Primate Tales: Using Literature to Understand Changes in Human–Primate Relations

Primate Tales: Using Literature to Understand Changes in Human–Primate Relations Primate species, by and large, are culturally significant icons across their habitat. One of the more prominent expressions of this lies in the revered status of macaques and langurs in South and Southeast Asia, largely because of their religious status in Hinduism. People’s belief in these species’ sanctity often serves to protect them from physical harm or retaliation in conflict situations and thus strongly mediates their conservation. The nature of this interface has changed over the years of mutual interactions between the two groups. Trends in literature are useful markers of sociocultural developments in human life and reflect changes in human views with respect to the world around them. I investigated Tamil language poetical works from southern India to analyze people’s attitudes toward primates and changes in their views of primates over time. My findings suggest that sacredness was not a defining characteristic of human–primate relations in ancient times. The deification of monkeys occurred later and was largely driven by the growing popularity of Ramayana, the Hindu epic. The growing importance of religion in the daily lives of people and increasing urbanization subsequently led to the peripheralization of monkeys in people’s lives and narratives. Monkeys, once considered coinhabitants of a shared landscape, slowly began to be seen as animals with some human-like qualities that represent wild nature. The literary lens is thus a useful tool to map and understand changes in human perceptions of primate species over time and can be a powerful method in ethnoprimatology. http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png International Journal of Primatology Springer Journals

Primate Tales: Using Literature to Understand Changes in Human–Primate Relations

17 pages
Read Article

Loading next page...
 
/lp/springer_journal/primate-tales-using-literature-to-understand-changes-in-human-primate-NyL5H3EcB0
Publisher
Springer Journals
Copyright
Copyright © 2018 by Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature
Subject
Life Sciences; Evolutionary Biology; Zoology; Animal Genetics and Genomics; Anthropology; Animal Ecology; Human Genetics
ISSN
0164-0291
eISSN
1573-8604
D.O.I.
10.1007/s10764-018-0035-9
Publisher site
See Article on Publisher Site

Abstract

Primate species, by and large, are culturally significant icons across their habitat. One of the more prominent expressions of this lies in the revered status of macaques and langurs in South and Southeast Asia, largely because of their religious status in Hinduism. People’s belief in these species’ sanctity often serves to protect them from physical harm or retaliation in conflict situations and thus strongly mediates their conservation. The nature of this interface has changed over the years of mutual interactions between the two groups. Trends in literature are useful markers of sociocultural developments in human life and reflect changes in human views with respect to the world around them. I investigated Tamil language poetical works from southern India to analyze people’s attitudes toward primates and changes in their views of primates over time. My findings suggest that sacredness was not a defining characteristic of human–primate relations in ancient times. The deification of monkeys occurred later and was largely driven by the growing popularity of Ramayana, the Hindu epic. The growing importance of religion in the daily lives of people and increasing urbanization subsequently led to the peripheralization of monkeys in people’s lives and narratives. Monkeys, once considered coinhabitants of a shared landscape, slowly began to be seen as animals with some human-like qualities that represent wild nature. The literary lens is thus a useful tool to map and understand changes in human perceptions of primate species over time and can be a powerful method in ethnoprimatology.

Journal

International Journal of Primatology – Springer Journals

Published: Jun 4, 2018

References

  • Jahangir: The naturalist
    Alvi, MA; Rahman, A
  • The monkey is not always a God: Attitudinal differences toward crop-raiding macaques and why it matters for conflict mitigation
    Anand, Shaurabh; Binoy, Vilakkathala Vijayan; Radhakrishna, Sindhu
  • Role of local culture, religion, and human attitudes in the conservation of sacred populations of a threatened ‘pest’species
    Baker, LR; Olubode, OS; Tanimola, AA; Garshelis, DL
  • Capuchin Monkeys ( Cebus capucinus) and the Ancient Maya
    Baker, Mary
  • Exploring the “critical” in critical content analysis of children’s literature
    Beach, R; Enciso, P; Harste, J; Jenkins, C; Raina, S
  • Szymborska’s two monkeys: The stammering poet and the chain of signs
    Blazina, J
  • The metaphysics of apes: Negotiating the animal–human boundary
    Corbey, R
  • Kinship with monkeys: The Guajá foragers of eastern Amazonia
    Cormier, LA
  • Songs of experience: The poetics of Tamil devotion
    Cutler, N
  • Ethnoprimatology and the anthropology of the human–primate interface
    Fuentes, A
  • The ethnoprimatological approach in primatology
    Fuentes, A; Hockings, KJ
  • Commensalism and conflict: The primate–human interface
    Fuentes, A; Southern, M; Suaryan, KG
  • Biological and cultural anthropology of a changing tropical forest: A fruitful collaboration across subfields
    Hardin, R; Remis, MJ
  • Poets and primates: Wang Yanshou’s poem on the macaque
    Harper, D
  • The rapids of a great river: The Penguin book of Tamil poetry
  • Madras, Mysore and the south of India or a personal narrative of a mission to those countries: From MDCCCXX to MDCCXXVIII
    Hoole, E
  • Apes and ape lore, in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance
    Janson, HW
  • The First International Whale Shark Conference: Promoting international collaboration in whale shark conservation, science and management. Conference overview, abstracts and supplementary proceedings
    Joshi, D; Talwar, V; Gandhi, R; Mookerjee, A
  • Local people’s perceptions of crop damage by common langurs (Semnopithecus entellus) and human–langur conflict in Keshabpur of Bangladesh
    Khatun, UH; Ahsan, MF; Røskaft, E
  • Identification of morphological variation in the humeri of Bornean primates and its application to zooarchaeology
    Ki-Kydd, K; Piper, PJ
  • Content analysis: An introduction to its methodology
    Krippendorff, K
  • Monkey in the middle: The status of Hanuman in popular Hinduism
    Lutgendorf, P
  • Ethnoprimatology: Critical interdisciplinarity and multispecies approaches in anthropology
    Malone, N; Wade, AH; Fuentes, A; Riley, EP; Remis, M; Robinson, CJ
  • Simian narratives at the intersection of science and literature
    Medeiros, P
  • Social issues and concerns in biodiversity conservation: Experiences from wildlife protected areas in India
    Mishra, BK; Badola, R; Bhardwaj, AK
  • Thiruk Kutralak Kuravanci of Thirikuuda Rassappak Kavirayar
    Mudaliyar, PCP
  • Poems of Subramania Bharati
    Nandakumar, P
  • The monkey as mirror: Symbolic transformations in Japanese history and ritual
    Ohnuki-Tierney, E
  • The natural place to begin: The ethnoprimatology of the Waorani
    Papworth, S; Milner-Gulland, EJ; Slocombe, K
  • Poems to Śiva: The hymns of the Tamil saints
    Peterson, IV
  • The evolution of the Kuravañci dance drama in Tamil Nadu: Negotiating the ‘folk’and the ‘classical’in the Bhārata Nātyam Canon
    Peterson, IV
  • Tamil geographies: Cultural constructions of space and place in South India
    Peterson, IV
  • Macaques and the ritual production of sacredness among Balinese transmigrants in South Sulawesi, Indonesia
    Peterson, JV; Riley, EP; Oka, NP
  • History of Tamil language and literature
    Pillai, SV
  • The macaque connection
    Radhakrishna, S
  • The international encyclopedia of primatology
    Radhakrishna, S
  • Modes of bhakti in Tamil devotional literature
    Radhakrishnan, R; Rajagopalan, N
  • Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde: The strange case of human–macaque interactions in India
    Radhakrishna, S; Sinha, A
  • Poems of love and war: From the eight anthologies and the ten long poems of classical Tamil
    Ramanujan, AK
  • Essays on Gupta culture
    Ramanujan, AK; Cutler, N
  • Historical dictionary of the Tamils
    Ramaswamy, V
  • Revisiting monkeys on pots: A contextual consideration of primate imagery on classic lowland Maya pottery
    Rice, PR; South, KE
  • A god becomes a pest? Human–rhesus macaque interactions in Himachal Pradesh, northern India
    Saraswat, R; Sinha, A; Radhakrishna, S
  • Tamil love poetry: The five hundred short poems of the Ainkurunuru, an early third century anthology
    Selby, MA
  • Tamil: A biography
    Shulman, D
  • Barriers to a blissful life and ways to overcome them according to Siddhars. Journal of Indian Culture and
    Sivapalan, G
  • Primates face to face: Conservation implications of human–nonhuman primate interconnections
    Sprague, DS
  • Circulation and the historical geography of Tamil country
    Stein, B
  • K’U: The divine monkey
    Stross, B
  • The Kural
    Sundaram, PS
  • The tale of “The bride and the monkey”: Female insatiability, male impotence, and simian virility in Indian literature
    Tull, HW
  • The treatment of nature in Sangam literature
    Varadarajan, M
  • Bharati Padaipugal
  • Hunting primates and managing forests: The case of Iban forest farmers in Indonesian Borneo
    Wadley, RL; Colfer, CJP; Hood, IG
  • The new physical anthropology
    Washburn, SL
  • The promise of primatology
    Washburn, SL
  • Content analysis: A flexible methodology
    White, M; Marsh, E
  • Hanumān: The power-dispensing monkey in North Indian folk religion
    Wolcott, LT
  • Primates in perspective
    Wolfe, L; Fuentes, A
  • Shrines, shamanism, and love poetry: Elements in the emergence of popular Tamil Bhakti
    Yocum, GE
  • Good gibbons and evil macaques: A historical review on cognitive features of non-human primates in Chinese traditional culture
    Zhang, P
  • The smile of Murugan: On the Tamil literature of South India
    Zvelebil, K
  • Tamil literature
    Zvelebil, K
  • Companion studies to the history of Tamil literature
    Zvelebil, K

You’re reading a free preview. Subscribe to read the entire article.

Try 2 weeks free now

DeepDyve is your
personal research library

It’s your single place to instantly
discover and read the research
that matters to you.

Enjoy affordable access to
over 18 million articles from more than
15,000 peer-reviewed journals.

All for just $49/month

Explore the DeepDyve Library

or browse the journals available

Search

Query the DeepDyve database, plus search all of PubMed and Google Scholar seamlessly

Organize

Save any article or search result from DeepDyve, PubMed, and Google Scholar... all in one place.

Access

Get unlimited, online access to over 18 million full-text articles from more than 15,000 scientific journals.

Your journals are on DeepDyve

Read from thousands of the leading scholarly journals from SpringerNature, Elsevier, Wiley-Blackwell, Oxford University Press and more.

All the latest content is available, no embargo periods.

See the journals in your area

DeepDyve

Freelancer

DeepDyve

Pro

Price

FREE

$49/month
$360/year

Save searches from
Google Scholar,
PubMed

Create folders to
organize your research

Export folders, citations

Read DeepDyve articles

Abstract access only

Unlimited access to over
18 million full-text articles

Print

20 pages / month

PDF Discount

20% off

Sign up
for free
Start 14 day
Free Trial