I asked Sapolsky whether he got flak from colleagues who believe that a scientist should not also be a comedian. "There are two levels of hassle," he said. "Do I get grief for the fact that in communicating, say, about the baboons I'm doing so much anthropomorphizing? One hopes that the parts that are blatantly ridiculous will be perceived as such. I've nonetheless been stunned by some of my more humorless colleagues -- to see that they were not capable of recognizing that. The broader answer, though, is I'm not anthropomorphizing. Part of the challenge in understanding the behavior of a species is that they look like us for a reason. That's not projecting human values. That's primatizing the generalities that we share with them.

"The second level of my colleagues' getting on me -- apart from whether I'm communicating to nonscientists in a serious or nonserious way -- is the issue of choosing to communicate to nonscientists, period. The snotty term in the field for what is done to you is that you are then 'Saganized.' If somebody can be spending his time [writing humorous accounts of his field experiences], he can't possibly be serious about his own science anymore. Nobody has sat me down and given me a lecture about how I better watch it, but I've gotten covert signals. I don't believe it's necessarily petty or mean. In some cases I think they're authentically concerned; in other cases it's simply not conceivable to them how I could be interested in communicating with nonscientists and still be totally crazed with interest in my own science. But I don't think their reaction is necessarily malevolent."

There were other human issues, apart from madness (albeit tangential to it), that Sapolsky regularly coped with during his years in Africa, such as the very different view of reality -- and evolution -- possessed by Africans, especially the Masai, who live in the area where he did his field studies. In one passage of "A Primate's Memoir" Sapolsky has just tranquilized a "squirrelly little adolescent" baboon named Daniel as Daniel watches two other baboons mating. "Daniel was more interested in voyeurism than keeping his eye on me," he writes, "let his guard down, and I had zipped a dart into his keister." He then picks up snoozing young Daniel and starts walking the kilometer back to his camp: "Marching over hill and dale with my sleepy boy, I encounter two Masai warriors, wrapped in their red cloaks and nothing else ... They are quite interested in the baboon. I put him down for a rest, want to show him off. Lookihere, look at my baboon."

The two Masai want to know if Daniel's dead. Sapolsky explains that, no, he's given the youngster medicine to make him sleep. The same medicine would make a man sleep, he assures the Masai, "because the body of a baboon is very much like the body of a man." That turns out to be the wrong thing to say to Masai warriors when you're standing in a far corner of the Serengeti beside a sedated ape. After some tense back and forth, the Masai getting increasingly irritated at Sapolsky, he really steps in it.

Suddenly, I get this giddy desire to shock these guys a little. I continue, "These baboons really are our relatives. In fact, this baboon is my cousin." And with that I lean over and give Daniel a loud messy kiss on his big ol' nose.

A Primate's Memoir: A Neuroscientist's Unconventional Life Among the Baboons

By Robert M. Sapolsky
Scribner
304 pages

I get more of a response than I bargained for. The Masai freak and suddenly are waving their spears real close to my face, like they mean it. One is yelling, "He is not your cousin, he is not your cousin! A baboon cannot even cook ugali!" (Ugali is the ubiquitous and repulsive maize meal that everyone eats here. I almost respond that I don't really know how to cook the stuff either, but decide to show some prudence at last.) "He is not your cousin!"

At that point Sapolsky comes to his senses, backs down fast, and the Masai are appeased. "We go our separate ways swearing eternal brotherhood," he writes. "How unlikely it would have been to be speared by a fundamentalist wearing no pants."

"Often in the book, in the funny passages," I say, "you cast yourself as the fool, the bumbler -- it's a classic storytelling technique among some tribes, including our own. Even when you introduce us to Lisa (a neuropsychologist whom he's now married to) you chide yourself for acting like a know-it-all when she accompanies you to Africa for the first time. Does that type of humor, that kind of self-deprecating storytelling, appeal to the Masai?"

"No," he answers immediately. "It's hard to translate [into Swahili or Maa, the Masai language] for one thing. Only a couple of the most Westernized guys -- like Richard and Hudson, my two research assistants -- would sort of get it. Hudson was one of the few Kenyans I'd met who wasn't university trained, who could do sarcasm, who would understand you could say the opposite of what you mean" and it could be funny or teasing. "That's a very rare thing out there.

"What continues to strike me about the place, though I spent more than 20 years there and know a bunch of people reasonably well -- watched them grow up and all that -- is that still every now and then something happens where I realize it's totally different, and I still haven't a clue in the fundamental ways. They have different notions of what life means, of privacy, of time pressure, of what you want out of life and so on. "

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