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This article explores the historical antecedents and later developments of the ‘quick-change’ or so-called ‘protean’ performance genres enacted on the British stage by male and female artists of the nineteenth and early twentieth century. Foundational in intent and chronological in approach, it foregrounds previously unknown or neglected performers, especially (though not exclusively) from Britain, whose respective contributions to these genres have seldom been recognized. Overall, the research highlights the rich complexity of these marginalized yet sophisticated performance practices that have been critically ignored within theatre historiography but which are still alive today.
We recently reported that cultural group membership may be a predictor of the likelihood that an individual will detect a faked accent in a recording. Here, we present follow-up data to our original study using a larger data set comprised of responses from the across the world. Our findings are in line with our previous work and suggest that native listeners perform better at this task than do non-native listeners overall, although with some between-group variation. We discuss our findings within the context of signals of trustworthiness and suggest future avenues of research.
Macedon and Qin are introduced, providing separate summary histories of these two polities, examining the differing types and quality of evidence for the study of each, examines the geographic and cultural location of these polities relative to their cores of their cultural networks, and argues for the usefulness of the center-periphery axiom in the study of these entities. Lastly, the nature of the Macedonian and Qin identity is explored, suggesting that prior attempts to define them as Greek/Zhou or not Greek/Zhou miss the clearer dynamic that they are frontier cultures. Their significant divergences from Greek and Zhou norms are explained by the same factors that cause colonial and frontier societies throughout human history to “deviate” from norms of a core culture. I also point out the significant ways in which their identities seek to preserve earlier cultural modes.
The organicism–mechanism divide continued. Darwin was a Newtonian and a mechanist. Herbert Spencer was a Romantic and an organicist. Thomas Henry Huxley denied full status to natural selection. Louis Agassiz continued to deny evolution. Henry Walter Bates used selection to explain mimicry. Amateurs explained industrial melanism. All accepted the fact of evolution. Darwin was honored by being buried in Westminster Abbey.
Previous research in the evolutionary and psychological sciences has suggested that markers or tags of ethnic or group membership may help to solve cooperation and coordination problems. Cheating remains, however, a problem for these views, insofar as it is possible to fake the tag. While evolutionary psychologists have suggested that humans evolved the propensity to overcome this free rider problem, it is unclear how this module might manifest at the group level. In this study, we investigate the degree to which native and non-native speakers of accents – which are candidates for tags of group membership – spoken in the UK and Ireland can detect mimicry. We find that people are, overall, better than chance at detecting mimicry, and secondly we find substantial inter-group heterogeneity, suggesting that cultural evolutionary processes drive the manifestations of cheater detection. We discuss alternative explanations and suggest avenues of further inquiry.
A satisfactory analysis of human deception must rule out cases where it is a mistake or an accident that person B was misled by person A's behavior. Therefore, most scholars think that deceivers must intend to deceive. This article argues that there is a better solution: rather than appealing to the deceiver's intentions, we should appeal to the function of their behavior. After all, animals and plants engage in deception, and most of them are not capable of forming intentions. Accordingly, certain human behavior is deceptive if and only if its function is to mislead. This solves our problem because if the function of A's behavior was to mislead, B's ending up misled was not an accident or a mere mistake even if A did not intend to deceive B.
The Stage Licensing Act of 1737 took aim chiefly at contemporary political satire and ad hominem satirical impersonations. But mimicry posed obvious challenges to a censorship system built upon pre-performance review of play texts because the impersonation is manifested in performance, not in the play script. Personal satire in the form of impersonation deserves more scrutiny than it has received because far from prohibiting mimicry on the eighteenth-century stage, the Licensing Act allowed it to flourish. If anything, it seems to have become more prevalent on the British stage after the law was passed than before. How did the law create conditions that increased the incident and impact of mimicry? When was the government spurred to take action against impersonation on the stage? And why did the government generally choose not to take any action regarding mimicry? The answers to these questions lie neither in the words of the law itself nor in the documentary record represented by the Larpent Collection. Looking at performance records and other sources, this essay examines the career of Tate Wilkinson to provide new insights into the relationship between impersonation and censorship.
This chapter considers how Samuel Johnson’s various disabilities shaped perceptions of him during his lifetime and continue to influence critical and biographical assessments of his personality, conversational prowess, and literary style. Given that modern conceptions of disability formed in the nineteenth century, I discuss why interpretations of Johnson’s mental and physical impairments might be better served by focusing on terms that were current in the eighteenth century, such as melancholy and peculiarity. Johnson’s friends and associates frequently commented on the “peculiarity” of his bodily movements. I examine episodes in which these peculiarities inspired people to stare at Johnson or to imitate him. These episodes reveal the deeper significance that eighteenth-century men and women ascribed to unusual and surprising forms of embodiment. I conclude by exploring the intriguing connections critics have made between Johnson’s “peculiar” body and his distinctive prose style.
Chapter 10 begins with an overview of previous, mostly telic treatments of play, contrasted with a “for its own sake,” paratelic approach.It discusses juvenile play, then adult play, including the play of animals in the wild.Much of the chapter focuses on language play, and on the function of play in conversation.The discussion throughout emphasizes the intrinsic motivation for play while acknowledging its contributions to individual and group homeostasis.
Empathy, the capacity to share and understand others’ states, is crucial for facilitating enduring social relationships and managing ingroup and outgroup dynamics. Despite being at the center of much scrutiny and debate in human research, the evolutionary foundations of empathy remain relatively opaque. Moreover, inconsistencies remain regarding definitions and theoretical models, leading to discrepancies in how to systematically represent and address empathy and understand its evolutionary basis. As a complex, multidimensional phenomenon, certain components of empathy are likely to be evolutionarily ancient whereas others may be more derived. As our closest living relatives, nonhuman primates provide an opportunity to explore the evolutionary origins of empathy and its subcomponents. Due to the rich diversity of primate societies, we can comparatively study evidence of affective responding and empathic behavior within the context of different social dynamics and organization. Although studies have been conducted on individual primate species, especially the great apes, direct species comparisons are rare. Here we examine the literature investigating evidence for empathy among primates focusing on its underlying affective and cognitive components. In reviewing the literature, we also highlight species that need more coverage to enhance our overall understanding of how empathy has evolved within the primate order.
This article will examine the parodic characterisation of the image of the beast (Rev 13.15) who mimics the two witnesses (11.3–12) from a literary perspective. There is evidence of this mimicry based on the appearance of the textual markers, εἰκών and πνεῦμα. This study will examine parody in relation to other parodic characterisations that appear in the Apocalypse.
This article aims to revisit the enterprise of the Chinese School (CS) of IR and discuss how it should be viewed and handled in the discipline, specifically from within the analytical framework of the power/resistance nexus put forward by Foucault, Bhabha, and Spivak. The argument of this article is twofold. Firstly, the CS attempts to reinvigorate traditional Chinese concepts (that is, humane authority, the Tianxia system, and relationality), which mimick Western mainstream IR. These concepts channel the CS into a realist notion of power, a liberal logic of cosmopolitanism, and a constructivist idea of relationality. Thus, the CS uses against the West concepts and themes that the West currently use against the non-Western world. Nevertheless, as the second part of the argument will demonstrate, the enterprise of the CS can still be justified because it can be regarded as a reverse discourse; mimicking yet altering the original meanings of the taken-for-granted concepts, ideas, and principles used by mainstream IR scholars. Moreover, with the judicious use of strategic essentialism, the CS can potentially be one local group in a wider effort to contest diffused and decentred forms of Western domination through linking various struggles to form a unified ‘counter-hegemonic bloc’ of post-Western IR in the discipline.
Chaapter 5 covers the impact of experience and past behavior on attitude and behavior change. In addition to experience, the influence of past behavior can be due to biased scanning, cognitive dissonance, and self-perception. Biased scanning entails forming attitudes on the basis of thoughts about specific information associated with the behavior. Cognitive dissonance entails a conflict between one’s attitude and one’s behavior and can lead to changing the attitude to resolve the inconsistency. Self-perception theory entails inferring one’s attitude from a past behavior that is salient at the time. These processes and supporting researach are described.
In recent years, scholars from a wide variety of disciplines have begun to study the process of emotional contagion. These disciplines include cultural psychology, anthropology, primatology, the neurosciences, biology, social psychology, and history. Primitive emotional contagion appears to be a basic building block of human interaction. It assists in “mind-reading” (allowing people to understand others’ thinking), sharing others’ emotions, as well as coordinating and synchronizing their activities with others.Primitive emotional contagion is also an important component of empathy. In this chapter we will discuss the many ways people can “mind-read” and feel themselves into others’ emotional experiences – especially those from disparate cultures and ethnic groups. We will also discuss the ways in which an understanding of the contagion process may be integrated into intercultural training programs. We begin by reviewing the theory of Emotional Contagion.
Chapter 1 argues that Victorian studies of animal mimicry and camouflage (known collectively as crypsis) resisted the hardening dichotomy between science and the arts. Researchers drew on their subjective perceptions, and art theories and techniques, to represent crypsis and recreate its illusions for readers. The first theorisers of ‘protective mimicry’, Henry Walter Bates and Alfred Russel Wallace, laced their writings with personal anecdotes of being deceived by animals’ appearances. Such narratives substituted for the imagined experiences of these animals’ predators and prey. It is proposed that these texts followed a pattern of perceptual self-scrutiny and suspended judgement that had been articulated by the art critic John Ruskin. Bates, Wallace and, even more, the Oxford zoologist Edward Bagnall Poulton also sought to simulate experiences of crypsis through illustrations. Accompanying text guided readers through the trompe l'oeil much as Ruskin’s ekphrastic prose guided the consumption of paintings. The tension between such artistic science and the rising ideal of objectivity came to a head in the controversial work of the American artist Abbott Handerson Thayer. Although Thayer made some lasting contributions to crypsis studies, his approach to nature as an artwork that only artists could understand provoked strong attacks from some zoologists.
Chapter 6 argues that evolutionary theories of crypsis and display served as models for thinking through the positions of disempowered, marginalised groups at the turn of the century. Israel Zangwill sometimes invoked protective mimicry to decry Jewish assimilation as the degenerate defence mechanism of helpless dependents. Persecution, he complained, had driven Jews to become invisible and, thus, alienated from their own nature. Conversely, Charlotte Perkins Gilman made sense of women’s perceived weakness via the conspicuous display of sexual selection. Gilman argued that women’s eye-catching, impractical clothes reflected their feeble dependence on men. Through their rhetoric of standing out and blending in, both authors sought to recover the imagined authentic essences of their group identities, which regimes of Gentile or male surveillance had repressed. Yet they also imagined this self-realisation being asserted through visual display. The intersubjectivity of display rendered it inherently inauthentic, mediated by arbitrary symbols. This contradiction caused Zangwill’s vision of Jewish self-realisation to vacillate between essentialism and anti-essentialism, between a return to pure origins and progression toward open-ended, heterogeneous identity. Gilman’s vision similarly vacillated between the restoration of a primordial female ‘modesty’ and the progressive transcendence of visible sex distinctions.
The Introduction outlines the historical context in which evolutionary theories of animal mimicry, concealment and display (grouped under the term ‘adaptive appearance’) emerged, and how they interacted with broader Victorian culture. It is argued that adaptive appearance constituted a shared discourse in which scientific arguments overlapped with more general ideas about appearance, perception and semiosis that can be traced in the period’s literature. Adaptive appearance was symbiotic with new models of communication that located meaning in receiver interpretations instead of sender intentions. In this way, it challenged the Cartesian binary between semiotic humans and mechanistic animals, suggesting that non-humans might be imagined as performers, deceivers and interpreters. This implication problematised the ideal of scientific objectivity, framing subjective perceptions and misperceptions as intrinsic to nature’s processes. Equally, adaptive appearance inspired reimaginings of human social interactions involving appearance and interpretation as biological processes instead of moral acts. It is suggested that, by materialising mind and meaning, adaptive appearance in some ways prefigured contemporary theories of biosemiotics and zoosemiotics. However, such discourse was not necessarily politically progressive. Adaptive appearance was ideologically adaptable, triggering different connotations for different observers, at once divine presence and absence, progress and degeneration, creative individuality and mindless conformity.
Revealing the web of mutual influences between nineteenth-century scientific and cultural discourses of appearance, Mimicry and Display in Victorian Literary Culture argues that Victorian science and culture biologized appearance, reimagining imitation, concealment and self-presentation as evolutionary adaptations. Exploring how studies of animal crypsis and visibility drew on artistic theory and techniques to reconceptualise nature as a realm of signs and interpretation, Abberley shows that in turn, this science complicated religious views of nature as a text of divine meanings, inspiring literary authors to rethink human appearances and perceptions through a Darwinian lens. Providing fresh insights into writers from Alfred Russel Wallace and Thomas Hardy to Oscar Wilde and Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Abberley reveals how the biology of appearance generated new understandings of deception, identity and creativity; reacted upon narrative forms such as crime fiction and the pastoral; and infused the rhetoric of cultural criticism and political activism.
This chapter explores the relationship between ICC interventions and efforts to reform the normative legal frameworks in Uganda, Kenya and the Democratic Republic of Congo with respect to atrocity crimes. It argues that it was less the ICC’s intervention or the desire to undertake domestic prosecutions that catalysed the passage of national implementation legislation in Uganda or Kenya; rather, implementation of the Statute was undertaken at certain political moments in order to ‘perform’ complementarity, typically for international audiences. But while the power of external constituencies was largely responsible for driving the implementation process, it often glossed over deeper concerns about the desirability of pursuing criminal accountability. The chapter also illustrates how the near identical importation of the Rome Statute’s substantive and procedural provisions reflects an increasingly disciplinary approach to implementation. By contrast, in the DRC, political mistrust in international judicial intervention not only thwarted the passage of comprehensive implementing legislation for many years, but appeared to encourage a more syncretic approach to implementation later on. Further, political contestation within the DRC was itself a catalyst that allowed other implementation strategies to take root, including the direct application of the Rome Statute by Congolese military judges in domestic proceedings.
This chapter examines the emergence of specialized domestic courts as a frequently cited outcome of ICC interventions. It highlights the shifting, adaptive nature of complementarity as the basis for reforming domestic judicial systems, even though the link between these efforts and the ICC itself is often tenuous. The chapter highlights how, in contexts like Uganda and Kenya, the threat of the ICC’s jurisdiction was used to prompt the setting up of domestic legal bodies and to buttress putative admissibility challenges. By contrast, recent descriptions depict these bodies more literally as extensions of the ICC: Rather than displacing the court, they are meant to complement and ‘complete’ its work. Non-state actors in the Democratic Republic of Congo have invoked complementarity in a similar manner, even though the domestic proceedings there through military courts are not materially connected to - nor the direct result of - the ICC’s undertakings. In tracing these shifts, the chapter considers complementarity’s duelling impulse towards conformity (specialized domestic courts often mimic the ICC) and competition (such courts are often in tension with the ‘ordinary’ justice system). I also suggest the concept of a ‘justice meme’ to understand how the perceived need for conformity with ICC practice is transmitted and replicated.