The intersection of anthropology and primatology is a complex one where our knowledge of human and nonhuman primates meet. Contributing to its complexity are the different sets of theoretical assumptions and methodological approaches that culturally-oriented anthropologists and biologically-oriented primatologists tend to bring to their studies. The different ways in which ethnographic and ethological findings are usually reported further increases the intellectual distance that anthropologists and primatologists alike must travel in their search for common ground.

There is also a curious asymmetry between anthropology and primatology that has developed along with the peculiar intellectual traditions of each. For example, although humans are primates, anthropologists who study humans rarely regard themselves as primatologists. Instead, primatologists, particularly in the social sciences, learn early on in their careers to respond to the persistent question of what primatology contributes to anthropology in terms of the comparative perspectives that nonhuman primates can provide. That this question is typically posed by scholars who focus on those aspects of cultural behavior that distinguish humans from other primates has often struck me as an odd detail because nearly all definitions of what makes humans human are implicitly or explicitly derived from comparisons.

Primatologists, for the most part, have been slow to turn the question of primatology's place in anthropology on its head.