Project

The Prehistory of Camouflage and Mimicry: Adaptive Behavior, Acting, and Mimesis in Antiquity, the 18th Century, and the Early Stages of Evolution Theory in the 1860s.

Code
bof/baf/4y/2024/01/380
Duration
01 January 2024 → 31 December 2025
Funding
Regional and community funding: Special Research Fund
Research disciplines
  • Humanities and the arts
    • Acting
    • Theatre
    • Theatre and performance not elsewhere classified
Keywords
Mimicry & Mimesis 19th Century Evolutionary Theory 18th- Century Acting theory
 
Project description

Animals adapt their appearance and behavior to their environment to avoid detection. In the life sciences this animal behavior was theorized by Wallace, Darwin and Bates as camouflage (the adaptation of an animal's appearance to its non-animal surroundings); and as mimicry, today distinguished as crypsis (disguise to avoid detection) and masquerade (disguise to avoid recognition). The first definitions by Darwin and Wallace already show a striking use of theatrical and artistic terms such as imitation, bluffing, acting, and masquerade, to describe animal, and by extension human, mimicry. This project investigates the origins of the connections between camouflage, mimicry, and the theater, by mapping the theatrical dimension of theories about mimetic behavior in human and non-human animals before and next to the theory of evolution. Taking its departure from a conceptualization of human camouflage and mimicry as cultural techniques, this project explores in what manners these can related to (1) the broad cultural application of the word 'mimeisthai' (to imitate’/‘to portray’) in Ancient Greece, and (2) the debate in 18th-century acting theories where camouflage and mimicry are constantly used to theorize theatrical mimesis and in particular acting.