Bonobo language
Garmt de Vries-Uiterweerd
Harpold, Terry Alan
<Sigh>… I’ve still got an unfinished draft article from years ago that unpacks Dr. Johausen (Le Village aérien aka Village in the Treetops) by way of Verne’s interest in real-life evolutionist and amateur naturalist R.L. Garner’s investigations of speech among the apes. (See, for example, his 1900 Apes and monkeys: Their Life and Language.) Garner, who was a bit of a crank, did do one brilliant thing: he used phonographs to record ape speech and to play it back slowly, and to play it sometimes backwards, to study the inventive articulation of their vocalizations.
My read of Verne’s novel is that, while it’s a compelling, dark and pessimist treatment of the depredations and inhumanity of colonialism – the scale and monstrosity of Leopold’s colonial experiment in the Congo was coming to light by this point – it’s also anti-Darwinian and very likely evidence of Verne’s inclinations toward polygenism, the racist belief that human “racial” differences are evidence of the so-called races’ different geographic and possibly even their species-ancestral origins.
(Another <Sigh>. Given the US President’s recent order to “correct” the hard-won, scientifically-aware anthropology on display in the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of African American History and Culture, so as to eliminate what Trump describes as “race-centered ideology” – his order insists that “race” is a biological reality, not a social and cultural construct and it’s “racist” to say otherwise – we are headed for a return to such nonsense.)
Anyway, here’s what I had/have to say about Verne’s/Johausen’s shift from Garner’s phonographs to a barrel organ for communicating with apes –
Johausen’s barrel organ differs from Garner’s phonograph in that the latter (at least as Garner foresaw the use of it) records and plays continuously, can be reversed to reveal the hidden structure of speech, and thus enters into a larger scientific project of potential dialog between species whose most important shared attribute is not a similar anatomy but a similar capacity for expressive thought. The barrel organ, in contrast, can play only a fixed number of notes, pattern or marks on a wooden or brass drum, or perforated paper. Forward and backward play are only conventions, the music sounds the same every time, and the only change in expressiveness that is possible is to substitute one prerecorded pattern for another. So Verne switches the experiment from a device that would accurately capture the generative, possibly inventive output of speakers, to a device that can only repeat the same formula again and again, and whose reversal tells us nothing about the inner structure of the communication or the event of recording. The implication here – and it changes everything, I think, in how we understand the potential humanity of the Wagddis – is that the ape-men don’t have an actual, inventive language, and therefore an actual inventive mind; they have only a simulacrum of language, a mimicry of language. Johausen’s music machine, then, gives evidence only of their talent for singérie, not humanity.
I really should pull this out of the drawer and do something with it. If only in honor of our Bonobo kin who, yes, Garmt is right to mark Berthet, et al.’s fascinating study, which shows that Bonobo vocalizations involve extensive compositionality – that is, they demonstrate, one might say, exactly what Garner was looking for and Johausen was hiding away.
Terry Harpold
Associate Professor of English
Director, Imagining Climate Change
Assistant Director, Astraeus Space Institute
https://people.clas.ufl.edu/tharpold/
https://imagining-climate.clas.ufl.edu
Terry Harpold has separate windings for thought, action, and speech.
From: jules-ve...@googlegroups.com <jules-ve...@googlegroups.com> on behalf of Garmt de Vries-Uiterweerd <garmtd...@gmail.com>
Date: Monday, April 14, 2025 at 3:41 AM
To: JVF <jules-ve...@googlegroups.com>
Subject: [JVF] Bonobo language
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Sent: Monday, 5 May 2025 08:38
To: jules-ve...@googlegroups.com <jules-ve...@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: [JVF] Bonobo language