The Mystic Science: George Schaller in the Field

Abstract

The Mystic Science:George Schaller in the Field Lily Huang (bio) In the twenty-five years between 1947 and 1972, only two Westerners personally saw a snow leopard in the wild. One of them was the biologist George Schaller. Thirty-nine years old in 1972, Schaller already had a singular reputation as a field worker. From conducting the first general survey of wildlife in Alaska and following the migration of Arctic caribou, he had gone to live among gorillas in Central Africa and then among lions in the Serengeti. In those studies he had dispelled the long accepted idea of gorillas as foul-tempered man-eaters and given the first systematic account of how predation works on the African plains. So it is understandable that, when he returned to the Himalayas in 1972, accompanied by the writer Peter Matthiessen, to study the Himalayan blue sheep, Matthiessen would regard him with a certain awe. Matthiessen had been told that Schaller was “the finest field biologist working today,” though “finest” is an odd way of expressing all the qualities that, in fact, made Schaller not representative of a certain standard of scientific practice: some of his “data” were obtained by reasoning and some by sheer guts; he freely admitted that his deepest motivation was a profound empathy with his subjects; he had patience for all animals except people. His stay at any given field site was almost invariably followed by the creation of an official wildlife preserve there, and these particular legacies—the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, Virunga National Park in the Congo, Shey-Phoksundo National Park in Nepal—revealed his aims as a conservationist, beyond the scope of strictly scientific research. [End Page 358] By the time George Schaller, of Berlin and Missouri, took his wanderlust to Alaska as an undergraduate, the sociologist Robert Merton had written that science had a normative structure, and two of its institutional norms were universalism, or objective criteria for evaluation, and personal disinterestedness. Max Weber had pronounced the world “disenchanted” by scientific reasoning, and with the loss of mysticism had come the loss of ultimate meaning: science left no mysteries, except for the now unanswerable question, “What shall we do and how shall we live?” Schaller’s science was deeply personal, frequently ad hoc, and inextricably bound with advocacy—yet all of this only elevated his status as the premier biologist of the field. Does the field qualify sociological and epistemological theories about science? Or does the best of field biologists show field science to be an altogether different kind of endeavor? Does it take someone like Schaller—essentially romantic, perceived as both scientist and sage—to do this kind of science? Schaller and Matthiessen’s trip to the northwest of Nepal and the Land of Dolpo in Tibet produced two books. Matthiessen’s The Snow Leopard might have been conceived, among other things, as an antidote to Schaller’s, which was a monograph on the region’s wild sheep and goats, called Mountain Monarchs. Schaller was on a mission, as usual, to give the first scientific account of several little-known species, among them blue sheep, about whose evolutionary lineage he had particular questions that he thought could be answered by observing behavior. Matthiessen was overtly on a quest. A convert to Buddhism, he wanted to see the ancient spiritual heritage of Tibet alive in Dolpo, where the Lama of Shey was, second to the Dalai Lama, the most revered of holy men. Matthiessen’s account is heavy with the sense of the hidden life of things. He perceives heroism in his very surroundings, “a blessedness to this landscape,” possibly owing, in part, to “the saintly tread of elephants.” The cicada makes an “unearthly sound”; his own porter wears an “enigmatic smile.” Following the Kali Gandaki, the river at the bottom of the world’s deepest canyon, he imagines its source high in the “hidden peaks and vast clouds of unknowing.” Surely the snow [End Page 359] leopard, the top predator of the highest reaches of the world, was one of the great living secrets of the Himalayas, like nature’s own Lama. If one appeared, it would be an earthly sign of whatever...