Abstract
When Girard articulated the major tenets of mimetic theory, there was a considerable gap between his understanding of the primordial role of imitation in human life and the level of interest and research on imitation in cognitive and behavioral sciences. “Until the 1970s the term ‘imitation’ did not even appear as a keyword in reference bases such as Psychological Abstracts,” and “the existence of immediate imitation in development was hardly suspected and its role was ignored.” Since then, a dramatic surge of interest in imitation happened across a wide range of disciplines, producing unprecedented clarification of its elemental role in human life.
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Further Reading
Donald, Merlin. A Mind So Rare. New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2001.
Garrels, Scott, ed. Mimesis and Science: Empirical Research on Imitation and the Mimetic Theory of Culture and Religion. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2011.
Piaget, Jean. Play, Dreams, and Imitation in Childhood. New York: Norton, 1962.
Nadel, Jacqueline and George Butterworth, eds. Imitation in Infancy, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999.
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Garrels, S. (2017). Scientific Evidence for the Foundational Role of Psychological Mimesis. In: Alison, J., Palaver, W. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Mimetic Theory and Religion. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-53825-3_57
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-53825-3_57
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