INTRODUCTION
My adventurous and astonishing mother
Alison Jolly overturned established thinking after becoming the first scientist to do an in-depth field study of the behaviour of the ring-tailed lemur, L. catta, beginning work in Madagascar in 1962 as a young graduate from Yale. She discovered that this species—and as it turned out almost all other lemurs—have female dominance over males, breaking the then orthodoxy that primates were male-dominant. As she later joked, the ‘king’ of the DreamWorks animation Madagascar ought to have been a queen.
My mother saw the ring-tails as pugnacious, swaggering, but also formal to the point of ritual and ever so maternally doting.1 She herself was not pugnacious at all, though she did indeed dote upon me and her three other children. Nor did she swagger, though as a nearly six foot American in her characteristically loud shirts, beads and sneakers, she cut a very visible figure in Lewes, the small English town in which she made her home. She was a gentle woman, with a lyrical, sing-song way of speaking, who on the rare occasions when hurt or cross would retreat into a detective novel with a glass of sherry (or whisky if very out of sorts), and a bowl of salted cashews. She saw the world as a place where humans could be cruel but wonderfully amusing, and where animals, plants, trees and seas, would always be more magical than any human invention.
Such a gentle sense of wonder is one of the reasons this book exists. Based on diaries written over the decades of her visits to Madagascar, it shows her hope that even such a complex and impoverished country could achieve a balanced ecology, although, like evolution itself, it might be slow and painful. This belief, and her love of her fragrant research site at Berenty, kept her writing. What follows is a unique insider’s account of a major conservation effort in one of the world’s most iconic biodiversity hotspots. But these diaries are also powered by her pleasure in storytelling, where accounts of policy-making and science conferencing, community discussion and conservation camping, were also farces, romances and natural comedy, even when they expressed political tragedy.
Her sometimes mischievously literary eye came from her upbringing. Growing up in the hilly university town of Ithaca, New York, she was the only child of the artist Alison Mason Kingsbury and the humorist and Cornell scholar Morris Bishop. Neither of her parents was remotely left-wing, but they were sophisticates with wonderful taste and humanity. East Coast Europhile Americans, their favourite writers included Dante and Proust, and they always dined with side plates and silver. Her father, whose light verse was regularly published in the New Yorker, taught her to observe ‘truth with laughter, not with tears,’2 her mother to see beauty and order in the landscape. Mason Kingsbury, a sometime muralist for New York’s Radio City Music Hall who was also supported by the Federal Art Project in the 1930s, proved that a woman could be as professional as a man.3
Her mother’s model proved to be the one that my mother adopted, combining mothering and wifehood with a largely self-directed career, in part made possible by an inheritance from her grandfather Albert Kingsbury, who had established a lucrative engineering business in 1912. But in many other ways, Alison broke with her parents’ genteel Anglo-Europeanism. Choosing science, choosing Madagascar, she threw off the corset and girdle, though not all of the side plates and silver, to join a set of brilliant women who came of age in the 1960s as the pioneers in the new field of primatology. Mum’s work can be set alongside that of Jane Goodall,4 Dian Fossey and Biruté Galdikas, who have made the lives of chimpanzees, gorillas and orang-utans so vivid to us. Although she was not sponsored by Louis Leakey, she did publish with National Geographic, and as this book shows, she worked with many legendary scientists and activists, including her supervisor G. Evelyn Hutchinson, Gerald and Lee Durrell, David Pilbeam, Jerome Bruner, Jean-Jacques Petter, Ian Tattersall, Russell Mittermeier, Tom Lovejoy, Sarah Hrdy, Patricia Wright, Hirai Hirohisa, Naoki Koyama, her one-time student Alison Richard—as well as outstanding Malagasy scientist pioneers, including Berthe Rakotosamimanana, Joseph Andriamampianina, Joel Ratsirason, Barthélémy Vaohita, Gilbert Ravelojaona, Guy Ramanantsoa, Philibert Tsimamandro and her closest colleague Hanta Rasamimanana. She could also schmooze with the best when it came to the World Wildlife Fund or the World Bank, not to mention various ministers and presidents of Madagascar. But she did not take a full-time academic post, and she chose to study prosimians, rather than great apes, a more distant set of relatives to humankind. Less compelling to most of us perhaps, for Mum, lemurs beautifully illuminated the logic of evolutionary law. As she never tired of explaining, because Madagascar split from India eighty-eight million years ago, it became a distinct biosphere in which 90 percent of species are endemic, where lemurs filled all the niches that monkeys did elsewhere, and in an astonishing variety of shapes and sizes, from the dog-sized indri (which sings mournfully in tall trees) to the mouse lemur, the world’s smallest mammal, to the otherworldly aye-aye, with its outsized skeletal third finger. Madagascar also hosts housecat-sized chameleons and tiny tenrec ‘hedgehogs’ which communicate through rubbing their striped quills together, comet orchids and the giant exploding palm tree.
David Attenborough’s special interest in Madagascar has brought this wonder to the general public, though few realize that the island is nearly three times the size of Britain, and the home too of a blended Indonesian, African, and Arab culture that dates back well over a thousand years; of undulating valiha harp music in lova-tsofina 12/16 rhythm, of mineral mining as well as vanilla and ylang ylang farming. Antananarivo, the capital, is filled with French-inspired ice-cream-colored houses alongside traditional red clay villas, its steep streets threaded with stepped lanes overhung with bougainvillea.5 The south boasts a warrior culture recorded first in print in the eighteenth-century bestseller Madagascar, or Robert Drury’s Journal during Fifteen Years’ Captivity on That Island, probably ghost-written by Daniel Defoe.6 Mum loved all this, and would invariably enjoy a few days in the capital at her favourite Hotel Colbert, catching up on the gossip, before beginning the bumpy ride to her research sites.
Despite her self-direction, my mother did not call herself a feminist, the subject of heated discussion with my sister and me for years, in which sociobiology became a line.7 Mum’s world was full of females and males doing what they were programmed to do, mine full of radical bodies reshaping relationships, and we seemed poles apart. But as she opened up to my values, I came to see the scale of her achievements, and the subtlety of her argument that biology’s force is interesting precisely because it is adaptive. Ironically too, I have come to see how strongly women-centred she was. Although her tastes were for outdoor adventure, dropping Jane Austen any day for Kipling, she saw her chosen method of watching animals in situ as deliberately non-invasive, letting the animals live and behave ‘as they wanted to.’8 Linda Fedigan describes this as ‘feminist science,’ where nature is seen not as passive and subject to human control, but ‘active, complex and holistic,’ and in which too, the observer reflexively declares their own position.9 It was a deliberate contrast to the laboratory-centred style of replicable experimentation in the late 1950s and early 1960s when Mum was trained. Photographs of her at Yale show her in this mould: long hair swept up in an attempt at her mother’s preferred French twist, as she reaches an animal out of the cage. In fact, they never were specimens or subjects to her, and she would tell of the kinkajoo’s jealousy of the lemur, until one day it escaped and ran up onto the lab window sill and was only coaxed down with a carrot. When clearing out her things, we came across four photo albums entirely of close-up portraits of ring-tails in Berenty, all carefully labelled with their names. They had been used for team observation of troops. But the fact is, she knew who the individuals were, and she cared about them as part of her view that, as she wrote in an undergraduate essay on plankton, ‘a community of living things has a structure, even if the specific structures are too complex for him to understand. … The student confines himself to the bounded region of a pond or log, but finds that everything affects it, from the path of a wandering newt to the climate of North America.’10
Despite contemporary suspicions of anthropomorphism, her approach anticipated a paradigm shift in theories of evolution. When she published her breakthrough Science paper in 1966, aged just 29 with me a baby on her knee, the dominant thought was that intelligence had evolved to master simple tools. She speculated that more likely it evolved through the challenge of maintaining complex social relationships.11 As she put it in her best-selling textbook The Evolution of Primate Behavior, ‘learning about the environment from within society and learning about society itself are thus the primate way of life.’12 Mum certainly enjoyed using her children as subjects in this regard, and several of our ‘behaviors’ were analyzed as particular forms of learning, aggression, play or friendship. Looking again at this text, I see however her own behavior as a mother illuminated, following her belief that attachment is more important than food for a primate’s development. Though she did pop off to Madagascar whenever she could, and always preferred an intellectual conversation to chit-chat, she refused the distant and controlled form of mothering common to her class in the 1930s and 1940s. Unsurprisingly, she couldn’t always keep the balls in the air, especially when we moved to New York in 1982, and she needed to support my father’s all-consuming work with the United Nations. Her diary of 1983 records her New Year’s resolutions: ‘To say I like New York, when asked. To be a great hostess. To be honest, when talking, particularly about life being romantic and reality melodrama.’ And a decade later, they included this reflection: ‘I brought up the kids as I wanted to be—with freedom and excitement and little nagging about rules and appearance. Clearly this was wrong. But how wrong? Should I not have done what I did about career? Or tried to make NYC more of a home? Or what?’ Her resolutions for 1992 included: ‘Not to moan about the empty nest.’
Donna Haraway’s interesting analysis of my mother’s place in the history of primatology locates her achievements in the privileges of class and race, her heterosexually conventional marriage and dad’s financial support, as well as the example of her own mother. Yet Haraway also describes how Mum’s ‘hybrid arrangement’ depended on the ‘craft production’ that primatology still permitted in the 1960s and 1970s, in contrast to the more industrialized sciences, and that Mum’s happiness with the arrangement was undoubtedly in part because of her strong self-esteem. She also pays tribute to my mother’s growing self-awareness, her ‘polyphonic’ writing, responding to decolonization as well as gender politics by including the voices of Malagasy colleagues as well as those of the animals.13 My mother described travelling with the botanist Rachel Rabesandratana, both leaving their children to their husbands’ care, discovering similar privileges as university-educated urban women juggling kids and career. Was camping deliciously romantic (Mum)? Or dangerous and uncomfortable (Rachel)? And what did the village grandmother serving them rice think? Haraway considered that my mother, had ‘taken a modest, concrete part’ in the development of a properly local and global conservation about its many competing lives and peoples.14
So the question of mothering was not the biggest, important though it was. As proof that women do not go into primatology because they like ‘big brown eyes,’ my mother’s real interest was to discover ways that competitive species coexist and indeed cooperate.15 She proposed that ‘as we cannot reverse evolution, we have no choice but to continue using our knowledge to accept the responsibilities for our society.’16 In Lucy’s Legacy, which she wrote in her office at Princeton—where she had installed her mother’s green chaise longue—she argued that to learn where we go next, we need to understand and harness the evolution of sex and intelligence, cooperation and love.17 It is thus unsurprising that she moved from lemur observation to conservation. She worked with photographers, notably Frans Lanting,18 and television crews, but also listened to and interviewed local Antandroy people, the ‘lords’ of Southern Madagascar, as well as the de Heaulmes, the French–Malagasy family who own the Berenty Reserve and who had become firm friends. She did oral histories of guardians, native guides, plantation workers, villagers, fishermen, farmers, anthropologists, conservationists, ecotourists, aid workers, ministers and traders and developers.19 She lobbied. Most of all, she threw herself into training programmes with and for Malagasy biologists and teachers. Her last project was the Ako series (2005–12), illustrated children’s books of lemur adventures in the threatened forests, which she wrote with her colleague Hanta Rasamimanana, doing what they could to integrate them into teacher training programmes.20 She had been dreaming of this since 1964, after learning that Malagasy children only had pictures of European rabbits in their books, and the only available lemur photographs in the Malagasy Republic were on the covers of match books for tourists, too expensive for locals.21 Mum’s Malagasy students were far more important to her than any of her books.
Her broadening of interest was also driven by what was happening in Madagascar. It became officially independent in 1960, two years before she first visited, but French officialdom still dominated until 1972, when, amid popular unrest, army chief Gabriel Ramanantsoa seized power as head of a provisional government. The country’s ties with France were loosened in favour of the Soviet Union; French scientists were told to leave. The French government responded by taking everything with them, except a few cars and buildings.22 The new government then denied all research visas between 1975 and 1983. Mum continued to go in on tourist visas, beginning with a six-month visit in 1975 supported by the World Wildlife Fund to write A World Like Our Own.23 This was the only time she took all the family with her; four children all aged under eleven, thrilled that we would live in the country’s zoo, in a whitewashed house next to Georges Randrianasolo, zoo director and an important catalyst for research. My father found some work with the government on poverty alleviation. But this was also the year that Didier Ratsiraka took power after a coup which set him up for a 22–year dictatorial rule. Mum’s instinctively literary rather than political sensibility was thus forced into focus by such visible nationalism, encouraged also by my father, with whom she had already begun to ask, who pays for conservation—and who benefits?
The book that follows begins with this question, with her arrival at the University of Antananarivo’s 1985 conference on Environment and Sustainable Development. The Minister of Waters and Forests, Joseph Randrianasolo, explains that this conference would not be like the previous one of 1970, which had emphasized the uniqueness, beauty, and scientific interest of Malagasy flora and fauna. In contrast, he puts it that the Malagasy want to manage their resources to be self-sufficient in food and fuelwood. Realizing that this was a turning-point, Mum began to keep frank and detailed diaries.24 The arc starts in Part I, Villages, where she reveals the influences of the outside world on apparently timeless village life. In Part II, Politics, she goes behind the scenes of the development of a National Environmental Action Plan introducing protagonists Russell Mittermeier, Tom Lovejoy, and the Napoleon-complexed Minister. The World Bank, USAID and other donors pledge funds, though not without acrimony. Then, with the funding established, Part III, Environment and Development, takes us into life at the National Park of Ranomafana in the eastern rainforest. Ranomafana’s research and science are justly famous, as are its golden bamboo-lemurs. However, like all the other early international conservation and development projects, trying to bring development to unconvinced villagers is a fraught process. Part IV, Weather, moves south to the spiny forest—the name my mother coined—and her own research site Berenty, as well as the Bezà Mahafaly reserve championed by Alison Richard. People and lemurs alike suffer in ferocious droughts. Evolution has shaped the lemurs and the culture the people to deal with such recurrent catastrophes. Climate change raises even greater challenges in the future.
My mother concludes that traditional life is in fact unsustainable. Change will come for good or bad. Thus in the final section, Money, her diaries track the prospect of mining concessions, as Madagascar’s extraordinary natural mineral resources entice the interest of outside investors. Here we also see how Mum came to be controversially involved with Rio Tinto in the development of the QMM titanium mine on the country’s southern coast, as an advisor on the independent Biodiversity Committee.25 She talked to us about this as her chance to grasp the political opportunity—even as, by then, she was in her seventies and increasingly unwell. The Committee’s achievement, in her view enormously due to the skill of fellow advisor Léon Rajaobelina, a former ambassador and Minister of Finance, was to negotiate the company’s commitment to net positive improvement in both environment and society during the life of the mine and a pledge not to cause the extinction of any species—an astonishing ambition. It seems this has been achieved, but Mum knew that the story might end in tragedy. She died nine days after the election of a new president, Hery Rajaonarimampianina, on 26 January 2014, hoping not.
The reader will see that these are diaries of witness, not confession.26 Even as she recorded the dinners and the dreams, what was most important to Mum was the ecology of community, not the private life. This was evident even in her last days, during which she was frantically writing the last pages on her deathbed, installed in her beloved study. Once, she woke to tell us she had been dreaming of indri lemurs singing in the trees by Cayuga Lake in Ithaca, though she knew this could not be possible. She left us a memorial service script in which she asked that we play a recording of those indri, followed by ‘If I had a hammer, I’d hammer out justice’ and a recessional of cheerful trumpet music. Later we heard from colleagues in Berenty that on the day of her death, the lemurs had come out of the forest, behaving oddly. Hanta said tartly this was ‘Disney.’ Mum would have too—she was adamantly against fantasies of an afterlife. She didn’t need one. Reality was fantastical enough and evolution will take care of the rest.
I hope that readers will see this view as her legacy, and do what they can to continue to visit, live in, love, and care for Berenty and Madagascar as a whole, as well as to marvel at its lemurs, whose fate depends upon us ‘cruel but wonderfully amusing’ humans. This was certainly her fervent hope, as she recorded her thoughts in these diaries through the tiny flash of a human lifetime.
Margaretta Jolly
1. A. Jolly, Lords and Lemurs: Mad Scientists, Kings with Spears, and the Survival of Diversity in Madagascar (2004), pp. 30–31.
2. M. Bishop, A Bowl of Bishop: Museum Thoughts, and Other Verses (1954), Preface.
3. Both Alison’s parents’ papers are at the Cornell University Library as the Morris Bishop papers and the Alison Mason Kingsbury papers. Her mother’s artistic career is analyzed in J. Piccirilli, The Art and Life of Alison Mason Kingsbury (2010).
4. Mum heard Jane give her first scientific paper at a special symposium on primates of the London Zoological Society in 1962 and was deeply impressed.
5. E.D. Ralaimihoatra, Histoire de Madagascar (1966); J.-L.V. Raharimanana and C. Ravoajanahary, Madagascar (1947).
6. Jolly, Lords and Lemurs, pp. 80–81.
7. A. Jolly and M. Jolly, ‘A view from the other end of the telescope’ (1990). See also A. Jolly, ‘Female biology and women biologists’ (1991), pp. 39–40.
8. Alison Jolly: Seven Wonders of the World (1995), dir. C. Sykes, BBC.
9. L.M. Fedigan, ‘Is primatology a feminist science?’ (1997), p. 67.
10. A. Jolly, term paper for Ithaca Habitats for Lamont Cole’s ecology course, 1956.
11. A. Jolly, ‘Lemur social behavior and primate intelligence’ (1966). See also S. Hrdy and P. Wright, ‘Alison Jolly: A supremely social intelligence (1937–2014)’ (2014).
12. A. Jolly, The Evolution of Primate Behavior (1972), p. 355.
13. D.J. Haraway, Primate Visions: Gender, Race, and Nature in the World of Modern Science (1989), p. 272.
14. See also J. Scardina, Wildlife Heroes: 40 Leading Conservationists and the Animals They are Committed to Saving, Philadelphia, PA, Running Press 2012, and A. Labastille, ‘Eight women in the wild,’ International Wildlife 13, 1983 36–43.
15. On the ‘big brown eyes’ myth, see L.M. Fedigan, ‘Science and the successful female: why there are so many women primatologists,’ American Anthropologist 96, 1994 529–40.
16. Jolly, The Evolution of Primate Behavior, p. 357.
17. A. Jolly, Lucy’s Legacy: Sex and Intelligence in Human Evolution (1999).
18. F. Lanting, A. Jolly and J. Mack, Madagascar: A World Out of Time (1990).
19. Jolly, Lords and Lemurs.
20. M. Jolly, A. Jolly and H. Rasamimanana, ‘The story of a friendship,’ Madagascar Conservation & Development 5 (2010), pp. 125–6. See also A. Jolly, H. Rasamimanana and D. Ross, Ny aiay ako (Ako the Aye-Aye), Myakka City, FL, Lemur Conservation Foundation 2005. For more on the Ako Project, see www.lemurreserve.org/akoproject2012.html.
21. My mother in this book pays tribute to her forerunner Barthélémy Vaohita, World Wildlife Fund Representative for Madagascar in the 1980s, whose primary school readers called Ny Voara (Nature), were distributed to the provinces in 1987.
22. Jolly, Lords and Lemurs, pp. 182–3. Notably, the French–Malagasy de Heaulme family, who were farmers not scientists, but who own the Berenty Reserve, did not leave but committed themselves to working with the new government.
23. A. Jolly, A World Like Our Own: Man and Nature in Madagascar (1980).
24. The full diaries are available as part of the Alison Jolly Papers, Cornell University Library.
25. Bezanson, Keith et al., ‘Report of the International Advisory Panel on QMM’ (2012); R. Harbinson, ‘Development recast’ (2007).
26. Jolly, ‘The narrator’s stance’ (2011).