A happy find from a google image search loosely inspired by the anthropologist Eduardo Kohn's 2007 essay "How Dogs Dream: Amazonian Nature and the Politics of Interspecies Engagement":
Kohn's elegant and brilliant article is about conceptions of animal sentience among the Runa people of Ecuadorian Amazon, especially Runa beliefs in the profound, intricately textured awareness that different non-human species - for example, dogs and pumas, dogs and agoutis - have of each other. The article abstract is here. I think I searched for "dog" and "Ecuadorian Amazon" and this photo came up.
Chalk this up as yet another entry in the prolific "bizarro Japan" genre of western reportage (this story comes from the British network ITN). If a small-town pub somewhere in England had "employed" a couple monkey waiters, it would probably be seen as a mark of the proprietor's eccentricity (endearing or creepy, depending). But this being Japan, it becomes yet more "proof" of the irreducible weirdness of Japanese people in general.
I have to say these macaques walking around in people's clothes, fetching people beer for edamame, are cute at first sight - but then the whole thing starts to feel a little funny, and not necessarily in a haha way... It reminds me of the concept of "uncanny valley," which the Japanese roboticist Masahiro Mori coined to describe the sense of unease - of "negative famliarity" - that humans feel towards robots as they become more and more human-like, maybe too human-like.
I don't really blog regularly enough for this "friday [insert your favored species here] blogging" to make sense, but here it is anyway.
From the Guardian's "The Week in Wildlife" series: "A golden langur – one of the world's most endangered species, found only in a few pockets in western Assam and adjoining Bhutan – and a Hanuman monkey in playful mood at the zoological park." Looks like monkey fight to me!
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