Gorillas as Others
Gorillas were discovered by the Western world somewhat later than the other great apes. Chimpanzees and subsequently also orang-utans had been arriving in Europe on merchant ships since the 17th century. Gorillas became part of the then prevailing image of the great apes which, with some exceptions, was quite negative: lustful, brutish, and aggressive. Their huge size and the - from the human point of view - aggressive nature of encounters in the wild contributed to this image. These were exactly the same sort of characteristics that were attributed time and again to non-Caucasian "races". Emmanuel Frémiet's bronze statue of a gorilla snatching an African female, displayed at the 1859 Salon de Paris, sums up the stereotype pretty well (see below).
This statue also plays upon the Beauty-and-the-Beast theme, already
present in the ancient theme of sylvan satyrs abducting shepherdesses,
which resurfaces on many occasions in the European imagination. The gorilla
stereotype is in tune with the character of Caliban in William Shakespeare's
The Tempest (1611). Caliban, a wild native of the tropical island
upon which Europeans are shipwrecked, is a quintessential bestial European
Other, an avatar and condensation of earlier figures such as the Plinian
Races and the Wild Man. It is an ambiguous being, a monster, as the text
states some 40 times, "a thing most brutish", a "thing
of darkness", "as disproportioned in his manners [as] in his
shape". Caliban, the Beast, lusts after the young and attractive
Miranda, the Beauty, and is enslaved by her father, the prince and scholar-magician
Prospero, a paragon of civilized European humanness.
The interaction of Anne Darrow and an apish monster in Merian Cooper's
1933 film King Kong or in Peter Jackson's 2005 remake fits in this
tradition. Here however, the monster's nature is more complex, more ambiguous;
it has positive aspects as well. In addition, Jackson refers extensively
to the history of human indifference to and exploitation of the apes,
and plays with traditional gender stereotypes. This King Kong is unlike
the monstrous aliens confronted by an attractive female in Ridley Scott's
film Alien (1979) and its sequels, and closer to the positive depiction
of the chimpanzee in Peter Høeg's brilliant 1996 morality tale
The Woman and the Ape.
A colonial propaganda film made in the 1950s in the Belgian Congo on behalf
of the Belgian government was still typical of the traditional negative
attitude towards apes. It circulated widely in Belgian cinemas, programmed
on Sunday afternoons for families with children. The footage shows in
great and, by present-day standards, shocking detail how scientists of
the Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences shoot and kill an adult
female gorilla carrying young. Subsequently, the body is skinned and washed
in a nearby stream, with the distressed youngster sitting next to it.
The adult's skeleton, skin and other body parts were collected for scientific
study and conservation, while the live young gorilla was sent to the Antwerp
Zoo.
Just a decade later, such a cruel scene had come to be unthinkable as
suitable for Western families with children. The publicity around field
studies of and language studies with great apes since the 1960s brought
about significant changes in the way Westerners felt about them. A forceful
new icon was the picture of a young Jane Goodall and an equally young
chimpanzee reaching their fingers to one another, as portrayed in a 1967
issue of National Geographic. This was reinforced by the photos and film
of Dian Fossey, overwhelmed with emotion as the wild gorilla Digit chooses
to sit beside her and examine her notebook and pen - an interaction so
sensitively recreated in the film Gorillas in the Mist. Likewise,
psychologist Penny Patterson's sign language research and friendship with
female gorilla Koko provided another, well-publicized challenge to traditional
stereotypes. Both filmmaker Jackson and fiction writer Høeg are
trying to come to terms with such positive appreciations against the background
of relentless oppression and exploitation by humans.
Through the ages, the Caliban character has been portrayed as a brute
primitive, a noble savage, the missing link, an unemancipated slave, a
colonial native, and a postcolonial citizen. The chimpanzee appears as
a noble Caliban in Jane Goodall's and Dale Peterson's book Visions
of Caliban: On Chimpanzees and People (1993) - a far cry from the
ferocious orang-utan in Edgar Allan Poe's The Murders in the Rue Morgue
(1841). Early hominins too started to appear in illustrations and museum
dioramas as peaceful human-like beings in idyllic natural settings, although
pictures of monstrous brutes wielding clubs persist to some degree, as
did less positive views of apes, especially baboons.
For more on this subject, see R. Corbey: The Metaphysics of Apes: Negotiating the Animal-Human Boundary. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press
Raymond Corbey
Other contributions:
James Byamukama and Stephen Asuma
Prof. Dr. Raymond Corbey is a philosopher
and anthropologist who is connected to the Department of Philosophy of
Tilburg University and the Department of Archaeology of Leiden University,
Netherlands. Much of his research is on human-animal relationships and
views of animals, especially in philosophy.