ABSTRACT
Recognizing anthropogenic contexts as worthy settings in which to examine primate behavior and ecology also characterizes the nascent field of ethnoprimatology, which is the subject of Chapter 5. Ethnoprimatology was the brain child of an ecological and sociocultural anthropologist in the late 1990s, but it has since become an important and increasingly used approach for field primatology. In this chapter, the author reviews the development of the ethnoprimatological approach, highlighting its diverse scope of study that includes the ecological causes and consequences of human-primate sympatry, human-primate disease ecology, and cultural dimensions of the human-primate interface. The author explores how research conducted using this approach can contribute to key concerns in biological anthropology, and how this approach enables boundary crossing. Both human and primate perspectives need to be understood as well as the points of intersections between them to comprehensively study the human-primate interface. To do so, theoretical and methodological pluralism is needed. The ethnoprimatological approach, which integrates theory and technique from behavioral ecology, ecological and environmental anthropology, and conservation ecology, provides the pluralistic framework needed to study primates in the current era.
