Biography
Fields was born in Atlanta, Georgia in 1949, the oldest of four children. His father is a musician and his mother a housewife. He attended Georgia State University where he was the student of anthropologist Kathryn A. Kozaitis earning a B.A. in anthropology in 1999. He also studied with Charles Rutheiser, Robert Fryman, and Mark B. King. Under these influences he developed the notions of a hybrid culture in which he proposed the theoretical concept of a Pan/Homo cultural dynamic as a critique of the ethological notion of proto-culture to explain bonobo Kanzi’s linguistic abilities.
In 2005 Fields published, as second author, Kanzi’s Primal Language: the cultural initiation of apes into language. The qualitative monograph is a cultural recasting of Savage-Rumbaugh’s 1993 empirical monograph titled Language Comprehension in Ape and Child. In 2006 he accepted the position of Senior Research Scientist at the Great Ape Trust of Iowa where he participated in ape language research with Savage-Rumbaugh and the bonobos Kanzi, Panbanisha, Nyota, Nathan, Maisha, Elikya, and Matata. The ape language program includes stone tool use and manufacture with paleolithic specialists Nicholas Toth and Kathy Schick. Fields appears in the 2000 NHK science documentary, Kanzi II, and has been interviewed about his work at the Great Ape Trust by the History Channel, National Geographic Channel, ABC News and Nightline, Discovery Channel, New Scientist, Swedish Educational Television and local media.
He served as Director of Scientific Research at the Trust from 2007 through 2011.
Read more about this topic: William M. Fields
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