Mimesis and developing models of self and other

Abstract

Based on literatures of child development, along with data collected in two long-term studies in the American Northwest and Samoa, this article argues that developing children copy images that represent models for self that caretakers mime for them through face and body language and through “attachment practices,” which enact and also affectively charge a self-model. Caretakers enact a cultural model of alterity through “separation practices,” shared ways of distancing children that likewise lend affective force to such models. Parallel practices in adolescence and young adulthood insure ongoing mimicry of these models and the sense of self and other that they entail. Developmental psychologists explore imitative processes as these bear on interpreting emotions, gestures, sights, words and object uses, and the formation of image schemas but have not investigated how culturally specific models of self and other are internalized through early mimicry and through mimetic interactions between little ones and their caretakers. Anthropologists have long investigated both mimesis and cultural models but not how models of self and other are internalized through mimesis. My data imply that to understand development in cross-cultural perspective, studies are needed that compare early and enduring forms of visual interchange between caretakers and little ones.