By NATALIE ANGIER
New York Times
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To illustrate how the New Humanities approach to scholarship might work, Dr. Heywood cited her own recent investigations into the complex symbolism of the wolf, a topic inspired by a pet of hers that was seven-eighths wolf. “He was completely different from a dog,” she said. “He was terrified of things in the human environment that dogs are perfectly at ease with, like the swishing sound of a jogging suit, or somebody wearing a hat, and he kept his reserve with people, even me.”
Dr. Heywood began studying the association between wolves and nature, and how people’s attitudes toward one might affect their regard for the other. “In the standard humanities approach, you compile and interpret images of wolves from folkloric history, and you analyze previously published texts about wolves,” and that’s pretty much it, Dr. Heywood said. Seeking a more full-bodied understanding, she delved into the scientific literature, studying wolf ecology, biology and evolution. She worked with Dr. Wilson and others to design a survey to gauge people’s responses to three images of a wolf: one of a classic beautiful wolf, another of a hunter holding a dead wolf, the third of a snarling, aggressive wolf.
It’s an implicit association test, designed to gauge subliminal attitudes by measuring latency of response between exposure to an image on a screen and the pressing of a button next to words like beautiful, frightening, good, wrong.
“These firsthand responses give me more to work with in understanding how people read wolves, as opposed to seeing things through other filters and published texts,” Dr. Heywood said.
Combining some of her early survey results with the wealth of wolf imagery culled from cultures around the world, Dr. Heywood finds preliminary support for the provocative hypothesis that humans and wolves may have co-evolved.
“They were competing predators that occupied the same ecological niche as we did,” she said, “but it’s possible that we learned some of our social and hunting behaviors from them as well.” Hence, our deeply conflicted feelings toward wolves — as the nurturing mother to Romulus and Remus, as the vicious trickster disguised as Little Red Riding Hood’s grandmother.
In designing the New Humanities initiative, Dr. Wilson is determined to avoid romanticizing science or presenting it as the ultimate arbiter of meaning, as other would-be integrationists and ardent Darwinists have done.
“You can study music, dance, narrative storytelling and artmaking scientifically, and you can conclude that yes, they’re deeply biologically driven, they’re essential to our species, but there would still be something missing,” he said, “and that thing is an appreciation for the work itself, a true understanding of its meaning in its culture and context.”
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