Interspecific Cultural Convergences (ICC) and Interspecifjc Cultural Studies (ICS): From the Only Human Towards a Comparative History of Animal Uses and Traditions

Limits of predictability and the need of a cognitive resilience in the study of animals' minds and cultures In the title of a recent essay, the primatologist Frans de Waal asks: Are we smart enough to known how smart animals are?(de Waal 2016). Along these lines, one could also ask whether we are smart enough to predict what could be learned from the study of animals’ intelligence and cognition. The last fifty years have seen the discovery of entire classes of phenomena related to the expression of the animal thought and cultures, which had been predicted impossible within relevant sciences as anthropology, comparative psychology, theoretical and moral philosophy, linguistic and cultural studies. From Aristotle to Chomsky and Povinelli, just to mention two important contemporary scholars, dominant theories had endorsed the hypothesis that human species was the only capable of thinking and inventing new solutions to individual or group problems; the only one able to convey traditions that differentiate communities from one another, the only species in which individuals can deliberately deceive, or develop affections with unrelated conspecifics and whit other animals. That these capabilities are shared with thousands of species of mammals and birds is now well documented, and we begin to have clues of their presence also in other animal classes. Despite this progress in knowledge, we have yet to fully engage with our legacy of failure when it comes to predict what can be learned from the study of animals’ minds. Predictability is a relational concept. A phenomenon can be defined as predictable (or not) only in relation to the available knowledge, instruments and methods. One thing that has become clear in the last half a century is that the exploration of the animal expressiveness and cognition has just begun, and the range of phenomena we are likely to be faced with down the road, is much larger than we are yet able to predict. We need a review and a radical re-thinking of the legacy of criteria, assumptions and cataloguings on which we base the predictive activity in this scientific areas. We also need a critical review of the criteria for self-interpretation of the human being and of the basic assumptions of human sciences. More than anything, we need an epochè: we have to suspend the belief in our predictive ability in this field and focus our efforts on developing perceptual, cognitive, and methodological resilience for the exploration of animals’ minds, languages and cultural traditions. In line with these premises, this essay outlines the contours of a new emerging research area, the Interspecific Cultural Studies (ICS), explains its scientific relevance and why it calls for a genuine overcoming of the traditional division between Natural Science and Humanities, and finally provides a reflection on a particular sub-field of ICS: the study of the Interspecific Cultural Convergence Phenomena (ICC). Interspecific Cultural Studies (ICS) The developments of ethology, or “comparative study of behavior” (Lorenz 1978), led, in the second half of the twentieth century, to one of the most revolutionary discoveries of contemporary science: the existence of animal cultures (Wickler 1986; Mainardi 1978; de Waal 2001; Lestel 2001), the demonstration, through an amount of data which since then never stopped growing, of the fact that our species is not the only one in which every population or group develops behavioral and communicative traditions that differentiate it from all the others. This was a revolutionary turn because it falsified, or in other words empirically refuted, one of the fundamental assumptions of our philosophical and scientific tradition (Man as the only “cultural animal”) and, therefore, questioned the same partition of science in Humanities, conceived as science of culture, and Natural on which the organization of school, university and research is (especially but not only in Italy) still today based to a large extent. The debate on the philosophical, epistemological and scientific consequences of this discovery began to develop in the 1970s, intertwining with the debate on the animal minds aroused from the researches of some comparative psychologists who had begun to study the ability of “higher primates” to learn man-made languages as the ASL, to recognize themselves in the mirror, to solve various cognitive problems. From these developments emerged two sub-disciplines of ethological research, cognitive and cultural ethology, and a new field of philosophical and epistemological research: Evolutionary Epistemology (Celentano 2000; 2011; 2017). However, only between the nineties and the next decade, began a both anti-determinist and anti-anthropocentric oriented Philosophy of Ethology, intersecting with the rising Animal Studies. Books like Visions of Caliban by Dale Peterson and Jane Goodall (1993) and Species of Mind (1997) by Colin Allen and Mark Bekoff gave a first significant boost in this direction. Then, in the new millennium, philosophers/ethologists/zoo-anthropologists as Roberto Marchesini (2000, 2016), Dominique Lestel (2001, 2007, 2014), Frans de Waal (2001, 2017), Gary Wolf (2003), Vinciane Despret (2004), Dario Martinelli (2007, 2010, 2016), Allen and Bekoff (2009) contributed to set the comparative study of the minds, cultures and animal societies on new, both post-mechanistic and post-spiritualist theoretical and epistemological assumptions . Therefore we are today only at the dawn of the possible developments of this research area, and the world of animal cultures, its extension, the forms in which it manifests itself, are still almost entirely unknown. According to the approach outlined in the essay, this kind of study requires a concrete overcoming of the division between Life Science and Humanities and the development of a meta-disciplinary area which combines biological, ethological and ecological skills with approaches and methods of the comparative cultural studies, and which will be here indicated as: Interspecific Cultural Studies. This is an approach oriented to a comparative study of cultural traditions, uses, expressions and developments which includes not just human ones, but all the known and knowable animal cultures. It can be consolidated only through a reallocation of all the kinds of humanistic and cultural study within a trans- and inter-specific perspective. It also requires an active contribution of humanists with transversal skills to the process of profound renewal which is currently underway in the field of comparative study of animal behavior. Renewal manifested primarily in the sunset not only of the traditional mechanist and dualistic Cartesian models, but also of the "psycho-hydraulic" model of classical and first cognitive ethology (Marchesini 2016a), of the gene-centric one of “classical sociobiology” (de Waal 2001), and of the new-deterministic approach currently dominant in evolutionary psychology (Lieberman 2013). This means: - to refound whit a post-anthropocentric and trans- or inter-specific setting methodologies, epistemological references and narrative background of the cultural studies. - to refocus ethology and behavioral science on a post-genecentric, post-deterministic, post-mechanist approach which considers all organisms as selective agents capable of cognitive and explorative activities, and their behaviors as one of the main driving forces of evolution. - to revolutionize the traditional forms of human self-representation paving the way for new forms of self-understanding; - to form new generations of scholars and teachers equipped to compare human and non-human cultures and societies without falling into the traditional opposition between biologisms and idealisms, anthropomorphism and anthropodenial; - to start, through comparisons and debates, the collective construction of a meta-disciplinary lexicon for this new field of study. A lexicon capable of attributing to words and concepts such as “culture”, “traditions”, “invention”, or “music” and “singing” meanings valid and usable in reference not only to a human, but also to a non-human context; - to critically insert the (chronologically) little history of human cultures into the big history of animal cultures which is hundreds of millions of years long. Interspecific Cultural Convergengences (ICC) Among the objects of the ICS, a group of empirical phenomena should occupy, according to the perspective proposed in this essay, a privileged place: the cases of Cultural Convergent Evolution among different species, or Interspecific Cultural Convergences. In morphology and ethology, as in the anatomical area, they are called convergent evolutions, evolutionary convergences, or simply convergences, the cases in which, during filogenesis, different species have developed similar structural and/or functional traits that are not inherited from common ancestors (Heymer 1977; Mainardi 1992) . A typical example are the wings in flying insects, bats and birds. In the essay I will propose: to extend this use of the concept of evolutionary convergence to the phenomena inherent in cultural evolution, defining as Cultural Convergence or Cultural Convergent Evolution all (and exclusively) the cases in which it is historically proven that a technique, an invention, a discovery or a use have been developed by different cultures and populations, in reciprocal independence ; - to distinguish as phenomena of Interspecific Cultural Convergengence (ICC) all (and only) the cases in which a cultural convergence occurring not only between populations of the same species, but also between societies and traditions of different species, begin to structure open databases and archives and to set a methodical comparison between the products, forms, and intraspecific differentiations, of all the “cultural animals” (Mainardi 1978), detecting and cataloging their similarities and differences. The most emblematic and studied case in this area is today surely that of singing. From a taxonomic and ethological point of view, singing is a phenomenon particularly interesting just because it is widespread in the animal world in a miscellaneous way. It appears in species which are genetically, phylogenetically and ecologically as remote and different from each other as they can be; for instance, cetaceans, which separated from land mammals more than fifty million years ago, monkeys as Hylobatidae, Tarsius, Indri and Callicebus, mice, thousands of species of singing birds, and all the human cultures spread over the planet (Celentano 2016). One of the most interesting aspects of the evolution of singing is precisely that this phenomenon is developed in species so distant from one another that it cannot be explained on the basis of “homologies”, here intended as characteristics inherited by common ancestor. The current diffusion of an expressive and communicative form such as singing in so different species, clades, and environments is the result of mutually independent, and in some aspects convergent, evolutionary processes. It can be adequately understood and explained only by identifying and comparing the different social, cultural and biological functions that this kind of expression plays, and the forms it has assumed in all these animal societies, whit the aim to detect their similarities and differences, just as it is normally done in areas such as anthropology, ethnography or art history, in comparing the products, techniques, or uses of different human cultures and societies. In the essay I will indicate eight groups of phenomena very important for the study of the ICC processes, but it is only a first sketch that, over time, and with the contributions of other scholars, will certainly be widened and further articulated. They indicate only some of the research sectors that are now being opened for the ICS. The first group relates to processes that may have played and still play a causal role in the genesis of ICC phenomena. The second indicates four areas of cultural phenomena in which it is possible, basing on the data that we already have, to identify ICC cases: Table I Processes that play a causal role in the genesis of ICC • epigenetic inheritance of socially selected and transmitted preferences, aversions and behavioral predispositions • imprinting • ritualization of behaviors • environmental and social constraints Table II ICC documentable cases • preferences for certain shapes or figures • development of “dialects”, or micro and macro-regional differences in the communicative systems • songs and other body music techniques • dances All this kinds of phenomena, besides, show undeniable differences but also significant and surprising similarities in the different species in which they can be found, both at the level of social and biological functions and in terms of forms. In all the cases they show trans-specific aspects, species-specific traits, local and regional markings and individual differences. To became able to deepen our knowledge of these phenomena we will need to integrate the methodologies of comparative study of uses and customs, communication systems, expressive and artistic forms, techniques and codes of conduct, developed by Humanities during their millenary journey, whit the observation and intra- and inter-specific comparison methods of the contemporary ethology and the post-genecentric and post-anthropocentric perspectives of the recent Philosophy of Ethology.