The social behaviour of monkeys

I discovered Thelma Rowell through her more recent work, where she has taken her field studies with primates and applied their methods to domesticated livestock. So it was a surprise and a treat to discover a copy of this book, which I believe was the only one she ever published. It was even more a pleasure to discover that, even fifty years ago, Rowell had a keen sense of critique about the way humans observe our world.

The Social Behaviour of Monkeys was part of a series published by Penguin in the early 1970s. The book's title is self-explanatory; it explores in great depth the many research studies about social groups and behaviours in various primates, both in the wild and in captivity. A lot of the chapters are methodical references of different studies contemporary to the time of publication, and would not be to everyone's taste. What is striking is how often and how brilliantly Rowell points out the hypocrisy in animal observation - e.g. "It is surely a comment on our own species that we have attempted to explain the behaviour of other species almost entirely in terms of concepts defined by aggression" (p159). She begins the book in this vein, opening with an impassive chapter that highlights how humans tend to overvalue our near relatives in assumptions about what "social" means. She has a keen sense of bias, and of where scientists use assumptions that may have little evidence, such as that primates have a pecking order (some do, but many only do when in captivity; this point and many others have been revisited recently by Vinciane Despret in What Would Animals Say If We Asked The Right Questions? (2017)).

Rowell's contribution to zoology is substantial, but her best work is in her critique of the inherent bias of other research, and this book is a fascinating record that shows she was a thought leader in critique long before posthumanism and radical feminist theory became more broadly adopted in academic circles.