Re: Evolutionary Psychology and Sociocultural Theory

Jorge F. Larreamendy-Joerns (larream+ who-is-at pitt.edu)
Wed, 17 Apr 1996 09:45:47 -0400 (EDT)

Mark, Ellice and xmca fellows, Thanks for the references provided so far!
When I referred to identity and social interaction in the context of the
video "Monkey in the mirror", I actually had in mind a particular segment
of the video where the producers show a chimpanzee recognizing him/herself
in the mirror. The empirical evidence, very creative in my opinion, is
that the chimpanzee was able to take some paint off her/his forehead that
had been put there before inadvertedly. There was yet another scene, very
powerful, in which a baby chimpanzee (about 3-days-old) seems to be
smiling at her human caregiver, who continuosly talks to the chimpanzee as
though she were a baby human (fully capble of understanding). These two
scenes brought up to my mind some readings that I did now many years ago
by Jacques Lacan, in particular "The stage of the mirror". In that article
Lacan argues that identity is first established through a "specular"
relationship in which the infant captures an image of himself in the
"imaginary" ideas that adults project upon himself. The specular image is
taken by Lacan as "loan of identity" whose foundations in the desires of
others constitute one of the first connections with the social. en fin,
the argument clearly goes beyond what I wound be able to articulate here.
Nevertheless, thinking retrospectively about these and other
"psychological tests" (I mean, putting apes to recognize themselves), I
came to realize the chasm between the bare and purely empirical
recognition of oneself in a mirror and the mechanism of identity
construction that is involved in Lacan's argument (i.e., recognizing
oneself in someone else's eyes). I have the feeling that if the mirror
experience is so crucial for us (humans) is mostly because incarnates or
objectifies, again, a central process in our constitution as social
beings. The "relevant mirror" is not the reflecting surface, but the
reflection of our own existence as social agents in the behavior,
actions, and language of others.
In the video the producers happily contrast tool use in natural
settings against tool using in the lab. There is a whole sequence in
which an orangutan, if I'm not wrong, is given all kinds of absurd verbal
commands, such as "Put the flowers in the refrigerator" or "Pour the coke
over the ball", and so on. The orangutan, to my surprise, successfully
executed all commands, demonstrating a remarkable understanding of word
meaning and syntactic structure. And yet, it seems as though the way to
test language comprehension or more generally communicative skills had to
be limited to very de-contextualized forms of language, tool using, or
intellegent behavior (something that psychology has called into question
many years ago). In contrast with these lab experiments (which provide,
no doubt, provocative data), ecologists and evolutionary biologists
prefer to study tool use, intelligent behavior, social behavior and so on
as emergent properties of the interaction between a species and its local
environment at a given time in history.
Anyway, the general impression I got was that in a way research
on apes at some point committed and ascribed to the same conceptions of
intelligence and language as traditional academic psychology.

Jorge F. Larreamendy-Joerns
University of Pittsburgh
Pittsburgh, PA 15260
E-mail: larream who-is-at pitt.edu