Member Profile: Asami Kabasawa

December 2007

A student of cultural anthropology turns to primates

At IPPL, we occasionally field phone calls from people who want to go to Africa, to volunteer at a sanctuary where they can really get directly involved in helping primates. They want to know how to “get there from here.” Maybe we could transfer some of these calls to Asami, who has spent over six years working among chimpanzees in West Africa at three different locations.

Born and raised in Japan, Asami spent a year in France before attending Hunter College, New York City, where she began her studies in cultural anthropology—“It would be nice to travel and meet different kinds of people,” she thought. However, in the United States anthropology is typically taught using the “four fields” approach as a means to understanding human diversity. This meant that, in addition to learning about different cultures, she was exposed to linguistic anthropology, archaeology, and biological anthropology, as well. This last discipline includes primatology within its scope, and soon she found herself reading a lot about animals that “sounded more interesting than people!”

But soon she felt the need for some experience beyond the textbooks. That’s when a classmate told Asami that New York University’s Laboratory for Experimental Medicine and Surgery in Primates (LEMSIP) was looking for volunteers to help with chimpanzee enrichment. At that time, she was not attuned to the animal rights movement, although she now is aware that some people would have opposed her assisting at a research facility that had become the target of numerous protests. For Asami, though, she actually thought it was worthwhile to do her best to help animals living in less than ideal circumstances. “Once I knew the LEMSIP chimps were there, I couldn’t not think about them,” she says—it made sense to her to provide a better life for the animals who were doomed to be confined for years before alternative research methods were found or the lab closed down.

After graduating, Asami thought that caring for chimps on their native turf was a more attractive option than going on to an expensive graduate school. Asking one of her professors for advice, he told her that she needed field experience before she could, well, go into the field. But LEMSIP turned to out to be the door to Africa for Asami. The lab’s veterinarian, Dr. Jim Mahoney, knew about a small start-up chimp rehabilitation project in Guinea—and Asami was off to volunteer at the Chimpanzee Conservation Project for a year. She loved going into the forest with them every day and caring for the babies. She even got to raise a baby hippo—to this day, they tell her, “Asami’s hippo” sticks her head out of the river whenever a car passes by!

When Asami returned to the U.S., LEMSIP was finally being closed down and its hundreds of primates dispersed to sanctuaries and other homes. Several dozen of Asami’s chimp friends were relocated to the Wildlife WayStation, a sanctuary in Southern California, and she followed them as their keeper for two years (they were delighted to see their old friend again!), until she felt the call of Africa once more. This time, she went to the Tacugama Chimpanzee Sanctuary in Sierra Leone, where its founder, Bala Amarasekaran, welcomed Asami’s expertise. She was there about four years, interrupted by a one-year stint at Oxford Brookes University, England, while she got her master’s degree in primate conservation. The Tacugama chimps became her close friends and were a comfort to her during some lonely days; sometimes, she says, she wasn’t sure if they needed ger, or if she needed them, more!

One day at Tacugama, she undertook a ten-hour bush taxi ride from Freetown, Sierra Leone, to Conakry, Guinea, to meet the eminent Japanese primatalogist, Kyoto University’s Tetsuro Matsuzawa, who has a field site in Bossou, Guinea. He and other researchers have been studying tool use in wild chimps there since 1976. He invited Asami to become his site manager and graduate student—both jobs for which she was by now well prepared.

At this point in her career, Asami is, in a way, returning to cultural anthropology as she works on her Ph.D. dissertation on the many types of humanchimpanzee relationships. Here are just a few: the chimpanzee as a totem animal (as is true for the native people near Bossou); the chimpanzee as “medicine” (some African mothers believe if you wash your baby in water in which a chimp bone was soaked, your baby will grow up strong, like a chimp); the chimpanzee as crop raider (an increasing occurrence as human activities encroach on chimp habitat); the chimpanzee as a resource (as a type of bushmeat); the chimpanzee as merchandise (for example, as a pet). But Asami has her own special relationship with chimps: not only have they have been her friends and companions over the years, they have also shown her how fragile is the boundary between humans and animals.