Project Nim Anthropology

Introduction

The movie ‘Project Nim’ tells the story of the life of a chimpanzee named Nim, after being taken from his mother’s hands in the 1970’s, by Herb, a researcher at the university of Columbia. The movie thoroughly depicts Herbs controversial attempt the teach Nim sign language to break the language barrier between humans and other species, naming the experiment Project Nim. The movie details aspects of Nim treacherous life as he is faced with many challenges throughout the experiment such as adapting into a human lifestyle, moving from owner to owner, being taken away from familiarities ect. The aspects of the film that connect to social sciences were Nim firstly being moved from a chimpanzee environment to a human one, followed

My reasoning for this is because they focused on both the human and chimp’s perspective of things, showing us what every one was thinking as things progressed. This made it very easy to understand the anthropology aspect of the film and you saw growth in Nim and the doubts of the humans. It also showed how important every species’ habit is to them and what taking away its familiarities does to them. The strengths of the film from an anthropological perspective was the initial idea of project Nim. This was trying to see if an animal can adapt to human adjustments and eventually learn sign language and say a sentence. This was a strength because if the hypothesis proved right it would have change social sciences forever. Another strength of the movie form an anthropological perspective was when Laura moved Nim to an estate in Riverdale that had a huge outdoors with trees, a tire swing, and fields. This was an anthropological strength in the movies because it was suited what a chimpanzee’s surroundings should be like. It helped Nim to feel more like an animal rather than a human. A weakness of the film from an anthropological standpoint trumping nature with nurture. This was a weakness because it took away what a chimpanzee should be exposed to in its life. Instead, they were impractical and brought Nim up as a child and opened him to various aspects of a human life such as child love. This was emotionally distressful and confusing for Nim because this was not what a chimpanzee should be exposed