Dominique Lestel

Knot tying in great apes: etho-ethnology of an unusual tool behavior

The authors intend to show in this article that, unlike what is usually said, some great apes are able to tie knots. First, they give the result of a survey on the Internet whose result has been to identify twelve “knot-maker” apes: seven orangutans, three bonobos and two chimpanzees. All of them have been reared by humans and are highly accultured anthropoids living in zoos. Second, they offer an ethnography of a knot-making orangutan, Wattana, a resident of the Ménagerie of the Jardin deśum National d’Histoire Naturelle) in Paris, who was born on 17 November 1995 at the Antwerp Zoo in Belgium. The authors show that she is able to make true knots using her hands, feet and mouth and carefully describe the process involved. They then correlate Wattana’s knots, fiber techniques and ecology of techniques with nest-making behavior and propose an ethology of the singular, at the crossroad of ethology and ethnology, to describe Wattana’s skills.

The Biosemiotics and Phylogenesis of Culture

The question of animal cultures has once again become a subject of debate in ethology, and is now one of its most active and problematic areas. One surprising feature of this research, however, is the lack of attention paid to the communications that go on in these complex animal societies, with the exception of mechanisms of social learning. This neglect of communications is all the more troubling because many ethologists are unwilling to acknowledge that animals have cultures precisely because they do not possess language, a refusal therefore on semiotic grounds. In the present article, I show that the biosemiotic approach to animal cultures is, on the contrary, essential to their understanding, even if the complexity of animal communications is far from being well enough understood. I consider that some of the consequences of this approach are very important, in particular the question of whether we can talk about subjects in the case of animals. Alternatively, I suggest that the semiotic approach to animal cultures leads to a discussion of some of the most serious limitations of biosemiotics, particularly when it comes to investigating the status of the interlocutors in a social community, or to taking into account interspecific communications and the social dimension of any biosemiotic interaction - which biosemiotics has for the moment failed to do. Finally I call attention to the importance of animals living in human communities and suggest that this be studied so as to better apprehend the capacities for culture in non-human living organisms.

The Phenomenology of Animal Life

This paper presents a bi-constructivist approach to the study of animal life, which is opposed to the realist-Cartesian paradigm in which most ethology operates. The method is elaborated through the examples of a knot-tying orangutan in a Paris zoo and chile-eating cats in a New York apartment. We show that, when grounded in the operational framework of the phenomenological approach, the interpretation of animal life acquires a much more robust character than is usually supposed. How does animal life enter the sphere of interpretation? The question is double-pronged. It is a matter of understanding what it means that an animal life requires interpretation, and also what a human life means such that it can be not only transformed by the interpretation of animal lives, but also enriched. The majority of approaches that seek to study animal behaviour today either fail to ask this question, or if they do ask it, fail to deploy any of the means that would enable them to answer it. Animal life is thus excised from the play of significance and enclosed in a realm of physical machines paired to inaccessible qualia. However, interpreting the meaning of nonhuman comportment is not only possible, but a much needed task that deepens human experience. In the following pages we show that, when grounded in the operational framework of the phenomenological approach, the interpretation of animal life acquires a much more robust character than is usually supposed.

What Capabilities for the Animal

In this essay, I defend a bi-constructivist approach to ethology—a constructivist ethology assuming that each animal adopts constructivist strategies. I put it in opposition to what I call a realist-Cartesian approach, which is currently the dominant approach to ethology and comparative psychology. The starting point of the bi-constructivist approach can be formulated as a shift from the classical Aristotelian question “What is an animal?” to the Spinozean question, which is much less classical but which seems to me to be much stronger: “What are the capacities of the animal?”. Is it possible to conceptualize an ethology which insists on interpretation and therefore on invention, innovation and creativity, rather than on causality, the monotony of behavioural routines, and/or genetic or environmental determination? Such an ethology would be based not on the fiction of an absent observer but on fully recognizing the necessity of an observer, who is effectively present in order to get an observation. A pluralistic ethology does not dissociate itself from the marginal epistemologies of practitioners like animal trainers, hunters, stockbreeders etc., or, moreover, non-western experts. An ethology of this kind is not clamped within the boundaries of purely academic epistemology, obsessed by demarcation lines between the human and the animal. My work on the bi-constructivist approach represents a contribution towards the elaboration of an authentically biosemiotic ethology, one which is significantly different from the mechanical ethology of today.

Tools, techniques and animals : The role of mediations of actions in the dynamics of social behaviours

The definition of tool proposed by Beck (1980) is still the one referred to in ethology when discussing the question of tool-use in animals, and its pertinence is rarely questioned. However, observations on technical behaviours in animals have multiplied over the last 20 years, and these have profoundly altered our earlier representations. In the present article, we show that Becks definition is insufficient and that it does not, in fact, work. More generally, we replace a theory of tools with a theory of mediations of actions to account for technical behaviours in animals. We show that a culturally overcharged notion such as that of tool hinders our perception of the diversity and the complexity of tool uses. By speaking of mediations of actions and not of tools, we eliminate the problem of first defining the pertinent object (is it a tool or not?) and are free to concentrate on the means by which the animal externalizes its actions and thus procures greater means of acting on these within a group. In so doing, we prepare the ground for a genuine evolutionary understanding of the dynamics of actions within a given animal population. Whereas, with a few exceptions, ethologists have always separated the question of techniques from that of social behaviour, we emphasize the importance of an ecology of mediations of actions for understanding the structure and dynamics of animal societies, in particular by attempting to rethink such notions as “culture” in the perspective of a general analysis of mediations of actions.

The withering of shared life through the loss of biodiversity

The article defends a conception of ecology that considers what ecosystems mean not only in themselves but also for themselves. Each living being is thus a message for another living being, and not merely a functional piece in a physical process of energy exchange or in an evolutionary process in which individual reproduction is all that counts. The article deems that the hatred of the animal kingdom characteristic of Western history and the resulting atrophy of our imagination of the living world explain our blindness. The author suggests Westerners should be more open to non-Western ways of thinking, which might help overcome their difficulty in thinking through the existential, ethical and cultural stakes involved in the present collapse of biodiversity.

Shared life: An introduction

Humans form their self-representations not in opposition to animals, as all Western histories of human evolution recount, but with them and through them. In other words, to be human does not mean to have fled animality, but on the contrary to live within it and to let it live within us. The phenomenon of shared life is, then, a problem of spillover and not one of hunting, breeding, domestication, or pets. It concerns human existence itself and, more widely, existence in general. A shared life implies becoming oneself while being other. Since antiquity, Westerners have lived in a culture that has constantly insisted on the man/animal opposition. Today, probing the convergences and proximity of all life is a major task; the issue of life in common is an attempt, among others, to do so. This problem’s central point of departure is not that we must cohabit with others, but that we are the others and the others are us. Therefore, the challenge is how we might consider the specificity of the human in proximity to other living beings (including plants and fungi) rather than setting strict boundaries. It is therefore wrong to say that we live with animals; it is more correct to say that we are animals and animals are us. The pertinent metaphor is not one of immigrants who must be welcomed but rather the fingers of a hand; in other words, one must consider humans and animals in terms of inseparable difference (Lestel, 2013). The animal question entails the full recognition of our existential physiology, which we share with living beings on earth. Thus, a shared life is more precisely a shared existence – a life that is always lived together from the perspective of the first-person point of view, and with the implied second-person point of view for all living beings (although it could mean otherwise). What is clear, however, is that no life is constituted from the point of view of the third person – even if that is the perspective privileged in Western culture. Life is fundamentally metabolic on the one hand and existential on the other.

Non-human artistic practices: A challenge to the social sciences of the future

The article suggests that the phylogenic basis for contemporary Western artistic practices lies in a social practice of the distinctive features found in the species, as seen in certain birds and mammals. Using the cases of birdsong, ape-paintings, knot-tying in certain orangutans and the intriguing stone-handling of some monkeys, the article shows that the question of non-human artistic practices is not only largely unexplored, but that contemporary ethology and psychology are still incapable of really tackling the problem. More generally, some of the problems encountered stem from the fact that one conception of the social sciences was constructed in opposition to the animal, leaving the study of the latter to biology. In this perspective, the study of artistic activity in non-human animals is a true challenge for the social sciences of the future.

The metaphors of complexity: the language and cognitive resources of artificial life

The use of computers has opened access to complex phenomena for the comprehension of which no operational narrative traditions are available. Notions of “life”, “cognition” and “intelligence” constitute metaphors and procedures for description and understanding that make it possible to discuss these phenomena, however. They represent cognitive resources for scientists. Why do computer scientists “play” at being biologists, and why do they view it as essential to naturalize their artifacts? When this question is taken as the starting point, it becomes possible to outline what an anthropological study of relations to complexity might look like. For “artificial life”, the outcome is a faustian attitude, implying the creation not of life, pure and simple, but of all possible forms of life. Most importantly, this “Godly discourse” goes along with the development of a truly astonishing object — self-modifiable, adaptable and evolutionary mimetic programs. There is no place for these surprising artifacts in the narrative traditions by means of which scholars may describe and account for them. To examine the all-pervasive but constantly denied language-related dimension of experimentation in artificial life, in an attempt to reach a more intimate understanding of how a purely playful technical project may be transformed into a grandiose metaphysical program, points to two major characteristics of such discourse, which have attracted little attention so far: its insistence on staging parallel, manipulatable and acceleratable temporal sequences for the phenomena observed, as well as an obdurate, painstaking will to exclude everything human from these worlds, which must be perfectly and even hermetically sealed off, this being perceived as a precondition for real life. One direct consequence of these radical positions is that they cut off artificial life from its richest heritage, and in particular from its forefathers in the world of art. One major consequence of this research on artificial life is the reformulation of where we cross boundaries in our culture, and rethinking the status of human beings.

Portrait de l'animal comme sujet

RésuméDe nombreux philosophes anglo-saxons de tradition analytique nient qu’un animal puisse penser, ou qu’on puisse accéder à sa subjectivité. Nous développons une réponse alternative. La légitimité d’une évaluation de l’intelligence de l’animal repose d’abord sur une familiarité acquise à son contact au cours d’une histoire partagée. Elle est propre à celui qui vit avec un animal mais aussi à l’expert qui a acquis une connaissance de l’animal à la suite d’une pratique professionnelle élaborée. C’est parce que nous interagissons avec l’animal comme s’il était un sujet que nous sommes prêts à lui accorder une intelligence susceptible de rendre intelligibles nos relations avec lui. L’intelligence d’un même animal n’est pas fixée une fois pour toutes. Elle est en partie dépendante des dispositifs humains dans lesquels elle se trouve impliquée. La question d’une véritable zoologie se pose, qui étudie l’intelligence du vivant dans la perspective des sciences sociales aussi bien que dans celle de la biologie.AbstractNumerous Anglo-Saxon philosophers in the analytic tradition deny that an animal can think, or that we can ever acceed to its subjectivity. The legitimacy of an evaluation of animal intelligence depends on a long-acquired familiarity through a contact with the animal. This familiarity is double. It is first a daily one of the person who lives with an animal. It is also one which is one’s own, that of the expert’s one who has acquired a knowledge of the animal following an elaborated professional practice. It is because we interact with the animal as if it were a subject to which we are repared to grant on intelligence capable of making our relations with it intelligible. In addition we suggest that the animal’s intelligence is partially dependent on the human apparatus in which it finds itself implicated.ZusammenfassungViele angelsächsische Philosophen aus der analytischen Tradition bestreiten, daß Tiere denken können oder daß man jemals einen Zugang zu ihrer Subjektivität finden kann. Grundlage für die Bewertung der tierischen Intelligenz ist die Vertrautheit, die über lange Zeit hinweg im Umgang mit dem Tier entstanden ist, im Laufe einer gemeinsam erlebten Geschichte. Diese Vertrautheit hat zwei Aspekte. Zunächst handelt es sich um die tägliche Vertrautheit desjenigen, der mit einem Tier zusammenlebt. Es ist aber auch die Vertrautheit des Experten, der das Tier infolge einer langen Berufspraxis kennengelernt hat. Nur weil wir mit dem Tier wie mit einem Subjekt umgehen sind wir bereit, ihm eine Intelligenz zuzubilligen, die es ermöglicht, unsere Beziehung zu ihm verständlich zu machen. Darüber hinaus suggerieren wir, daß die Intelligenz des Tieres zum Teil von den vom Menschen konstruierten Vorrichtungen abhängt, mit denen sie in Verbindung gebracht wird.RiassuntoMolti filosofi anglo-sassoni di tradizione analitica negano che un animale possa pensare, o che si possa mai accedere alla sua soggettività. La legittimità di una valutazione dell’intelligenza dell’animale e fondata su una famigliarità ottenuta da un lungo periodo di contatto con esso, nel corso di una storia condivisa Questa famigliarità è doppia. In primo luogo è quella, quotidiana, della persona che vive con l’animale. Ma è anche quella dell’esperto che ha conosciuto l’animale in seguito ad una pratica professionale. Proprio perchè interagiamo con l’animale come se fosse un soggetto, siamo allora pronti a accordargli un’intelligenza suscettibile di rendere intelligibili i nostri rapporti con lui. Inoltre, formuliamo l’ipotesi che l’intelligenza dell’animale sia in parte dipendente dai dispositivi umani nei quali egli si trova coinvolto.