Balder Ex-Libris

Author : Ardrey Robert
Title : The territorial imperative A Personal Inquiry into the Animal Origins of Property and Nations
Year : 1966

Link download : Ardrey_Robert_-_The_territorial_imperative.zip

A Preliminary Meditation. Some years ago - it was February, 1955, late in the southern summer - I was introduced by Professor Raymond A. Dart to a room filled with fossil bones in the basement of Johannesburg's Medical School. In that room I met more than bones, for I encountered a variety of things that I had never heard of. I had never heard of man's origin on the continent of Africa. I had never heard of our probable ancestors, the australopithecines, a zoological group of small-brained erect-running creatures, hesitating between the roles of ape and man, who haunted the high African savannahs a million or two years ago. Neither had I heard that man's last animal ancestors were hunters and for unknown ages had been killing other species for a living before we started killing each other for fun. I had heard of none of these things. In the early 1930's I had lectured in anthropology for a season or two at Chicago's World's Fair. But after that I wrote a play, and so I became a playwright. For twenty years I divided my life between theater and films, and I naturally lost touch with the sciences. It was in these twenty years that all had happened. When I entered Dart's basement room I was anthropology's Rip Van Winkle, encountering the most enormous of alarm clocks. Normal human beings, jarred into consciousness of their own ignorance, tend to keep the information to themselves. Authors, being shameless, tend to rush into print. So fathomless was my ignorance, however, and so oceanic were the dimensions of scientific accomplishment while my back had been turned, that the rush consumed six years of my life, and even then I learned only to float. For it was not just a matter of Australopithecus and the predatory transition; there were alpha fish and pecking orders, gene pools and displacement activities, exploratory behavior and ritualized aggression, and all had bearing on the human condition. Above all, there was territory. There is a virtue, I must presume, in shamelessness, since by placing on parade the things one does not know, one discovers that no one else knows either. The pubhcation of African Genesis in 1961 dropped a clue as to how many people in how many lands shared the shock of my discovery in Dart's basement room, and could share as well the excitements of a six-year safari through unknown scientific lands. An intellectual excursion which a generation earlier could have concerned but an educated few now concerned an educated many. We forget, all of us, that not all the explosions in our reverberating era are those of population and nuclear devices. There is a literacy explosion, too. This perhaps was the most shining emblem to decorate my ignorance. I had not guessed how many people would care about what I was doing. Out of personal obsession I took my long detour through the new biology's beckoning yet forbidding fields. A playwright is a specialist in human nature, and as a playwright I sheltered a conviction that these specialists in animals extant and extinct had something to say about man. But it was a personal enlightment I sought. As a playwright I had my normal nostalgia for fields more familiar than fossil beds and tanks filled with fish. I had no least intention of pursuing my investigations beyond those broad conclusions recorded in my book. I had not reckoned, however, on my fellow man. With the book's publication my last alarm clock went off. Not only had the new anthropology in the time when I slept produced a revolutionary interpretation of man's emergence from the animal world; not only had the new biology begun a revolutionary interpretation of the behavior of animals in that world from which we came: also, as I was now to discover, our time of high stress was producing a revolutionary class of human being. A new human force - a force anonymous and unrecognized, informed and inquisitive, with allegiance to neither wealth nor poverty, to neither privilege nor petulance - was silently appearing on earth. And the class was massive. There is nothing so moving - not even acts of love or hate - as the discovery that one is not alone. It is part of our evolutionary heritage that this should be so, and the ancient chemistry worked on me. Theater and films need not be totally abjured but might on occasion be the object of a sentimental journey like a visit to the town where one was born. But what could not be denied - what could be denied no more than the future itself - was this land of high adventure which science was exploring. And since somebody cared, I went back to work. The Territorial Imperative is a volume comparable to African Genesis. Like the first book, it is a personal investigation into the contemporary, little-known accomplishments of the natural sciences, and a personal interpretation of what these revolutionary studies may bring to our knowledge of man. Unlike the first book, however, which attempted to gather in long perspective our increasing evidence for man's evolutionary nature, the present investigation resembles what we should call in films a close shot. It brings into focus a single aspect of human behavior which I believe to be characteristic of our species as a whole, to be shaped but not determined by environment and experience, and to be a consequence not of human choice but of evolutionary inheritance. In a way it is a pity that we must isolate from all that rich carpet of human impulse a single pattern for contemplation. No man or other animal lives as other than a whole being. If I am a dominant male lion with a vast impressive mane, then at once I am a predator seeking candidates for my next meal, or I shall grow unbearably hungry; I am also prey, and I must keep a wary nostril for men carrying guns, or I shall end up decorating somebody's wall; I am a proprietor, and I must keep rival lions out of my hunting territory, or game will grow scarce; I am a husband, and when one of my wives comes into heat then I must entertain her; I am a father, and with due regard to future lion generations I must brook no nonsense from my cubs while teaching them all I can; and I am also a social being for, sad to confess, I am deathly slow on my feet and an appallingly bad hunter except at close quarters, so I am dependent on the assistance of my wives and my friends, and whether I like them or not I must somehow get along with them. If I am a lion I am many things at once, and if I am a man I am even more. And so it may seem a temptation toward unreal simplification to select a single aspect of the human condition with which to absorb ourselves. And indeed it is most surely a temptation and an almighty hazard. In precisely such fashion some have reduced men to a sexual symbol, and others have excavated him like a kitchen midden, as if he were nothing but a cultural accumulation, and still others have embalmed him in economic determinism, like many of our friends on both sides of the iron curtain. Shall we not when we are done have reduced him to a walking territiorial principle ? Well, I can only say that I find myself dedicated to man's elevation, not his reduction; to his desimplification and not his distillation to a pale white definitive liquid. I shall do what I can. Focus our attention, however, we must. Territorial behavior in animals, over the past few decades, has attracted the attention of hundreds of competent specialists who have recorded their observations and their reasoned conclusions in obscure professional publications. The subject is very nearly as well known to the student of animal behavior as is the relation of mother and infant to the student of human behavior. Furthermore, many of the concerned scientists, as we shall see, believe as do I that man is a territorial species, and that the behavior so widely observed in animal species is equally characteristic of our own. And yet - it is astonishing - there exists in all the scientific literature but one book devoted exclusively to the subject. That book was written in 1920 and it concerned only bird life, and it established the concept of territory, and I have dedicated my book to its author. Since then no attempt has been made to publish in any language, for the benefit of either the layman, the scholar, or the scientist himself, a single volume exploring a subject which could be vital to our understanding of men. This book, then, must in the manner of a combined operation do several things at once: It must collect and organize a fair sample of science's observations of territorial behavior in animals. It must record all that is salient concerning the history, the interpretations, and the scientific controversies bearing on the concept. And it must attempt to derive from biology's conclusions whatever illumination may exist concerning ourselves. This will be about all that I can handle in one volume, and we must defer to some future date inquiry into other aspects of comparative behavior of equal importance to our daily affairs. The Territorial Imperative, in other words, is but a single forward step toward an understanding of man's evolutionary nature, an understanding compatible on the one hand with the revolutionary findings of biology, and on the other with our age-old human experience. Author and reader alike, however, must keep in mind that we are entering terra incognita, and that the crossing of an all-but-unknown intellectual continent may have its fascinations, but it has also its casualties. Many a conclusion which I recorded in African Genesis, only five years ago, today lies a victim of biology's ruthless, incessant raids. I shall acknowledge my losses. And with equal truth, many of contemporary thought's most sacred convictions are being pressed toward oblivion by the biological onslaught. I shall point to their corpses along our way, if I do not in all mercy shoot them down myself. Finally, before I close these preliminary meditations, there are motions of gratitude which I should like to offer. Many scientists have helped me in measure far beyond the line of duty; for one, my friend and counselor and drinking companion, the late Professor K. R. L. Hall of the University of Bristol, I have neither words nor means to express my gratitude, since his death occurred before the book was finished. To the others I must extend the hope that by treating their work with the discipline expected of me I have repaid their generosity. And for two longtime friends, Dr. Kenneth P. Oakley, of the British Museum of Natural History, and Professor Raymond A. Dart, until his retirement head of the anatomy department of the University of the Witwatersrand, I extend most special thanks: they got me into all this in the first place, ten long years ago. This work - this combined operation - could not be possible except for the collaborative assistance of many minds. I shall not neglect my wife, who has furnished me with far more than the illustrations which grace my pages. Nor shall I neglect a Middle Western American businessman, a manufacturer of machine tools and a man of many parts. It was Leighton A. Wilkie who in a critical hour of Dart's career rode to the rescue like a regiment of U.S. Cavalry in an old-time western film. And it was Leighton Wilkie, with his Wilkie Brothers Foundation of Des Plaines, Illinois, who rode to my rescue in a comparably critical hour and underwrote the formidable costs of field research involved in the present volume. Just where we should all be without him, I cannot say. ROBERT ARDREY Rome, 1966. ...