BOOK REVIEW

Satoshi Hirata

Par Segerdahl, William Fields, Sue Savage-Rumbaugh. Kanzi’s primallanguage: the cultural initiation of primates into language

Palgrave Macmillan, Hampshire, 2005. 248 pp

Published online: 28 April 2006� Japan Monkey Centre and Springer-Verlag 2006

Kanzi, a male bonobo with whom Sue Savage-Rumb-augh and her colleagues have been working, understandsspoken English and communicates with others by usinglexigrams (abstract symbols on computer keyboards orprinted plastic boards). How many spoken Englishwords or lexigrams can Kanzi comprehend? How manylexigrams can Kanzi combine to make a phrase or asentence? To what extent can Kanzi understand thesyntactical structure of language? Can Kanzi create anew word to name a new thing? Potential readers of thebook under review may be looking for the answers tothese and other such questions. However, this book doesnot answer them as it deals not with ‘‘what’’ Kanzi hasmastered, but about ‘‘how’’ he has acquired language.The first stage of how Kanzi acquired language beganwhen he was young and started to use language spon-taneously when Savage-Rumbaugh and others lived andcommunicated with him.

Segerdahl, Fields, and Savage-Rumbaugh character-ize the process by which Kanzi acquired language withtwo keywords that appear in this book’s title and sub-title: ‘‘primal language’’ and ‘‘culture’’. To put it simplyfor the layperson, ‘‘primal language’’ is the ‘‘primarylanguage’’ or the ‘‘first language’’, even though intrin-sically these two terms are not identical. The authorsclaim that there is a vast difference between first andsecond language learning. Beginning to speak a lan-guage the first time means beginning to do things andsharing life with parents and other mature companionswho already speak that language. A child who acquires afirst language learns how to act in an association withwords used in activities of daily life shared with others.After acquiring a first language, a child can learn a

second language, without transforming his/her attitudestoward daily life, by remembering additional wordsabout the objects or events in the environment. Theauthors remark ‘‘Our primal language is an intrinsicaspect of culture. First language acquisition is encul-turation’’ (p. 22). ‘‘Our primal language is the culturalmatrix of specific languages’’ (p. 25).

The above lines of thought can be highlighted by anexplanation that opposes the case of Kanzi with Nim, achimpanzee who was taught American Sign Language.The authors explain that Kanzi acquired his primallanguage ‘‘in the mere living of his life, surrounded bycultural objects, gestures and practices’’ (p. 18); Nimwas less successfully taught sign language in a small,bare room for a predetermined period of time as iflearning a second language in school. However,Segerdahl, Fields, and Savage-Rumbaugh do notmerely refute the work on Nim; they reinterpret thebook written by Terrace (1979) about Nim and find anaspect of primal language in Nim from Terrace’sdescriptions. In addition, they present a different viewfrom Terrace et al. (1979) which includes a negativeconclusion on ape language studies.

The emergence of a primal language in Kanzi meansthat he acquired a culture with which to interact withpeople around him through the means of language. Theauthors’ usage of ‘‘enculturation’’ to characterize thisprocess may be somewhat misleading when consideredalong the current line of discussions on great ape cog-nition. One may be misled into understanding that hu-man culture has been unnaturally imposed on anindividual belonging to Pan paniscus. That is not true,according to this book. Instead, both humans and thebonobo created a new shared culture called the Pan/Homo culture. In addition to specifying this sharedculture as an important aspect of language acquisition,this book further illustrates 12 design features of primallanguage that could be inferred through their uniqueexperiences with Kanzi: spontaneity, boundlessness,immanence, cultural creativity and generality, place-ment, gestures and tools, culture-sustained vocal speech

S. HirataGreat Ape Research Institute,Hayashibara Biochemical Laboratories, Inc.,952-2 Nu, Tamano, Okayama 706-0316, JapanE-mail: hirata@gari.be.toTel.: +81-863-439520Fax: +81-863-439521

Primates (2006) 47:284–286DOI 10.1007/s10329-006-0183-y

and other media, cultural unity, non-arbitrariness,reflexivity, flexible interface of primate interactions, andmoral and personal dimensions.

By the way, since English is my second language, I donot understand it as well as those who speak it as a‘‘primal language.’’ Thus, I did expect that reading thisbook in English would be laborious; however, on thevery first page a phrase grabbed my attention: ‘‘Dedi-cated to the memory of Kinji Imanishi and Jun’ichiroItani, founders of Japanese primatology and the notionof animal cultures.’’ Japanese is my first language.

I would like to spare some space to providing anotherperspective on this book by referring to the respectivearticles written in Japanese by Imanishi and Itani.Imanishi first pointed out the possibility that monkeysmay have culture in 1952 in ‘‘The evolution of humannature (English translation of the original Japanese)’’(1952). His idea was later corroborated by youngercolleagues conducting field research on Japanese mon-keys. In 1953, a year after the publication of Imanishi’shypothesis, a monkey on Koshima Island in Japan wasobserved washing sweet potatoes, and the habit wasobserved to gradually spread to other group members.Stimulated by the findings of the innovation, transmis-sion, and acculturation of washing sweet potatoes inJapanese monkeys, Japanese primatologists continuedto pursue the problem of culture in monkeys.

Some years later, Imanishi (1957) wrote anotherarticle entitled the ‘‘Current situation and problems ofthe study of Japanese monkeys: especially on the issue ofidentification’’ (English translation of the original Jap-anese). It appeared as the very first paper in the firstvolume of the journal ‘‘Primates’’, of which he was thefounder. This first volume was different from later vol-umes of ‘‘Primates’’ in that the articles in this volumewere not completely written in English. The larger por-tion of Imanishi’s article was written in Japanese, with asmaller portion in English; however, it did have anEnglish title: ‘‘Identification: a process of enculturationin the subhuman society of Macaca fuscata’’. Imanishiconsidered identification to be a key process in theproblem of culture. According to his hypothesis, amonkey baby absorbs the entire personality of its mo-ther through identification, and then a male monkeychanges its target of identification to a leader male. Suchis the scenario in which a monkey learns the wholebehavioral system appropriate to the group to which itbelongs. In other words, a monkey absorbs the cultureof the group through identification. The followingquotation comes from a part of the paper written inEnglish: ‘‘There are at least two conditions necessary tothe establishment of identification. The one is the age ofchild when it makes identification with its parent. An-other is the strong attachment of child toward the par-ent. In the first year during which the monkey babystrongly attaches to its mother, these two conditionsmay be satisfied, therefore the baby may be able to makeidentification with its mother’’ (p. 2). In another partof the paper written in Japanese, he continues the

discussion and writes that a monkey baby learns how tosee a problem as it ought to be (it is not easy to translatethe original Japanese into English; in other words, ‘‘howa problem exists in the world’’) through identification,and this differs from other learning processes by which amonkey baby learns how to solve a problem and where areward plays the primary role.

It is difficult to handle ‘‘identification’’ from theviewpoint of natural science. Few of his contemporaryJapanese colleagues referred to this topic, and Imanishihimself rarely talked about it afterwards. Later, how-ever, Itani (1991) discussed Imanishi’s identificationtheory. By that time, researchers had accumulatedmore knowledge about the behaviors of many primatespecies, and the differences in tool use in chimpanzeeshad attracted the interested attention of researchers.Itani criticized the study of culture in non-human pri-mates and argued that the concept of culture had be-came impoverished, writing that ‘‘the remains of theconcept, after having become impoverished, seemed tobe locked into a narrower genre about skills andknowledge for survival.’’ What had disappeared fromthe concept of culture? Itani (1991) remarked that thesewere ‘‘group oriented behavior[s]’’ or ‘‘a responsiblebehavior for a group in which a reward to an indi-vidual is not clearly seen’’, ‘‘implicit culture’’ as Ka-wamura claimed, and social interaction or socialstructure. Imanishi seemed to offer a similar criticism,as he had already considered the example of the sweetpotato washing by Japanese monkeys as a peripheralphenomenon of culture.

Subsequent primate researchers may have been‘‘locked into narrower genres’’ with respect to the issueof culture, as Itani (1991) criticized, but they successfullyenriched our knowledge of the detailed behavior reper-toire of primate groups, especially in chimpanzees. Forexample, Whiten et al. (1999) illustrated the behaviordifferences of each community of chimpanzees. Fol-lowing these results of longitudinal observations, manyresearchers began to talk about culture in non-humananimals.

In one book that discusses primate culture, I sur-prisingly found the word ‘‘identification’’ again. It is‘‘bonding- and identification-based observational learn-ing (BIOL)’’ in de Waal’s (2001) ‘‘The ape and the sushimaster’’. De Waal proposes that ‘‘primate social learn-ing stems from conformism – an urge to belong and fitin’’ (pp. 230–231). He uses ‘‘BIOL’’ to emphasize thatthe process favors certain social models, such as mothersand peers, and continues his explanation as follows:‘‘Instead of being dependent on tangible benefits, such asfood, BIOL is a form of learning born out of the desireto be like others. Certain social models are copied in anoften playful, imperfect, and exploratory fashion.Whether or not this translates into rewards is second-ary’’ (p. 231). I now recognize that de Waal’s ‘‘BIOL’’and Imanishi’s ‘‘identification’’ are nearly identical.Both emphasize strong bonds to the model and consideractual rewards to be secondary.

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De Waal’s book is mentioned many times in ‘‘Kanzi’sprimal language’’. Although there are several points ofdisagreement, the authors show an admiration for deWaal’s ideas. Whereas de Waal himself may feel antip-athy to ape language research (Segerdahl, Fields, andSavage-Rumbaugh point out that Kanzi is not men-tioned in de Waal’s ‘‘The ape and the sushi master’’), theauthors of ‘‘Kanzi’s primal language’’ do agree withcertain of his statements; for example, ‘‘enculturatedapes support the notion of ape cultures in the wild andindicate that cultural influences abound in their naturalenvironment’’ (p. 104 in Segendahl, Fiels, and Savage-Rumbaugh’s book, a paraphrase of de Waal’s state-ment), and ‘‘They are educible because they need to be’’(p. 234 in de Waal’s book, cited on page 104 of Segen-dahl, Fiels, and Savage-Rumbaugh’s book).

We can see the connections between Imanishi and deWaal as well as those between de Waal and Segerdahl,Fields, and Savage-Rumbaugh. Moreover, the namesImanishi and Itani appear on the first page of this book.To my way of thinking, the keywords of the book,‘‘primal language’’ and ‘‘enculturation,’’ treat the sameaspect of culture that Imanishi tried to describe by‘‘identification’’ and de Waal by ‘‘BIOL.’’ Unfortu-nately, neither Imanishi’s paper on identification norItani’s comments on it was mentioned in de Waal’s andSegerdahl et al.’s books, respectively. Of course this isnot surprising since Itani’s comment was written inJapanese, and Imanishi’s paper was also mainly writtenin Japanese. However, it seems to me that these authorsshare the same idea about the cultural aspects of primatelives. Moreover, I contend that they are responding toItani’s spirit by trying to shed light on what has fallenfrom the current stream of studies on culture in non-

human primates in which differences of behavioral rep-ertoire are examined and such cognitive mechanisms asimitation, emulation, and social facilitation are beingdiscussed.

After reading this book, I strongly believe that pri-mate research should not be locked into a narrow genreconcerning the question of culture. Kanzi listened to hishuman companions and learned to understand humanlanguage. The reverse may also be true. As the authorsof this book actually put into practice, we should listenmore and more carefully to the voices of apes, otherprimates, or other non-human animals in order to gainan understanding of the nature of the lives of animals,which includes ourselves.

References

Imanishi K (1952) The evolution of human nature (in Japanese).In: Imanishi K (ed) Ningen. Mainichi-shinbunsha, Tokyo, pp36–94

Imanishi K (1957) Identification: a process of enculturation in thesubhuman society of Macaca fuscata (in Japanese with Englishsummary). Primates 1:1–29

Itani J (1991) The concept of culture: subsequence of the identifi-cation theory (in Japanese). In: Nishida T, Izawa K, Kano T(eds) Cultural history of monkeys. Heibon-sha, Tokyo, pp 269–277

Terrace HS (1979) Nim. Knopf, New YorkTerrace HS, Pettito LA, Sanders RJ, Bever TG (1979) Can an ape

create a sentence? Science 206:891–902Waal FBM de (2001) The ape and the sushi master: cultural

reflections by a primatologist. Basic Books, New YorkWhiten A, Goodall J, McGrew WC, Nishida T, Reynolds V,

Sugiyama Y (1999). Cultures in chimpanzees. Nature 399:682–685

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