The didactic dimensions of maternal and juvenile actions as wild chimpanzee pups learn to crack nuts : Part Three: Situations from the subject’s point of view

Résumé 0

The article takes up the data and the argument of Géraldine Liger’s doctoral dissertation and proposes new interpretations, which are of interest to a comparative didactics seeking the evolutionary foundations of any didactic relationship, even below the level of language. The aim was to study how the technique of eating walnut kernels is learned by young wild chimpanzees in the Tai National Park, by studying the dynamics of their relationship to the objects involved in this action, by seeking to identify the dynamics of the mother’s actions and those of the youngster who is exposed to the maternal technique and will engage in this learning. The results that we draw from a systematic resumption of the observation data constructed for this dissertation allow us to recover the relevance of the first concepts of didactics, the science of the transmission of techniques (practices and knowledge), and to define methods for a comparative posture in didactics, because in principle the social ways of this transmission depend strongly on the properties of the techniques concerned. We dare to think that they can more generally contribute to the debates on the transmission of techniques in a social group of primates, human or not. The text is proposed in three parts entitled “Observing the transmission of a technique”, “The data: collection, coding, study”, “The situations, from the point of view of the subjects”; it thus claims to bring theoretical elements and principles of method that are not limited to the observed subjects, non-human primates.