Abstract
Mimicry in the animal kingdom mostly consists of two major types: by appearance or by behaviour. Although these are not the only ones, they will be the main focus of this article. We will develop two purposes of behavioural mimicry in animal death rituals (what we have called “ritual mimicry”): how it helps understanding a complex concept, and how it teaches to manage intense emotions. We will first show how ritual mimicry is a logical step in the evolution of appearance mimicry and why it can be a major advantage for the species that are able to use it. We will give a brief explanation of the importance of the notion of semiosis in behavioural mimicry. In a few words, we will also describe what a ritual is, how to recognize it and what its different features are. Then, for the first purpose, we will show how understanding what death is, or at least, what it is not – not sleep, nor illness – is difficult. This process starts through mimicry, which raises awareness in the young that a major event is occurring. For the second purpose, we will show how mimicry helps the young learn ritual behaviours and gestures which help distressed adults with managing their emotions in these situations. As such, mimicry is also a way to learn this emotional behaviour management, enabling the young – and future adult – to be less distressed when confronted with loss.
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Notes
This example is from chimpanzees and kapok tree fruits observations, first discussed by Jane Goodall. Now, this behaviour is well-documented enough to have its own acronym: STE (Nishida et al. 2010)
Here a concept is understood as the existence of a cognitive process linked to an event or a set of facts. I.e., almost all social animals will, at one point, witness the death of a group member, but understand the concept of death implies to be able to tell the difference between death and sleep or to understand that is an irreversible state.
If the expression “courtship rituals” might be seen as an introduction of this word in the ethology field, it is interesting to see that, depending of the cultural sensibility, “ritual” is often erased in the translation. Italian and Spanish only use the “courtship” part: “corteggiamento” and “cortejo”. German and French rather speak of a kind of display: “Balz” and “parade”.
Evolutionarily speaking, the process is probably more in another way: some species – including our ancestors – evolved in a way that enabled them to understand such concepts, and to comprehend them through mimicry. As our species gained in cognitive and linguistic abilities, our understanding became more abstractive, and our ways to transmit this understanding, more precise.
The whole event was filmed, and rushes are still available on BBC One channel (but the only public one are those in the Spy in the Wild episode 1 trailer) - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vaIH5tLmC8U – Last accessed on 30/01/2018.
“Positive” in the meaning of impacting positively individual’s lives in term of well-being, development, health or survival rate.
Knowing what is or is not pathological mourning can seem like a complex question. Roger Fouts explained quite well, for Washoe, why the loss of her first child was a normal one and why the loss of her second was pathological and endangered her health (Fouts and Mills 1998, 229).
The best-known pictures of this kind of phenomenon are the work of Dr. Joan Gonzalvo from the Thethys Research Institute.
The same went for self-consciousness, numeral abilities, learned medical skills etc. Frans De Waal likes to say that the field of what we were not supposed to look at reduces at every new generation of scientists. (De Waal 2016)
And, of course, partly because it was quite intolerable for a philosophical, religious and spiritual culture to put these evolved and complex abilities, these “propres de l’Homme” at the same level as animals. Some other cultures did not face the same problem, and that is why, one of the first primatology study to question the concept of culture in animals was a Japanese one. (Kawai 1965)
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Acknowledgements
Paris-Sorbonne University and the STIH – Sens, Texte, Informatique, Histoire (Meaning, Text, Data processing and History) Laboratory. Thomas Broden, Georges Chapouthier and Timo Maran, for bringing part of the references to my acknowledgement. Many thanks to Pierre Ghislain for his review of the translation of this article.
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Delahaye, P. Ritual Mimicry: A Path to Concept Comprehension. Biosemiotics 12, 175–188 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12304-018-9338-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12304-018-9338-7