Description
The evolution of art behaviors and their transmission: an ethological study. Ellen Dissanayake (1992; 2009) traces the origins of human art behaviors in the adaptive adult-infant interaction, and views it as a ritualized behavior in the ethological sense. Based on Dissanayake's artification hypothesis, in this presentation I discuss the evolution of art behaviors and their transmission from an ethological perspective. I briefly point out the cognitive processes that seem to underlie these behaviors allowing humans to re-create objects and events by imagining themselves or others in a space, time, and state of mind decoupled from the immediate external environment. Emphasizing the links between these phenomena, I explain such diverse behavioral predispositions - even if to varying degrees in atypical cases - in terms of a set of imaginative capacities which I call ”reflective imagination” (Wah 2019; 2020; 2022). I argue that a useful and accurate way to think of the evolution of art behaviors begins not with technology, as is usually inferred, but with the tendency to imitate, mirror, coordinate, and transmit mental patterns by means of sounds, movements, and gestures. Mindful of the risks involved in comparative studies, and bearing in mind that humans cannot fully escape their anthropocentric perspective when studying behavior in nonhuman animals, I make a couple of cross-species comparisons to corroborate whether art behaviors are characteristically human. In this presentation I thus offer an alternative to “unify the arts” as a category, that is, to posit a kinship of the arts. This unification, as Dissanayake (2015) points out, would have to include the arts of all kinds, in all times and places, including the evolutionary past, making it possible to explore their universality and possible functions| Period | 5-Oct-2022 |
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| Event title | The Cognition, Behavior, and Evolution Network annual meeting: Evolution of Information Transmission |
| Event type | Conference |
| Location | Leiden, NetherlandsShow on map |
| Degree of Recognition | International |