6. Social behaviour and relationships
7.15 Into forest with Tinka John. We move east to block 8D. Duane walks past us unconcerned. Nambi
feeding on C. mildbraedii. Other chimps around on ground and in trees. Musa seen, now a big juven-
ile! Others: Gonza, Shida, Muhara, Kadogo, Gashom & Bwoba. Move east across sawmill trail. 7.57
Find Duane grooming Vernon. Duane chases Janie (in estrus 4). Clea — oestrus 2 — plus inf seen, not
id. Gashom, Zesta, Bwoya, Zefa (getting big, subadult), Nick. Duane waves a sapling to get Janie’s
attention. He does this many times, moves and does it again. He vocalizes, she replies, both give short
harsh barks. We are in 9C now. 8.16 Muga (following Gashom). 8.18 Tinka (26 September 1998).In the previous chapter we looked at the social organization of the Sonso chimpanzees.
The social organization of any species is the outcome of social relationships, and those
relationships are the outcome of social behaviour. These three levels of society have
been distinguished and described by Hinde (1976) and provide a way of looking at soci-
ety: in the large (social organization), at one level closer to actuality (social relation-
ships) or at the level of what we see taking place (social behaviour). There is a further
level to which social behaviour can be taken, namely the level of social or cognitive psy-
chology. This level has been well explored by Chadwick-Jones (1998) and promises to
be at the forefront of future developments in the understanding of primate social
behaviour. One of the fundamental tenets of this approach is that individuals, in their
interactions with each other, are involved in an exchange of benefits, and this process of
social exchange is cognitively mediated. We shall return to this approach at various
points in this chapter.
Communication
To be social, behaviour has to be communicative. Each species has a system of commun-
icative behaviours. A detailed description of the communicative gestures, postures,
facial expressions and vocalizations of chimpanzees is to be found in Goodall (1986);
this description fits the Sonso chimpanzees well. There would therefore be no point in
my describing the social behaviours^47 of the Sonso chimpanzees here, and I shall only
(^47) This does not refer to cultural peculiarities. Chimpanzee cultures are described in Whiten et al.(1999,
2001). To give an example, hand-clasp grooming, an everyday occurrence in the chimpanzees of the Mahale
Mountains in Tanzania, has never been seen in the Sonso community. Sonso culture was described in Chapter 4.