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.
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© 2012 Edith Turner
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Turner, E. (2012). Contrasts: Communitas and False Communitas. In: Communitas. Contemporary Anthropology of Religion. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137016423_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137016423_2
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
Print ISBN: 978-0-230-33908-8
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-01642-3
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