By settling among chimpanzees – creatures capable of attention, violence, culture, mourning, and care – by sharing their lives and studying their behavior, far beyond a simple existence among animals, Jane GOODALL allowed humanity to learn about itself.
In Le Point on October 9, Peggy SASTRE paid tribute to “the ethnologist who delivered the last rites to the human moral monopoly.”
We wish to join this tribute to a woman who lived among chimpanzees with no hypothesis to defend, no theory to confirm – a freedom of mind that allowed her to see what so few ever manage to perceive.
“A woman without a real diploma, but with a gaze beautifully incompatible with academic domestication.“
By humanizing the apes, she rendered more animal the idea humanity had built of itself. She encouraged women and men to reconsider their own self-importance.
“With the death of Jane GOODALL, it is as if a heretic has vanished. She not only shattered the scientific representation of the animal; she delivered the final sacraments to the human moral monopoly.”
