One of my pupils sent me the following cartoon. It’s indeed quite a fun way of summarizing some basic intuitions of mimetic theory. Some sort of scapegoating is transmitted, mimetically, ritualistically even, since one monkey became guilty by association – in illo tempore…

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Although this cartoon shouldn’t have any scientific pretensions, it seems nevertheless inspired by an experiment carried out in the late sixties by Gordon R. Stephenson (Stephenson, G. R. (1967), Cultural Acquisition of a Specific Learned Response Among Rhesus Monkeys – In: Starek, D., Schneider, R., and Kuhn, H. J. (eds.), Progress in Primatology, Stuttgart: Fischer, pp. 279-288).

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CULTURAL ACQUISITION OF A SPECIFIC LEARNED RESPONSE AMONG RHESUS MONKEYS (PDF)