Donna Haraway's Primate Visions is the most ambitious book

Donna Haraway's Primate Visions is the most ambitious book on the history of science yet written from a feminist perspective, embracing not only the scientific construction of gender but also the interplay of race, class, and colonial and postcolonial culture with the "Western" construction of the very concept of nature itself. Primatology is a particularly apt vehicle for such themes because primates seem so much like ourselves that they provide ready material for scientists' conscious and and unconscious projections of their beliefs about nature and culture.

Haraway's most radical departure is to challenge the traditional disjunction between the active knower (scientist/historian) and the passive object (nature/history). In Haraway's view, the desire to understand nature, wehether in order to tame it or to preserve it as a place of wild innocence, is based on troublingly masculinist and colonialist view of nature as an entity distinct from us and subject to our control. She argues that it is a view that is no longer politically, ecologically, or even scientifically viable. She proposes an approach that not only recognizes diverse human actors (scientists, governments officials, laborers, science fiction writers) as contributing to our knowledge of nature, but that also recognizes the creatures usually subsumed under nature (such as primates) as active participants in creating that knowledge as well. Finally, she insists that the prespectives afforded by these different agents cannot be reduced to a single, coherent reality--there are necessarily only multiple, interlinked, partial realities.

This iconoclastic view is reflected in Haraway's unorthodox writing style. Haraway does not weave the many different elements of her work into one unified, overarching Stroy of Primatology; they remain distinct voices that will not succumb to a master narrative. This fragmented approach to historiography is famaliar enough in historiographical theorizing but has rarely been put into practice by historians of science. It presents a complex alternative to traditional history, whether strictly narrative or narrative with emphasis on a causal argument.

Haraway is equally innovative in the way she incorporates broad cultural issues into her analysis. Despite decades of rhetoric from historians of science about the need to unite issues deemed "internal" to science (scientific theory and practice) and those considered "external" to it (social issues, structures, and beliefs), that dichotomy has proven difficult to set aside. Haraway simply ignores it. The many readers in whom this separation is deeply ingrained may find her discussions of such popular sources as science fiction, movies, and television distracing, and her statements concerning such issues as nuclear war bewildering and digressive. To accept her approach one must shed a great many assumptions about what properly belongs to the study of science.


13) The passage is primarily concerned with discussing which one of the following?

A) the roles played by gender and class in Western science in general, and in the field of primatology in particular.
B) Two different methods of writing the history of science.
C) The content and style of proposal to reform the scientific approach to nature.
D) the theoritical bases and the cultural assumptions underlying a recent book on the history of women in science.
E) the effect of theoretical positions on writing styles in books on the history of science.

18) Which one of the following best exemplifies the type of "traditional history" mentioned in line 40 of the passage?

A) a choronological recounting of the life and work of Marie Curie, with special attention paid to the circumstances that led to her discovery of radium
B) a television series that dramatizes one scientist's prediction about human life in the twenty-second century
C) the transcript of a series of conversations among several scientists of radically opposing philosophies, in which no resolution or conclusion in reached.
D) a newspaper editiorial written by a scientist trying to arouse support for a certain project by detailing the pratical benefits to be gained from it.
E) detailed mathematical notes recording the precise data gathered from a laboratory experiment.