Contrasts: Communitas and False Communitas

Abstract

Scientific studies confirm humankind’s innate capacity to recognize a relationship of communitas. In the late 1970s, Colwyn Trevarthen, a child neurologist at the School of Neurobiology at Edinburgh University, found that babies at two months old can recognize their mothers in a live picture on two-way television, which provides warm interactive communication between baby and mother. The babies can distinguish between two things: seeing their mothers live, and seeing a delayed replay, a mere copy of the sight of their mothers in an “off the mark” communication. Many repeated tests involving two-way television and volunteer mothers with their babies have shown that babies can indeed distinguish the live image from the replay. Here are excerpts from two of Trevarthen’s articles.