“Anthropomorphize” is one of those words I like just because I learned it in first grade, and logophiles always have a special fondness for some of the first few standout words they learn. It means to attribute human qualities to something that is not human. From the Greek derivation, “anthro” means “human,” “morph” means “form,” and “-ize” makes a word a verb — hence, loosely, “put into human form.” When you call a dog your “fur baby,” as the internet has made into a cutesy slang trend, you’re anthropomorphizing the pup.
Similarly, anthropology is the study of human beings. All those “-ology” words for fields of study are using the Greek “logos,” for “word,” but here meaning the things that are true (whereas “doxa” refers to things that are just commonly held or apparently true — hence paradoxes, or two apparent truths, are contradictions that are hard to resolve).
This dip into etymology trivia is a preface to discussing why it is so baffling to find people applying the tools of anthropology to the study of animal life. It’s like gazing up at the stars using a jeweler’s loupe; you are using the wrong tools and can’t possibly expect to see anything of value, just a blurry mess. Nevertheless, the New York Times of Jan. 11 carried a long article in its science section about “Checking Privilege in the Animal Kingdom.” The piece is a write-up of a study that finds squirrels whose parents leave them a bigger stash of buried pinecones are better able to survive. It’s sort of trivial that this is true, in the sense that the opposite finding is the one that would be surprising to report. But it’s dressed up in anthropological language to make it seem like it’s interesting since it shoehorns in a hot buzzword: “Young, pine-cone-rich squirrels, the scientists say, are children of privilege. … Applying a human lens, they say, can help us understand the roots of inequality in animals.”
After quoting an “evolutionary anthropologist” who concedes that “the use of terms like ‘privilege’ and ‘perpetuating the cycle of privilege’ is a little bit unusual,” the piece nevertheless goes on to explain the utility of mixing up notions of justice with the behavior of organisms in the natural world.
The intrusion of anthropological language into scientific research is not a new story. Bad or overcooked ideas from sociology, anthropology, and various related fields have invaded almost every area of life. But animal research is a bright line. When the Independent’s environment correspondent writes about how “mongooses rear young in a ‘fair society’, solving inequality problems” as a way of asking whether human babies should be shuffled up in the incubator room so human parents, like mating mongoose mothers, don’t know which is their biological issue, we should know it is time to stop and take stock.
Notions such as fairness, privilege, and inequality problems make sense in a human context sometimes. But only in a human one (Animal Farm aside). Mongooses cannot be unfair to the cobras they fight. A century ago, ideas from Darwinian evolutionary theory were brought into the realm of social theory and, with them, a very dark period of scientific racism and social Darwinism under the banner of “progressive” science. The problem, then and now, is that anthropomorphizing is a category error. The humanities and the sciences have a lot to teach one another, but this isn’t one of them.
