Chimpanzés não amam! Em defesa do significado

Abstract

This article is the product of a critical scrutiny of "Chimpanzés também amam: a linguagem das emoções na ordem dos primatas", by Eunice Durham. Our comprehensive critical review of Durham's work reflects the importance of her article in the Brazilian anthropological context. For the first time in the country issues related to human evolutionary behavioral ecology, neurobiology, evolutionary psychology, and sociobiology, albeit naïvely, were raised by a distinguished local anthropologist traditionally affiliated to the symbolic school under a positive perspective. Durham's contribution is critically scrutinized in this paper following two main perspectives: the danger of representational bias contaminating those engaged in long term studies of great apes social behavior, and the danger to assume that human-like behaviors presented by these large primates can be seen as homologous to ours. Although we concur with Durham that evolutionary theory can be of great importance in the study of human social behavior, the preeminence of meaning behind behavior is stressed here as a unique property of Homo sapiens.