“How naïve I was,” Jane Goodall recalls in Through the Window, going on to share:
As I had not had an undergraduate science education I didn’t realise that animals were not supposed to have personalities, or to think, or to feel emotions or pain . . . Not knowing, I freely made use of all those forbidden terms and concepts in my initial attempts to describe, to the best of my ability, the amazing things I had observed at Gombe.
When I read this last night it made me think of the portrait of Goodall that Stewart Cohen made for his book Identity.
I was reading Matt Ridley’s The Agile Gene, in which Ridley notes that, “Goodall’s anthropomorphism had driven a stake through the heart of human exceptionalism.” This is important to Ridly’s notion, when comparing human beings to “lesser animals,” that:
There is no exact parallel to the human scheme. But in the animal kingdom, there is nothing exceptional in being unique. Every species is unique.
This made me think of another one of Cohen’s Identity subjects, Erik “Lizardman” Sprague, who in the book shares: “I generally find the claim of being unique to be rather trite since we are all by nature individuals and thus unique.” That’s nice sentiment coming from a guy who has filed his teeth to points and tattooed green scales on his face. It also seems to speak to perfectly to Cohen’s approach to Identity, and so I used it in the opening of my article reporting on his project.
Identity Beyond Symbolism
In his simple, black-and-white portrait of Goodall Cohen has included a blatant visual reference to the concept of evolution. There Goodall is, sitting in Continue reading “Unpretentious Jane Goodall by Stewart Cohen”
