Green Monkeys and Green People
Published 03/23/2023 in Scholar Travel Stipend
Written
by Bri Matusovsky |
03/23/2023
Let’s begin with a hypothetical scenario, which will help set the scene. Imagine that you are a farmer, growing crops to feed your family and to sell or trade at local farmers’ markets. Now, imagine that one day, you leave for a few hours. Upon return, you find that a group of people has come and destroyed your crops. They took bites out of fruits and vegetables before throwing the scraps on the ground and running away. How would you feel? Furious? Disappointed? What would you do, in response? Put up a fence? Seek legal action? Revenge?
Now, let’s complicate the situation. What if this group of people were all starving, unhoused children? How would your response change? Would you seek to help them? Would you pity them? This image that I provide is extreme, but it is meant to be so. Make sure you keep track of your answers, as we continue to complicate the situation even more. What if these people were not really people at all, but wild monkeys? How would your response change? Would you react differently than if they were humans? What if the wild monkeys were themselves suffering from food insecurity, and had been driven to invade your farm by a lack of naturally available food supply?
The hypothetical situation above seeks to make you aware of how your reactions may differ to people and monkeys as perpetrators of violence, and to show how the role of innocence is important in informing those different reactions. If someone steals, they have committed a crime. But what if it’s a monkey? What if it is driven to steal out of necessity? Different people may have varying answers to such difficult moral and ethical questions, but these questions are actually vital to the everyday experience of people around the world.
All of this is quite literally what the farmers of St. Kitts face on a regular basis. This July 2022, I traveled to St. Kitts to conduct field-work on this topic. Less than 5% of the produce that is commercially available and sold on the island is locally grown, not because farming isn’t happening, but because green monkeys (Chlorocebus Sabaeus) are a continually disruptive force.
St. Kitts has gone through important decolonial transitions in the past years: in 1983, the nation of St. Kitts and Nevis gained independence from the UK, and in 2005, they officially halted the commercial production of sugar, thus bringing to end a mono-crop plantation industry which had dominated the socio-economic landscape of St. Kitts for over three hundred and fifty years. Part of the country’s projected sustainable development plan, which was developed in the wake of these changes, was to diversify its agricultural production. The transition of these lands from plantations to other things – farms, laboratories, and tourist attractions – can be understood in the context of a larger global agricultural/industrial and local post-colonial socio-economic transitions. These transitions are ever incomplete. The remnants of plantations remain visible reminders of the particular violent logics through which these spaces were made. In my preliminary field-work, locals often talked about jumbies, or malevolent spirits, that continued to haunt these spaces. The monkeys are also talked about as a spectral presence, their bodies blending into the surrounding landscapes.
Ethnoprimatologist Kerry Dore’s research shows that farmers feel a sense of empathy for the green monkeys based on shared experiences of food insecurity (Dore 2017; Dore et al. 2018). I title this piece Green Monkeys and Green People to further stretch the mind of the reader. I ask you: what is shared between the monkeys and the people of St. Kitts? The taxonomic name green monkey comes from the monkey’s green-tinged golden fur: they often blend into trees and natural environments, making them appear as an elusive and almost mystical presence. Kittitians and other humans on St. Kitts, however, may be green for other reasons: green-thumbed, as they engage in farming and gardening; green in their pursuit of money and profit.
As a trained social-cultural anthropologist, I utilize the method of ethnography, or participant observation, alongside other qualitative methods, namely semi-structured interviews. However, ethnography and social science research in general have historically been anthropocentric endeavors, favoring human lives over others. For this project, I center the multi-species component of environmental health. I consider the health of an environment and an ecosystem as directly related to the health of the people living in that ecosystem. In this way, the health of the monkeys and the humans of St. Kitts is deeply interwoven with the green-ness that surrounds them both.
As such, I expand the ethnographic method to encompass interactions between humans and monkeys, and the green between them, or the landscapes that they share. This multispecies ethnography follows the different roles of the green monkey — a pest that disrupts farming and agriculture, an experimental subject in laboratories, and a tourist attraction which draws income for the island. Growing populations of monkeys, and the increased frequency of encounter between humans and monkeys, is an ecological crisis known locally on St. Kitts as the “monkey problem.” My research investigates the unevenly distributed economic and social consequences of the monkey problem, or both humans and monkeys.
I do this through ethnography with local stakeholders including laboratory employees, trappers, and tourism agents, and international stakeholders such as scientists, researchers, environmental activists, and animal rights advocates including from PETA and the Animal Rights Foundation of Florida. Arguing for greater attention to the fragile divide between humans and animals, and related constructions of race(-ism) and species(-ism), this project connects these theoretical positions to the real world of advocacy for both humans and animals struggling in and against growing social and ecological precarity.
I give you a glimpse here into my process. Much like the hypothetical questions with which this essay began, there are no easy answers or solutions to the complex web of interrelations that make up “health” on St. Kitts. Consider the Milken Institute’s focus on health, not only a biological or physical phenomenon, but as a socially-, environmentally- and economically- informed one. The mission states:
“The Milken Institute is a nonprofit, nonpartisan think tank focused on accelerating measurable progress on the path to a meaningful life. With a focus on financial, physical, mental, and environmental health, we bring together the best ideas and innovative resourcing to develop blueprints for tackling some of our most critical global issues through the lens of what’s pressing now and what’s coming next.”
This mission can be a useful lens through which to think about complex situations like the monkey problem of St. Kitts, which require long-term, slow, and continued research from a variety of perspectives to be understood. If the goal is to seek a meaningful life, I ask – a meaningful life for whom? How can the framework of a meaningful life be extended to also include meaningful multispecies lives? How can the connections between monkeys and humans contribute to shared expressions of physical, mental, and environmental health?
In the course of this research, I have found non-local, international animal-rights and conservation-based-environmental activist movements limited in their ability to address or even understand the particular transitions and complexities of the monkey problem on St. Kitts. The solution to this, I believe, is more research, and the communication of this research. Recent primatological research has been very important for documenting and better understanding this situation, and the movement within primatological research towards ethnoprimatology, or primatology that also employs ethnographic and qualitative methods to capture testimony, have allowed for farmer’s accounts of drop destruction by monkeys to be compiled. I believe that ethnography can allow us to further trouble and unsettle activist and ethical commitments not grounded in the local landscape, and also account for the cacophony of local interests, international “development” and tourism industries, all of which assert competing claims for land-use, sense-making, and re-settling.
Sources Cited
Dore, Kerry M. "Navigating the methodological landscape: Ethnographic data expose the nuances of the Monkey Problem in St. Kitts, West Indies." Ethnoprimatology: a practical guide to research at the human–nonhuman primate interface (2017): 219-231.
Dore, Kerry M., Andrea R. Eller, and Jackie L. Eller. "Identity construction and symbolic association in farmer-vervet monkey (Chlorocebus aethiops sabaeus) interconnections in St. Kitts." Folia Primatologica 89, no. 1 (2018): 63-80.