Some other kind of being: Human nature and animal subjects in ape language research

Abstract

When asked to describe herself, Koko the nonhuman primate replied in sign-language that she was indeed a ‘fine animal gorilla’. One of several nonhuman primates that have been undergoing language training since the 1970s, Koko’s ability to grasp the fundaments of human expression have caused both fascination and derision in popular and scientific cultures. Yet visions of the language-using ape have not been simply a phenomenon of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Early natural history and Enlightenment philosophy make curious reference to the possibility of communicating apes. So similar to the human and yet existing in the terrain of animality, it was believed by some that the ape held a latent capacity for perfectibility — for emerging out of the mute world of the animal into the terrain of the human. An historically liminal entity, the great ape has been cast in both scientific literature and popular culture in various ways as a ‘pre-human’, a species that may be capable of becoming, through a training in the civilized manners and language of the world, fully human. In this sense, striking similarities can be found between the representation of nonhuman primates in contemporary ape language projects and historical discourses linking human childhood with a state of animality.