My current research project--Barely Human: Aggression and the American Search for Human Nature--explores how and why Americans came to believe that we could learn as much about human nature by studying primates and other animals as we could by studying ourselves. Throughout the 1950s and ’60s, cultural anthropologists like Margaret Mead enjoyed considerable celebrity and were happy to supply answers to questions of human behavior and nature. By the mid-1970s, however, organismal biologists had largely succeeded in grabbing the spotlight as reliable providers of scientific knowledge about human behavior, as evidenced by the rising popularity of Jane Goodall’s research on chimpanzees in Gombe, in today’s Tanzania.

During these key decades between the UNESCO statements on race in the early 1950s and the highly visible fights over human nature as defined by sociobiology starting in the mid-1970s, concerns over natural aggression in humans loomed large. On the one hand, science and technology seemed to offer power and control over nature; on the other, the cold war seemed in danger of exterminating all civilization. Like many of their generation, scientists worried that the speed at which we invented new technologies of war had long ago outstripped our natural capacity to deal with them. In the words of psychologist Charles Osgood, “Modern Man, with his head in the sky, still has Neanderthal feet that are stuck in the mire” (An Alternative to War or Surrender, 1962: 19).

Constructed as a series of chronologically parallel stories, Barely Human investigates the political, gendered, and racialized landscape in which this conversation about human nature took place. Thanks to a Scholar’s Award from the National Science Foundation (SES-1057586) I will be on leave pursuing this research during the 2011-12 academic year.