Interspecific Cultural Studies and Numanities. The Comparative Study of Animal Traditions Beyond the Separation Between Humanities and Life Sciences

The introductory part of the chapter will display its whole purpose and topic. First of all, this section of the book aims to clarify the situation of both humanities and behavioural sciences after the discovery of animal thought and cultures. In other words, after the fundamental theoretical assumptions of these two scientific traditions were empirically refuted: the idea of man as the only thinking and cultural animal and other animals as mechanically explainable entities,. From this the need for a critical and self-critical re-foundation of both humanities and behavioural sciences arises. A process which is in fact already underway but is still not reflecting enough on the level of theoretical elaboration and on the practical level of a reform of scientific training and research. This need for a new organization of university and post-university education, transversal to the bipartition between human and life sciences, and of meta-disciplinary forms of organization of the basic and applied research, on which the chapter aims to focus, is in various respects close to the goal of a radical self-reform of humanities proposed in Martinelli’s Manifesto of Numanities (Martinelli 2016). In this specific case, the pivot or pillar of this “revolution” of humanities is identifiable in the attempt to reorganize the humanistic field as Interspecific Cultural Studies. That is, as a meta-disciplinary area able to assume a post-anthropocentric approach towards its topics and collaborate, each sector starting from its own specificity, on an enterprise that we are attempting in our age for the first time: to insert the study of past and present human cultures into the broader context of a comparative study of all animal cultures, existing and existed. This enterprise would imply, as its indissoluble condition, the commitment to protect the survival of these animal cultures and of the natural environments in which they have evolved. The following section presents, in extreme synthesis, the state of the art of cultural ethology. The third section introduces, in an equally concise way, the emerging etho-centric approach to the explanation of evolutionary processes in contrast tothe geno-centric one, recognizing not genes, but explorative and cognitive behaviours, experiences and cultural traditions as the main driving forces of animal evolution. The fourth section illustrates the basic characteristics of the meta-disciplinary area indicated in the chapter as Interspecific Cultural Studies (ICS) and their close affinities with the program of Numanities. The fifth section focuses, within the ICS framework, on a particular project and object of research: the study of the cases of Interspecific Cultural Convergences (ICC). These are cases in which a technique, an invention, a discovery, an expressive form or use have been independently developed not only by different populations of the same species, but also by societies and traditions of different animal species. The last part illustrates one of the best-known ICC cases: singing. A widespread expressive form in all human cultures and in primates genetically and phylogenetically quite distant from us such as Hylobatidae, Tarsius, Indri and Callicebus yet not among our sister species (chimpanzee, bonobo, gorilla). An expressive form developed by animal species as diverse and from a genetic, phylogenetic, morphological and ecological point of view as different as birds, mice and whales. The diffusion of singing in so different clades and environments obviously cannot be explained as a case of homology (similar characteristic inherited by common ancestor), because the ancestors common to birds and mammals did not sing, just as as those common to insects and birds did not have wings. It is instead the result of mutually independent, but in some aspects similar, evolutionary processes and social or ecological selective pressures. It can be adequately understood only by identifying and comparing the biological and social functions that this kind of expression plays, and the forms it has assumed, in all these animal communities, just as is commonly done by comparing human singing traditions and performances. In the ICS perspective, this approach can be extended to the study of all aspects of animal cultures and of all cases of ICC found