Hans Kummer is a Swiss ethologist and behavioral scientist who began to study hamadryas baboons at the Zurich Zoo in the late 1950s. He soon thereafter began an almost 20-year sojourn in Ethiopia and Saudi Arabia studying them in the wild. Hamadryas baboons (named after the woodnymph by Linnaeus, a choice that baffles even Kummer) are noteworthy for their large red rumps, dog-like faces, luxuriant mantles of hair (in males at least), and aggressive attitude. The hamadryas differs from other baboons in the horn of Africa and lower Arabian peninsula-among them the anubis, yellow baboon, and gelada-in its superior size and range of travel, as well as its extension of habitat from the savannah into semi-desert regions.

In Quest of the Sacred Baboon itself is an often entertaining and engaging, and extremely comprehensive, study of hamadryas habits and habitat. There is, however, little that could be deemed questlike or sacred about this story or the baboons studied. In spite of a lyrical conclusion in which he says that studying the baboons has increased his wonder at the way life evolves and complexifies, Kummer is unforthcoming on the transformative qualities suggested by the word quest. Even the idea of elusiveness isn't there. The monkeys seem ubiquitous. In spite of anecdotal asides about broken machinery and recalcitrant natives and bureaucrats, once the story arrives where the baboons are, the attention shifts to detailed scientific analyses and descriptions of elaborate patterns in hamadryas society.

Nor is there anything particularly sacred about the baboons. Kummer cursorily summarizes how the ancient Egyptians thought the hamadryas baboon was an incarnation of Thoth, god of scholars and scribes. Not being a historian of religion, Kummer doesn't probe this in much detail, and not being by any stretch of the imagination a post-structuralist, he does not possess the methodological legerdemain to make the subject of the study teach the scholar the nature of his art.

While the book is written for ethologists and primatologists, clearly Kummer feels that there is something in his work that could reach a wider audience. Not being either an ethologist or a primatologist, I am not able to comment upon the experiments carried out, the observations made, or the in-depth analyses of social structures internal to the hamadryas packs. Suffice it to say, however, that I cannot believe that In Quest of the Sacred Baboon will not be a major work in the study of these particular primates.

Kummer asks relatively few questions about the scientific method in general. He holds, understandably if conventionally, to the belief that science should be a discipline removed as far as possible from preconception or prejudice and, in regards to animals, anthropomorphism, particularly concerning motivation or individual characteristics. Although Kummer readily uses words such as "marriage" to describe the initial mating of a male with a female baboon and "harem" for the polygynous male's mates, such words he suggests are necessary to convey the social dimension of this arrangement.

Kummer quotes Richard Dawkins (of The Selfish Gene) approvingly, and seems to believe that the exigencies of genetic diversification combined with the pressures of evolution account for nearly all life-action. He does allow that in human beings and in some "higher" animals, social activity does take place that is not wholly necessary to genetic activity. In the conclusion, furthermore, he confesses that the role of emotion in human activity leaves open the possibility for regarding behavior with a more holistic view than that found in the somewhat reductive "genes are destiny" hypothesis he applied. He also argues that his holistic view can be applied, in embryonic form, to the study of non-human primate activity.

In Quest of the Sacred Baboon hints at that larger, more holistic, conclusion-if only because by the time Kummer has exhaustively, and sometimes exhaustingly, categorized and described each and every action of the hamadryas, you get a sense that they are more than the sum of their genes. Kummer makes some excursions into descriptions of landscape, other animals, and human beings-but these are few, and in the case of the last, tinted with a genial, post-colonial paternalism. Occasionally, Kummer allows himself to compare, slyly, human societies with that of the hamadryas; but these comparisons are characteristically undeveloped. At one point Kummer draws an implicit link between the way elderly male hamadryas, once they have lost their "harem" to younger males, begin to play with their male children, with his, Kummer's, own sense of protective and playful fatherhood as his children also begin aping his scientific activity when they are with him in the field. Clearly what is suggested is a larger and deeper connection between him and the monkeys he studies. It remains, however, only a suggestion.

By way of example, in a rather bizarre aside towards the end of the book, Kummer suggests that female primatologists, such as Jane Goodall, are more interested in the individual ape rather than "the impersonal and general," which is the province of his (i.e. male) interest. It is not clear what he means by this, except that perhaps both sexes are blinkered to the others' concerns. While Kummer doesn't go as far as to suggest that a sentimental, unscientific personification of the animal is womanish, and the pursuit of objective scientific rigor masculine, it is nevertheless in itself a strangely unscientific admission. As it is, like so many others in the book, the admission remains unexplored. Following it a little, and opening the cracks on the relation between object studied and object studying, may even have allowed us a little deeper into what may have really gone on when Kummer saw the hamadryas male being fought over by his "harem." One wants to see stronger motives than enthusiasm for science qua science at work in this two-decade devotion to empirical infatuation.