In 2007 I studied chimpanzees for six months in Gombe National Park, Tanzania. By that point I was finishing up my Summa thesis for publication purposes in the american journal of primatology. It essentially looked at how different alpha males "ruled" differently: there was a "nice guy" who groomed everyone, all of the time; and then there was the bully, who just intimidated everyone all of the time (See this link for more details). While I was in Gombe I actually studied "dominance displays," which is a term that Jane Goodall coined to describe a long series of movements that male and female chimps do to assert their "high rank" to the surrounding chimpanzees.
My point in describing this is to show that my interests in science were looking at social behavior, rank, and how performative behaviors the chimpanzees did (e.g., dominance displays) tied with the overall "hierarchical" analysis that tries to determine how/when they access food, stress levels, and ability to choose reproductive partners (more on the latter heteronormative assumption at another time). All in all: how does a chimpanzees' performative choices impact its overall health/well-being?
Amidst this research--I remember being frustrated because I essentially began studying chimpanzees because I (like Louis Leakey insisted) really wanted to study the "roots" of human behavior--have a sense of what our closest genetic ancestor was like. The theory is that the creature that humans once were millions of years ago was not terribly different than the chimpanzee living today.
So it's about studying humans. Many primatologists would disagree with me about this point. I would say that "most primatologists" are actually more engaged with why animals do the things they do--and its relation to human behavior is ultimately irrelevant. But that was not the case for me, and this is probably the reason that I ended-up deviating away from the field, because the more research I did, the more I felt that the best way to understand human behavior is to simply examine humans themselves.
