Quinn Forest Georgic

QUINN GEORGIC, then a graduate student at Rice University, Houston, Texas, was awarded a grant in September 2023 to aid research on “The Nature of Matriarchy: Feminist Primatology and Human-Lemur Relations in Field and Laboratory Contexts,” supervised by Dr. Cymene Howe. This project utilized multispecies ethnography and Feminist STS to ask how two sites of lemur research — one captive site in the United States, one “wild” site in Madagascar — produced different forms of primatological knowledge or impacted the racio-gendered subjectivities of the researchers. Through fieldwork, this study found that the material infrastructures of each site elicited different questions from the researchers and different behaviors from the lemurs. Despite this difference of scientific inquiry, in both cases, research impacted the primatologists’ ethical subjectivities. In the context of captive lemur research, researchers attempted to subvert the human domination over the nonhuman in typical laboratory contexts by using different methods, including affective attunements and rudimentary interspecies communication. In the case of the researchers who conduct research in the wild, there was recognition that lemur sciences had historically dispossessed Malagasy people of resources and land. To subvert these power dynamics, interlocutors would attempt different forms of collaborations with local communities. This project illustrates how these two spaces manifest histories of colonial logics and how contemporary scientists are working to subvert them in divergent ways.