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Chimpanzees are humankind’s closest living relatives, and like us, they display considerable behavioral diversity.  While genetic, ecological, and cultural factors are traditionally invoked to explain behavioral variation in chimpanzees, the demographic context is often overlooked as a contributing factor.  For the past 21 years, I have conducted a long-term field study of an extremely large community of chimpanzees at Ngogo in the Kibale National Park, Uganda.  With over 200 individuals, the Ngogo chimpanzee community is significantly larger than other chimpanzee groups that have been studied in the wild.  My observations provide new insights into the hunting and territorial behavior of chimpanzees.  In this talk, I review some of my findings in this regard.  I include a discussion of some recently completed demographic analyses that reveal one reason why the Ngogo chimpanzee community is so large.

 

John Mitani is primate behavioral ecologist.  During the past 38 years, he has conducted field research investigating the behavior of our closest living relatives, the apes.  His current research involves a long-term study of an unusually large community of chimpanzees at Ngogo in the Kibale National Park, Uganda.

This presentation explores the intersections of photographic images, family history, tourism, and Ho-Chunk survivance through an examination of two photographic collections housed at the Wisconsin Historical Society: the Charles Van Schaick Collection and the H.H. Bennett Collection. The Van Schaick collection includes nearly taken between 1879-1936, and the H.H. Bennett Collection is comprised of hundreds of images of tribal members taken from 1865-1960. Also contained within the Bennett Collection are film reels of the Stand Rock Indian Ceremonial, a major tourist attraction that employed tribal members in Wisconsin Dells, WI from the 1920s through the 1960s. The stories that these images convey of the importance of kinship, place, modern labor, cultural performance, settler colonialism, and survivance are the central themes of the Ho-Chunk experience in the 20th century, and my presentation will address these intersecting themes and the ongoing meanings that these images have for contemporary tribal citizens.

 

Sponsored by the UCSB Public History Program, the Department of Anthropology, and the Department of History.

 

Amy Lonetree, a member of The Public Historian editorial board, is author of Decolonizing Museums: Representing Native America in National and Tribal Museums (University of North Carolina Press, 2012), and co-editor with Amanda Cobb of The National Museum of the American Indian: Critical Conversations. (University of Nebraska Press, 2008).

James F. Brooks, History and Anthropology
jbrooks@history.ucsb.edu

Jeannine Marie Delombard, English
jdelombard@english.ucsb.edu

Rose Maclean, Classics
rmaclean@classics.ucsb.edu

 

The categories of “slavery” and “freedom” are as complex and elusive as they are central to our understanding of the social, economic, and cultural phenomena with which students of the Humanities are most deeply concerned. Whereas legal frameworks
emphasize the slave’s status as property, the concept of “social death” remains highly influential, and yet seems not fully able to encompass advances in the scholarship on smaller-scale forms of human bondage. Some students of slavery prefer to explore the
rubric of “captivity,” which places slaves within the broader class of persons who have been relocated against their will into a new social context, from the ancient Mediterranean to the modern carceral state (Brooks 2002; Cameron 2011). Even the distinction between “slave societies” and “societies with slaves” is subject to fierce contention (Cameron and Lenski, forthcoming). This RFG’s initial and perhaps most invigorating debate will address how to delineate our common object of study, a conversation which happens most effectively across disciplinary lines. Even as we grapple with terms like “slave,” “captive,” “free,” and “unfree,” scholars working on these topics share a core set of questions. The enforced exploitation of labor informs economic and technological history. The master-slave relationship, in its seemingly infinite iterations, epitomizes the negotiation of power in situations of extreme imbalance. Representations of slavery in visual art and text illuminate cultural responses to subjugation and violence. And the ways in which enslaved persons survive or escape slavery, form networks, practice religion, bury their dead, and otherwise fashion their lives problematize the politics of groups in captivity (Brown 2009). Studying modes of accommodation and resistance reveals, in turn, the ideological forces that lead us to perceive the experience of slavery as knowable or invisible, tragic or triumphant. After the abolition or decline of massive slave systems such as those found in the Roman empire and the Americas, the legacies of slavery have proven remarkablytenacious, as have forms of captivity and exploitation that closely resemble legal enslavement. New research linking the ancient and modern worlds includes, for example, incisive studies of the reception of classical Greek slavery (duBois 2003) and of African American and Caribbean writers’ engagement with the Classical tradition (Rankine 2006; Greenwood 2010; Tatum and Cook 2010). In recent years, a renewed emphasis on relationships between capitalism and slavery has produced prize-winning works at the regional, national, and global levels of analysis (Johnson, 1999, 2013; Baptist 2014; Beckert 2014). These force us to confront the persistence of slavery in the 21st century,and to wonder if, indeed, it is intrinsic to human affairs (Bales 1999; Bales and Soodalter 2009).

 

A focus group with the mission to explore these questions fits well with current trends in the interdisciplinary study of slavery. Building on landmark contributions by Patterson (1982) and Davis (1966, 1975, 1984), scholars working in this field have profitably employed comparative methodologies with varying degrees of rigor and specificity (see Dal Lago and Katsari 2008, 5-12). Some of these studies refine our knowledge of slavery as an institution, while others use comparative techniques to spark questions or to apply new models. While remaining sensitive to the particularities of any given historical setting, we stand to benefit immensely from this type of dialogue, both in terms of understanding the natures of slavery and captivity and in the interest of opening new lines of inquiry.