This piece, by Christian Sheppard for Sightings (Martin Marty Center at the University of Chicago), may be of interest to some RLL readers. Sheppard is co-editor of Mystics: Presence and Aporia (University of
Chicago
Press, 2003) and is currently completing a memoir on mourning the death
of his
father after the death of God.
Sightings 5/13/10
Ape
Pietà
--
Christian Sheppard
Two
new ethological studies tell us how chimpanzees grieve, raising doubts about
the uniqueness of human mourning as well as, perhaps, the superfluity of
religious practice. Laboratory scientists in Scotland have made
unprecedented close observations of captive chimpanzees reacting to a long-time
group member’s death and conclude that “without death-related symbols or
rituals, chimpanzees show several behaviors that recall human responses to the
death of a close relative.” Behaviors displayed by these chimps before,
during, and after the death of one elderly female include “respect, care,
anticipatory grief,” “test for pulse or breath,” “attempted resuscitation,”
“denial, feelings of anger toward the deceased,” “night-time vigil,”
“consolation, social support,” “disturbed sleep,” “cleaning the body,” “grief,
mourning,” and, finally, “leaving objects or places associated with the
deceased untouched.” After meticulously detailing the deathbed scene of
this beloved chimp grandmother, these scientists are provoked to ask, “Are
humans uniquely aware of mortality?” It has long been known that
chimpanzees, like humans, possess self-awareness, but that chimpanzees are also
aware of their mortality is news that profoundly alters our own self-awareness.
Our grief could be a sign, not of our humanity, but that we are apes.
Meanwhile,
out of Africa comes other news to further refine awareness of our essential
ape-ness. Field ethologists in Bossou, Guinea have studied one wild chimpanzee
group’s macabre cultural tradition of “corpse-carrying”: “The carrying of
infants' corpses has been reported from a number of primate species, both in
captivity and the wild — albeit usually lasting a few days only — suggesting a
phylogenetic continuity for a behavior that is poignant testament to the close
mother-infant bond which extends across different primate taxa.”
Corpse-carrying, like other signs of grief, may point to an awareness of
mortality, but in Bossou grieving mothers have been observed carrying and
caring for their children’s bodies over two months after death.
“Corpse-carrying may have become something of a Bossou
"tradition", admits Bossou’s lead-scientist Dora Biro, suggesting
that one chimp mother may have learned to carry her dead infant from another
mother, who had been observed performing the behavior twice before. It
seems that chimpanzees not only grieve like us, but like us, they also invent
traditions to deal with their grief. Further ethological work in the lab
and field may someday reveal what such culturally transmitted traditions mean
for chimpanzees, but for humans, it is apparent that we are not the only beings
who mourn.
Moreover,
we ought to ponder the significance of the fact that chimpanzees, aware of
their mortality, grieve and mourn without religious symbol or ritual.
While some might be tempted to interpret our fellow apes' mourning behaviors as
a sign of some kind of nascent religiosity (although thereby complicating the
claim that religion is uniquely human), these studies can be understood as
undermining altogether the role of religion in our response to death.
Perhaps now better aware of our essential ape-ness in regards to death,
grief, and mourning, traditional religious responses can be discarded as
inessential. Let the uncanny image of a chimpanzee mother tenderly toting
her weather-mummified infant through primordial jungle (http://divinity.uchicago.edu/martycenter/publications/sightings/images/chimpanzee.jpg)
be our post-Darwinian pietà, a post-religious icon to unfix our gaze from such
traditional religious images as Mary mourning over her crucified son.
Where, for example, Michelangelo’s famous statue in Rome emphasizes the
pitiful death of Jesus all the more to anticipate His resurrection and to
promise believers their own eventual eternal triumph over death, our ape pietà
offers no transcendental context, no after-life, no resurrection, no “good
news” (for that matter, no reincarnation and no nirvana), no means of escape
from our primal tearful awareness of our mortality. So observing our
chimpanzee kin raises our awareness of life’s amazing, wonderful variety, as
well as life’s fearful finitude.
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