Primates Like Us

In the summer of 1998 a group of primarily American undergraduate students from Central Washington University went to Bali as part of the university’s first Balinese Macaque Project field school. The goal was to experience Balinese culture and study macaque monkey behavior and document the entire six-week process with on-location video footage. After compiling and reviewing more than 50 hours of video footage, however, it became clear that what was actually captured was an ethnographic account of a group of undergraduate anthropology majors who were experiencing simultaneously a new culture, the rigors of anthropological fieldwork, and the conflicts of living and working with each other as a team.