Hans Kummer has created a richly textured account of ''Project Hamadryas,'' begun in 1960 and brought to an abrupt end in 1977 by the war in the horn of Africa. Woven together with descriptions of hamadryas baboon behavior patterns, social relationships, and social structures are lucid expositions of the ethological/sociobiological approach to behavior and the value of observational and experimental research in captive settings. These scientific threads are set off by colorful vignettes of the trials and rewards of field research in an exotic setting and reflections on the philosophical implications of the work done by himself, his students and colleagues.
The english subtitle of the book provides a useful clue to its approach. It resembles a series of journal entries or extended conversations with a veteran traveler as much as it does a scholarly presentation. The journey begins after an introductory chapter that describes the history of human involvement with hamadryas baboons, supplemented by brief overviews of the species' social behavior and the sociobiological perspective. The first stop on the journey is Kummer's 1955 master's research on the baboon group in the Zurich Zoo. There we are initiated into the construction of an ethogram as a means of learning about the communicative aspects of baboon interaction. We are helped to understand both the challenges of deciphering ''hamadryish'' as well as the theoretical rationale of the enterprise, namely, the view that the baboons' communicative repertoires develop under the strong constraint of inherited predispositions that are shared with wild conspecifics.
Kummer's discussion of protected threats, in which a low-ranking female positions herelf between the male unit leader and a higher ranking female so that she can use the power of the male against her more powerful opponent, is typical of his ability to craft multi-level presentations of phenomena. At the most immediate level, the actions and their setting are recounted in an absorbing way. Next, variations in the pattern across different classes of animals are described in order to show us its immediate determinants and short-term functions. Finally, we are asked to consider the theoretical significance of the fact that Kummer and his colleagues did not see protected threats in the field.
The discrepancy between patterns observed in zoo and field gives rise to an examination of the conditional nature of hereditary predispositions and to a discussion of the value of studying behavior in unnatural settings. Kummer stresses that we can see the full range of developmental outcomes inherent in a species' genetic design and the underlying behavioral dynamics that produce these outcomes only by studying the species in settings that range from remote natural habitats to zoos. In his view, captive settings should be seen as ''hothouses for social behavior'' where animals can pursue their social inclinations, unhindered