Scholars’ Perception of Aye-Ayes Compared with Scholars’ Perception of Malagasy-Aye-Aye Relations

Title: Scholars’ Perception of Aye-Ayes Compared with Scholars’ Perception of Malagasy-Aye-Aye Relations

General Information about Item:

  • Language: English
  • Country: United States
  • Overview of aye-aye folklore; does not relate to a specific item

Informant Data:

  • Sam Gochman is an ‘18 at Dartmouth who has done research with aye-ayes.
  • Nate Dominy is a Dartmouth professor who has researched several different aspects of aye-aye anatomy and behavior. Sam and Nate have collaborated on one project investigating aye-ayes’ enzymatic ability to tolerate alcohol.
  • Megan Aylward is a recent PhD from the University of Calgary. Her work with aye-ayes focuses on genetics.

Contextual Data:

  • Social Context:

This is a synthesis of our three informants’ perspectives. Altogether, the three interviews lasted about three hours and took place at Novack Cafe (Sam), the professor’s office (Nate), and in a McClane study room over Skype (Megan).

The information presented here is gleaned from a variety of contexts: lectures in classrooms, in-person research with aye-ayes, anecdotes from other scholars, information exchanged at conferences, and individuals’ observations. Generally, the folklore is recited in academic contexts of performing research, giving a lecture, or hearing a lecture and is addressed towards students and researchers.

  • Cultural Context:

This perspective is a synthesis of two American biological anthropologists and one British scholar. These are researchers who have personally interacted with aye-ayes, and actively chosen them as a research topic of interest. Their positive view of aye-ayes is generally juxtaposed by their understanding of the Malagasy people’s relationship with aye-ayes. The two American scholars in particular represent this relationship in a negative light.

Item: 

During the course of the interviews, each informant was asked to reflect on their personal views of aye-ayes, on their perception of the scholarly community’s views of aye-ayes, and on their perception of the Malagasy people’s views of aye-ayes. Much of this involved sharing verbal folklore in the form of widely circulated anecdotes, featured elsewhere on this site. This folklore divulged a bifurcation in how scholars perceive academic relationships with aye-ayes and how they perceive local relationships with aye-ayes. We desired a visual method of capturing this bifurcation of perspective. Thus, we combed through our interview transcriptions and created a two wordclouds, depicted below. We used WordItOut to create the images.

Associated file (a video, audio, or image file):

Fig. 1 How scholars view aye-ayes

 

Fig. 2 How scholars believe Malagasy people view aye-ayes

Collectors’ Comments:

Figure 2 features much less diversity of diction than Figure 1. This makes sense in that it is easier to explain one’s feelings and that of one’s community than to speak for others. There is some overlap in perspective (e. g., “ugly” and “strange” are used in both word clouds), but for the most part these images depict very different opinions.

Collectors’ Names:

Keira Byno, Savannah Liu, and Annie Medina

Click for more aye-aye folklore