the minds of these designers long after that design project ended.

RM: In our conversations about primatology over the last eight years, I am often in a mindset like those designers you describe: we get to look at human culture with new eyes. Which seems a lot like what I like art to do – to defamiliarize the world around us. How do you know when it’s scientifically valid to make such cross-species comparisons?

DF: I don’t think cross-species comparisons are ever scientifically valid unless you explicitly do comparative research, as in specifically design a study that directly compares species. I found that, in non-scientific contexts, juxtaposing imagery of two species is often provocative enough, and a sufficient point of departure, for some good learning and creative insight to take place. Your work is exemplary. When you decide to show the humans side by side with baboon or chimp footage, you create juxtapositions that make people curious about the species they know least, or they see the familiar human footage in a new light. I must say, that after discovering the fun to be had with that sort of research and questioning, I am more motivated to find opportunities to bring similar freshness back into the science I do. Or maybe I’ve just become aware of it in a different way.

RM: Could you briefly explain your particular approach to primatology, having been trained in cognitive science?

DF: I ask where and how can we “see” cognition in social behavior. For research on nonhuman primates, where language and material culture are largely absent, it’s not a trivial task, especially if you confine cognition to what happens only inside the head. I like to think of human language as cognition “leaking” out of the skull, and of knowledge as extending out to, or being offloaded onto, the world (books, material artifacts, etc.). Infants are immersed in a language world around and outside of them long before it ever emerges from inside as speech, so the notion of “distributed cognition” begins to look at cognitive systems that are inclusive of individuals and the structures and processes that link between and across them. Just the way a bar scene both emerges from and constrains the behavior of individuals, so do other social “situations,” and I try to identify such scenes and scenarios in the baboons’ lives.

One situation I focus on is an event that takes place as part of baboon sexual dynamics. A sexually receptive female forms a consort with a male, who tries to monopolize access to her in the face of other interested troop males. The consort pair and the follower males form a consort “party,” and the dynamics can get pretty intense as individuals challenge or form coalitions or incite others to fight – going through recognizable phases or “system states.” Invariably, there’s a switch in male partners (a consort “turnover,” or CTO), often several times a day.

If I tried to explain what is going on by guessing and tracking the agenda of each individual, it quickly becomes intractable. If, instead, I get to know how this CTO system typically works (like knowing that in a restaurant there’s always a chef, a waiter, a menu, people order food, etc.) I can ask how each of the individuals participates in the system, and I can look at different systems to see how one feature makes a difference (for example, what happens in a CTO when the current male partner is a new immigrant to the troop? Like asking what happens in a restaurant when there’s a new waiter that is not familiar with the habits of the regular patrons).

Capturing the fast-paced dynamics on video makes it possible to examine the details of behavior that are often missed by the naked eye. The sophisticated monitoring and the elegant negotiation of body and gaze revealed in repeated viewing and slow motion, begins to address the way system level “states” are maintained or disrupted through the coordinated action of the participants.

As productive as this perspective is for understanding the nature and development of social skills in baboons, I personally also find the intricacies of this baboon soap opera emotionally satisfying and I usually have a running commentary of what individuals might be thinking or scheming. I refrain from assuming or attributing these internal mental states during data analysis, and I can often challenge these assumptions with the findings from the systems approach I use.

I especially enjoy the way (human) others are captivated by the individual baboons that obviously lead rich mental lives full of idiosyncratic meaning making. I like that I can leave all the acting out of my fantasies regarding what goes on inside baboon heads to my collaborations with you, and to the rich interpretations of the human actors and collaborators you have introduced me to. Which is probably why I find these projects so satisfying!

RM: Sometimes I feel like a bonobo in a chimpanzee world. Is there a particular primate that you identify with?

DF: My sisters tell me that when I was a toddler they’d get a kick out of opening up a book we had at home to a line drawing of a young chimpanzee (I have a vivid memory of it being on the bottom left-hand side of the page) because, whenever they did, according to them, I would get very excited and point to the drawing and yell: “Me! Me! ME!!!”