Chris Herzfeld & Patricia Van Schuylenbergh

Humanized Apes, Aped Humans

Drift of Identities in the Light of Western Representations

Social Science Information

Vol. 50, n°2 : 254-274, June 2011

Sage Publications, London

Thousand Oaks and New Delhi

This article explores certain collective representations related to the great divide between human and animal. But rather than engage on the reassuring path of inventorying human uniqueness, it mobilizes various places where humans and the ambassadors of four particular species – chimpanzee, bonobo, gorilla and orang-outan – meet, and exchange habits and skills.A careful study of the few historical milestones in the history of the relationship between humans and the great apes allows us to highlight the limitations of the Western dualistic division of the animal kingdom into poles that radically separate the human species from the other animal species. In the space where humans and apes come together, the apes show a form of ‘becoming-human’ that echoes the ‘becoming-animal’ outlined by Deleuze & Guattari. The primates in fact adopt the customs, capabilities and lineaments of human ethos, thus blurring the often too linear boundaries between human and animal, and calling into quesiton the rigidity of several great oppositions that structure our thinking and discourse: nature and culture, wild and domestic, bestial and human.