Introduction

Perspectives is a new, inclusive, natural history journal that will serve as a platform for local field researchers to share knowledge about primates and the natural world in a variety of accessible formats. Perspectives, which is currently self-organized and run by a collective of field primatologists working at the Budongo Conservation Field Station, Uganda, will remain committed to the notion that diverse perspectives are valuable and vital to making progress in primatology and in natural science more generally.

Primatology remains a scientific discipline still glaringly saturated in vestigial, colonial legacy. Archaic and problematic primatological practices take on many forms and reach all corners of the field. Only recently have scientists from the Global North begun to acknowledge this legacy and begun work to decolonize the discipline. While some progress has been made, one of the most glaring problems perpetuating the continuation of primatology’s colonial practices has yet to be addressed: the institutionalized “science” of primatology is inherently exclusive, validating well-funded findings with statistical significance while dismissing local knowledge and lived experience.

Habitat country field staff (referred to as field primatologists from here on out) at wild primate field stations, who in many cases have worked for decades tracking, observing, and taking data on primate subjects, are given little opportunity to participate in mainstream, academic conversations about the work that they do. Despite the fact that veteran field primatologists have clocked far more field days than visiting researchers or students from the global north, and that they better understand the ecosystems, botanical landscapes, and complex anthropogenic factors threatening primate populations, still, across most if not all primate field sites, habitat country field primatologists are excluded by elitist, and gate-kept publication processes.

The current issues with the publication process are manifold. There is often a fee to publish papers which cannot be met by field staff working at primate research stations. Past papers are often locked behind a paywall preventing staff from conducting literature reviews, and even when papers are open access, internet is not always available. Translation services are usually not offered, creating a linguistic barrier to entry that is hard for many field primatologists to overcome. Papers must be submitted digitally in specific formats which often require computers and software that remain largely unavailable in many habitat countries. Submission processes are generally difficult to understand without mentorship, guidance, or peer-advice which has not been historically available to field staff at research stations. The statistical approaches and techniques required to write papers that are considered quantitatively “valid” are often not accessible to primate field staff. There are only a few journals that accept anecdotal reports and even these have strict content requirements. Interdisciplinary and holistic approaches to studying the natural world are less easy to publish as journals are highly disciplinized. The list goes on. In summary, the current epistemic culture of primatology and primatological publishing practices, is still designed to advance the professional careers of visiting field primatologists from the global north, while excluding and invalidating insights from habitat-country experts.

In addition to the publication process being unjust, this systematic exclusion of diverse perspectives also creates room for unrestricted and unchecked intellectual plagiarism. Visiting researchers working with field primatologists (who are referred to as “assistants” across most if not all primate field sites) have an unchecked amount of power when it comes to claiming credit. Original ideas formulated by habitat-country field primatologists and shared with researchers, can easily be stolen and miscredited with no accountability, as field primatologists often do not have access to the platforms where these papers would be published. This is not an uncommon occurrence. Additionally, while field primatologists spend years working with students on projects, teaching them how to identify subjects, how to navigate the forest, and critically how to interpret complex social interactions which may be otherwise missed by early-career researchers, it is still embarrassingly common that field primatologists’ names are not included as co-authors on resulting papers.

The exclusion and exploitation of habitat-country field primatologists is not only unethical, but also has deleterious effect on the advancement of novel primatological insight. As habitat-country field primatologists spend more time in the forest than anyone else, they are also observers and recorders of a great number of unreported rare events. Many have watched entire generations come and go, passing through every stage of development until they have offspring of their own. They have witnessed the spontaneous appearance of novel behaviours, and the gradual disappearance of others. They’ve seen landscapes change, weather patterns shift, and anthropogenic disturbances ebb and flow. The interpretations of these dynamic developmental, cultural, and ecological variables are invaluable to the field, as very few visiting researchers witness wild primate life-histories in such depth.

The knowledge and experience of habitat-country field primatologists clearly has enormous value regarding our understanding of and ability to conserve the natural world. However, there is currently no platform for documenting and sharing these insights. Here, we aim to fulfil this need. Perspectives is a free-format, open-access journal for local knowledge about the natural world. Acknowledging the value in a plurality of knowledges, both scientific and traditional, we aim to make primatology, and natural science more generally, more socially and epistemologically inclusive. In the following sections, we highlight what we believe to be the epistemological, ethical, and practical importance of this endeavour.

Ethical Significance

Research is fundamentally the pursuit of knowledge. Knowledge takes many forms, but today it is scientific knowledge that is privileged above others. While scientific knowledge clearly has its own unique qualities, privileging such knowledge above other forms of knowledge not only introduces enormous epistemological blind spots in our understanding of the world, but it also incurs ethical problems that are commonly overlooked.

The presumed superiority of scientific knowledge devalues and even masks the contribution of other forms of knowledge to the creation of scientific knowledge, which in turn prevents those who possess such knowledge from receiving the credit they deserve. Field research, for example, largely rests on the knowledge of local people, who have in-depth knowledge of local flora and fauna by virtue of their lived experiences. Often this knowledge is a rich source of novel insights that inspire scientific research projects. However, because of the presumed superiority of scientific knowledge, there is often a reluctance outside of local communities to accept their knowledge as valid on its own terms. To translate local knowledge into a format that is regarded as valid elsewhere, field scientists typically develop scientific protocols to ‘test’ ideas drawn from local knowledge.

This tendency for scientists to appropriate local knowledge, transform it into a scientific format, and claim it as their own has strong colonial undertones. Since there is no public outlet (i.e. a journal) for local knowledge, there is no paper-trial documenting where ideas originated. Ideas are shared in private (i.e. in conversation between local and foreign researchers) but exploited in public (i.e through publications in scientific journals). This problem is exacerbated by the fact that published scientific studies are often locked behind paywalled journals, meaning local researchers are alienated from the fruits of their own labour. While the contemporary move towards open access journals, stimulated by the open science movement, is progressively removing this barrier, more fundamental barriers exist. For example, field research often takes place in rural areas within impoverished countries, meaning local researchers lack internet access. As a result, it is very difficult for local researchers to keep track of their contributions and hold foreign researchers accountable for sharing credit.

Fairly allocating credit to local researchers in scientific articles and providing access to those articles does not, however, solve all the ethical issues that follow from the presumed superiority of scientific knowledge. Local knowledge is not only valuable in as much as it is able to stimulate novel scientific insights. Local knowledge itself has its own intrinsic value by virtue of its unique qualities. Translating local knowledge into mainstream scientific format inevitably means losing these unique qualities, and as such imposes a limit of how local people can express themselves. Mainstream science is an institution largely dominated by industrialised and wealthy countries, meaning that local researchers must adopt a foreign voice to be heard.

At the institutional level, contemporary science even incentivises the exploitation of local knowledge and disincentivises sharing credit. Contemporary science is heavily focused on originality. Local ideas tend to be highly original because they do not emerge within the constraints of mainstream science or from the pool of ideas that characterise contemporary scientific literature. They emerge from the direct experience of people living in nature and are coloured by the cultural background of the observer. The institutional emphasis on the value of originality thereby encourages foreign researchers to commandeer such ideas and claim them as their own as a route towards originality.

To summarize briefly, providing a platform that allows habitat-country field workers to contribute what they want to contribute, in a way that they way to contribute it, can enable us to make our field more socially equitable.

Epistemological Significance

Traditional scientific knowledge can be viewed as a complementary body of knowledge to local or traditional knowledge gained through lived experience and cultural heritage. One advantage of including the voice of lived experience is that lived experiences capture insights that go beyond the reach of science, either due to fundamental limitations of science, current methodological limitations, or limits on knowledge imposed upon science by virtue of the available systems for conducting science.

Field science is largely carried out by masters students, PhD students, or post-doctoral researchers. Individuals are sent to the field by their supervisors, often for less than a year. Within this time, individuals are expected to extract scientific knowledge that carries an eternal validity, from a brief and fragmented experience. The high turnover of field researchers creates a disconnect in the emerging world view, which is exacerbated by the fact that each student focuses on their own distinct project, owing to the high premium allocated to ‘originality’ in western science. By contrast, local fieldworkers spend the majority of their days, for decades, in the field. Consequently, they are more likely to observe rare events. For example, in a recent paper, we found that in 40 collective years of observations, live births in chimpanzees have been observed just twice. Contemporary science is simply not set-up in a way that is amenable to capturing such events. More so, since students and researchers are mere temporary visitors to field sites, they are unable to anticipate when such events are likely to occur.

Science as a system for generating knowledge relies on the ability to aggregate observations that are both systematic and reliable. Science thereby demands repeatability. A consequence of this, is that science is blind to events that are unique – perhaps never to be repeated again. Such events certainly occur and are no less real owing to their uniqueness – history is almost entirely made up from unique events whose reality we certainly do not question, although we may question their interpretation. Given this limitation, including a more diverse range of voices and accepting a plurality of formats for those voices to be heard (art, film, conversation), surely enriches our view of reality.  

Putting aside the existence of unique events that science is unable to capture, severe limitations remain. With its diverse repertoire of technological tools for measuring the properties and behaviour of living things, science is often well-equipped to gather the kinds of systematic and reliable observations it requires to draw what it considers to be knowledge from the world. However, in a complex ecosystem, such as a tropical rainforest, the diverse and complex network of factors that explain the sum total of its functioning and behaviour outpace the capabilities of science which requires sub-components of a system to be isolated, systematically observed and experimented upon. Indeed, the number of components involved in such systems is so vast, that systematic experimental science is simply not possible as a method of holistically understanding. Lived experience, by contrast, synthesises the sum total of relevant factors into a coherent world-view that even carries the predictive value that science so sorely seeks.

In sum, embracing epistemological diversity in natural science not only makes natural science more socially inclusive, but it also genuinely enriches our understanding of natures, by shedding light on aspects of reality that science currently is not, and perhaps never will, be capable of grasping.

Practical Significance

Making primatology more inclusive is a virtue worth pursuing in and of itself. The inclusion of a plurality of voices enriches our collective worldview and helps to create a more egalitarian world in which all can flourish meaningfully. All perspectives are unique and in this way have intrinsic value. Beyond this, however, there are many important practical advantages conferred upon primatology through the inclusion of a plurality of perspectives.

The knowledge gained by adopting a socially and epistemologically more inclusive approach to primatology is not just additional complementary knowledge, it also has essentially practical value. First consider, why is it that we have local ‘assistants’ in the first place? Why does someone with a bachelors, masters, and PhD degree, need someone with no formal education? Anyone who has conducted field work knows, the role of local fieldworkers is not simply to help carry equipment. Local field workers have a rich folk-knowledge of the ecosystem within which they work that provides an essential backbone to scientific research. In the case of the Chimpanzees of Budongo forest, for example, field workers have a rich folk-psychological understanding of the chimpanzees that are studied – their habits, patterns, goals. It is this chimpanzee folk-psychology that is used to track chimpanzees every day. There is no scientific model that is able to do this – it requires knowledge of individual chimpanzees, their personalities, relationships, the ecology of the particular section of the forest that they inhabit. Yet, scientific research is absolutely impossible without this – for how else would we ever find and keep track of the animals that are the subjects of our science?

Often, such local bodies of knowledge even contradict science. Again, in the case of chimpanzees, it is treated as a text-book fact that females emigrate from their natal communities as they approach adulthood. Yet in the Sonso community of Budongo forest, there are many chimpanzees that have remained in their natal communities well-into adult hood and have given birth to and raised many offspring successful in those communities. These observations are available only to those familiar with the local history of the animal populations under study. The significance of these observations, from a theoretical perspective, is apparent more to those who have formally studied animal behaviour.

Given the striking gap between textbook and practical knowledge of working with wild primates, we now highlight the critical conservation value of local knowledge. As previously discussed, the academic scientific literature often reflects the values and interests of those who are not habitat-country citizens. Much less, those local to a particular site. Increasingly, it has been acknowledged that successful conservation must be driven by the knowledge, beliefs, and values of local communities who must ultimately find sustainable ways of living with nature. With no venue for documenting and sharing local knowledge, conservation strategies can only really be built around knowledge from mainstream academic science, which is not only limited in its accessibility, but arguably also its relevance to the needs of communities in habitat countries. Local knowledge, that emerges from and thus is consonant with the beliefs and practices of local communities, is therefore essential in the development of sustainable ways of living with nature, and thus its successful conservation. This knowledge is precious, and like scientific knowledge, takes decades, even centuries, of lived experience to emerge. A platform for preserving and sharing local knowledge is thus essential to meeting the contemporary conservation challenge.

Conclusion

To conclude, primatology, and natural science more generally, is beset with a colonial legacy. Combined with the exclusionist mechanics of mainstream academic science, our field is sorely lacking in social and epistemological inclusivity. We believe that making natural science more socially and epistemologically inclusive makes our field more socially equitable, enriches our understanding of nature, and enhances our capability to find sustainable ways or living with it. Here, we hope to contribute towards addressing these challenges by developing a platform upon which the voices of local knowledge can be heard.

Cite as

Taylor, Derry. (2023). Diversifying Perspectives: A New Ethics for Natural Science. Perspectives Collective Journal, 1(1). https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.8420085