Here is a wonderful essay by primatologist Frans de Waal that illustrates how cultural presuppositions are inseparable from our investigations of nature, that ontology (in this case our a priori view of ‘animal nature’) underlies the questions we ask, the answers we get, and what we make of them. Even categories like “reason” and “logic” are inseparable from culture (or metaphysics, more specifically), a point so often missed, including by so many self-avowed rationalists.

In 1952, when European ethologists still worked on instinct theories and American behaviorists still trained rats to press levers, Imanishi [the founder of Japanese primatology] wrote a little book that criticized the view of animals as mindless automatons. He inserted an imaginary debate between a wasp, a monkey, an evolutionist and a layman, in which the possibility was raised that animals other than ourselves might have culture. The proposed definition of culture was simple: if individuals learn from one another, their behavior may, over time, become different from that in other groups, thus creating a characteristic culture. Soon thereafter, his students demonstrated that the potato washing started by a juvenile female monkey on Koshima Island spread to other members of her troop. The troop had developed a potato washing culture.  [Photo, taken by the author, shows Japanese macaques on Koshima Island are still washing potatoes half a century later.]

Imanishi was also the first to insist that observers give their animals names and follow them for years so that they understand their kinship relations. His concepts are now all around us: every self-respecting field worker conducts long-term studies based on individual identification, and the idea of cultural transmission in animals is one of the hottest topics of today. But that is now: at the time, all Imanishi got was ridicule.

More here.  Speaking of primates, check out a short post I did on our trip to Sumatra last year to see orangutans in the wild.