Erect Men/Undulating Women

Thomas M.F. Gerry is an associate professor of English at Laurentian
University and the editor of Arachne.

The central reconstructive illustration to which Melanie Wiber refers in
Erect Men/Undulating Women is the familiar six-part sketch: on the left,
an ape; on the right, a tall man; and, between these extremities, four
other creatures. All are walking, but this display is not a parade. It
is an artist’s conception of the human evolutionary story. From left
to right—the artist naturally uses the Western reading mode to convey
the implicit messages—a passage of hundreds of thousands of years is
signified. “We” have progressed from short, hairy, dark-colored,
hunched-over beasts to tall, beardless, body-hairless white men striding
fearlessly into the future. Clearly, the illustration conveys many
stereotypical and highly questionable notions.

The author’s aim is to deconstruct this image—together with a fair
sampling of others from educational publications on human
evolution—and to begin a process of critical evaluation, “so that we
can think differently about the nature of scientific knowledge, about
the history of our species and our cultural institutions, and about the
over simplistic and misleading representations in visual form of these
many complex ideas.”

Wiber demonstrates her awareness of the complexities of the task she
sets herself, detailing, for instance, the paradoxical existence of
numerous disputes among specialist practitioners in subfields of
anthropology, as opposed to the field’s public presentation as
essentially unified. Her approach draws on a wide array of disciplines,
but herein lies the book’s weakness: in dealing with
extra-anthropological matters, at times it is superficial and naive.
Perhaps the same could be said about many interdisciplinary enterprises.
How can one person be expected to be fully cognizant of the knowledge
and issues associated with more than one discipline?

Overall, Wiber’s book succeeds in its aim. It is a good place to
start to analyze such influential images.