{"id":51024,"date":"2012-12-31T13:03:25","date_gmt":"2012-12-31T18:03:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/?p=51024"},"modified":"2017-09-17T16:11:09","modified_gmt":"2017-09-17T21:11:09","slug":"the-politics-of-discovery-the-case-of-the-lesula","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/2012\/12\/31\/the-politics-of-discovery-the-case-of-the-lesula\/","title":{"rendered":"The Politics of “Discovery”: The Case of the Lesula"},"content":{"rendered":"

For the last week of December, we\u2019re re-posting some of our favorite posts from 2012.<\/em><\/p>\n

We often hear that Christopher Columbus \u201cdiscovered\u201d America, a word that erases the 50 million-plus inhabitants of the continent that were already here when his boat arrived. A person can\u2019t discover something that another person already knows about. \u00a0In the American telling of the story, however, the indigenous population don\u2019t count as people. They\u2019re knowledge isn\u2019t real.<\/p>\n

This dismissal of knowledge-of-a-thing until the \u201cright\u201d people know about it is a common tendency, and another example was sent in by Jordan G. last week. \u00a0CNN<\/a>,\u00a0ABC<\/a>,\u00a0CBS<\/a>, and the\u00a0Los Angeles Times<\/a><\/em>, among other news outlets, reported that a new species of monkey was \u201cdiscovered.\u201d<\/p>\n

So where did they find this monkey? \u00a0Tied to a post in a Congolese village;\u00a0it was a pet. \u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

\"Cercopithecus<\/a>
By John A. Hart et al. Wikimedia Commons<\/a>.<\/figcaption><\/figure>So\u00a0someone<\/em>\u00a0knew about these monkeys. \u00a0It just wasn\u2019t the\u00a0right<\/em>\u00a0kind<\/em>\u00a0of person. \u00a0In this case, the right kind of person was a (bonafide) scientist (with credentials and institutional privileges not un-related to living in the West).<\/p>\n

Now I\u2019m not saying that it doesn\u2019t matter that a trained scientist encountered the monkey and established it as a unique and previously undocumented species. \u00a0The team did a lot of work to establish this. \u00a0As the\u00a0Times<\/em>, which otherwise does a fine job on the story,\u00a0explains:<\/p>\n

Convinced the species was novel, team leader John Hart began an exhaustive three-year study to describe the monkey, and to differentiate it from its nearest neighbor, the owl face monkey. The study included geneticists and biological anthropologists, who helped confirm that the monkey was different from the owl face, though the two share a common genetic ancestor.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In other words, something significant happened because those scientists happened upon this monkey. \u00a0But to say that they \u201cdiscovered\u201d it is to mischaracterize what occurred. The scientists\u00a0write<\/a>\u00a0that it was \u201cpreviously undescribed,\u201d which is far more accurate. Their language also\u00a0doesn\u2019t\u00a0erase the consciousness of the people of the Congo, where this monkey is \u201cendemic.\u201d \u00a0 In fact, they recommend the short-hand name \u201clesula,\u201d \u201cas it is the vernacular name used [by people who\u2019ve known about it, probably for generations] over most of its known range.\u201d \u00a0In doing so, they acknowledge the species\u2019 relationship to a population of human beings, making them visible and significant.<\/p>\nLisa Wade, PhD<\/a> is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of <\/em>American Hookup<\/a>, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender<\/a>; and a forthcoming introductory text: <\/em>Terrible Magnificent Sociology<\/a>.\u00a0You can follow her on Twitter<\/a> and Instagram<\/a>.<\/em><\/span>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

For the last week of December, we\u2019re re-posting some of our favorite posts from 2012. We often hear that Christopher Columbus \u201cdiscovered\u201d America, a word that erases the 50 million-plus inhabitants of the continent that were already here when his boat arrived. A person can\u2019t discover something that another person already knows about. \u00a0In the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":51,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[155,232,23384,8086],"class_list":["post-51024","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-animals","tag-cultural-imperialismneocolonialism","tag-social-construction-discourselanguage","tag-nation-congo"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51024","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/51"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=51024"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51024\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":71617,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51024\/revisions\/71617"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=51024"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=51024"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=51024"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}