Centre of African Studies Occasional Papers

Hiroaki Izumi's occasional paper describes the work of Kyoto primatologists, and its eventual development through ecological and behavioural studies of human hunter-gatherers such as those by Jiro Tanaka and Kazuyoshi Sugawara. After the Second World War, Kyoto primatologist Kinji Irnanishi led a team of researchers of great skill and passion. At that time, Japanese researchers could not easily travel abroad, but Imanishi's successor Jun'ichiro Itani arranged for fieldwork to be carried out first with Africa's great apes and soon with African hunter-gatherers, pastoralists and swidden agriculturalists. Ecological anthropology at Kyoto, both in the Centre of African Area Studies and in the Integrated Faculty of Human Sciences, inherits this tradition. To a Westerner or to an African, at first glance it may seem odd to study humans with the same methods one uses in the study of baboons and chimpanzees. Yet that is exactly what, at least originally, the Kyoto primatologists did. I first met Jiro Tanaka at my fieldwork site in Botswan