The Stage Licensing Act of 1737 took aim chiefly at contemporary political satire and ad hominem satirical impersonations. But mimicry posed obvious challenges to a censorship system built upon pre-performance review of play texts because the impersonation is manifested in performance, not in the play script. Personal satire in the form of impersonation deserves more scrutiny than it has received because far from prohibiting mimicry on the eighteenth-century stage, the Licensing Act allowed it to flourish. If anything, it seems to have become more prevalent on the British stage after the law was passed than before. How did the law create conditions that increased the incident and impact of mimicry? When was the government spurred to take action against impersonation on the stage? And why did the government generally choose not to take any action regarding mimicry? The answers to these questions lie neither in the words of the law itself nor in the documentary record represented by the Larpent Collection. Looking at performance records and other sources, this essay examines the career of Tate Wilkinson to provide new insights into the relationship between impersonation and censorship.

This chapter considers how Samuel Johnson’s various disabilities shaped perceptions of him during his lifetime and continue to influence critical and biographical assessments of his personality, conversational prowess, and literary style. Given that modern conceptions of disability formed in the nineteenth century, I discuss why interpretations of Johnson’s mental and physical impairments might be better served by focusing on terms that were current in the eighteenth century, such as melancholy and peculiarity. Johnson’s friends and associates frequently commented on the “peculiarity” of his bodily movements. I examine episodes in which these peculiarities inspired people to stare at Johnson or to imitate him. These episodes reveal the deeper significance that eighteenth-century men and women ascribed to unusual and surprising forms of embodiment. I conclude by exploring the intriguing connections critics have made between Johnson’s “peculiar” body and his distinctive prose style.

Chapter 10 begins with an overview of previous, mostly telic treatments of play, contrasted with a “for its own sake,” paratelic approach.It discusses juvenile play, then adult play, including the play of animals in the wild.Much of the chapter focuses on language play, and on the function of play in conversation.The discussion throughout emphasizes the intrinsic motivation for play while acknowledging its contributions to individual and group homeostasis.

Empathy, the capacity to share and understand others’ states, is crucial for facilitating enduring social relationships and managing ingroup and outgroup dynamics. Despite being at the center of much scrutiny and debate in human research, the evolutionary foundations of empathy remain relatively opaque. Moreover, inconsistencies remain regarding definitions and theoretical models, leading to discrepancies in how to systematically represent and address empathy and understand its evolutionary basis. As a complex, multidimensional phenomenon, certain components of empathy are likely to be evolutionarily ancient whereas others may be more derived. As our closest living relatives, nonhuman primates provide an opportunity to explore the evolutionary origins of empathy and its subcomponents. Due to the rich diversity of primate societies, we can comparatively study evidence of affective responding and empathic behavior within the context of different social dynamics and organization. Although studies have been conducted on individual primate species, especially the great apes, direct species comparisons are rare. Here we examine the literature investigating evidence for empathy among primates focusing on its underlying affective and cognitive components. In reviewing the literature, we also highlight species that need more coverage to enhance our overall understanding of how empathy has evolved within the primate order.

Chaapter 5 covers the impact of experience and past behavior on attitude and behavior change. In addition to experience, the influence of past behavior can be due to biased scanning, cognitive dissonance, and self-perception. Biased scanning entails forming attitudes on the basis of thoughts about specific information associated with the behavior. Cognitive dissonance entails a conflict between one’s attitude and one’s behavior and can lead to changing the attitude to resolve the inconsistency. Self-perception theory entails inferring one’s attitude from a past behavior that is salient at the time. These processes and supporting researach are described.

In recent years, scholars from a wide variety of disciplines have begun to study the process of emotional contagion. These disciplines include cultural psychology, anthropology, primatology, the neurosciences, biology, social psychology, and history. Primitive emotional contagion appears to be a basic building block of human interaction. It assists in “mind-reading” (allowing people to understand others’ thinking), sharing others’ emotions, as well as coordinating and synchronizing their activities with others.Primitive emotional contagion is also an important component of empathy. In this chapter we will discuss the many ways people can “mind-read” and feel themselves into others’ emotional experiences – especially those from disparate cultures and ethnic groups. We will also discuss the ways in which an understanding of the contagion process may be integrated into intercultural training programs. We begin by reviewing the theory of Emotional Contagion.

Chapter 1 argues that Victorian studies of animal mimicry and camouflage (known collectively as crypsis) resisted the hardening dichotomy between science and the arts. Researchers drew on their subjective perceptions, and art theories and techniques, to represent crypsis and recreate its illusions for readers. The first theorisers of ‘protective mimicry’, Henry Walter Bates and Alfred Russel Wallace, laced their writings with personal anecdotes of being deceived by animals’ appearances. Such narratives substituted for the imagined experiences of these animals’ predators and prey. It is proposed that these texts followed a pattern of perceptual self-scrutiny and suspended judgement that had been articulated by the art critic John Ruskin. Bates, Wallace and, even more, the Oxford zoologist Edward Bagnall Poulton also sought to simulate experiences of crypsis through illustrations. Accompanying text guided readers through the trompe l'oeil much as Ruskin’s ekphrastic prose guided the consumption of paintings. The tension between such artistic science and the rising ideal of objectivity came to a head in the controversial work of the American artist Abbott Handerson Thayer. Although Thayer made some lasting contributions to crypsis studies, his approach to nature as an artwork that only artists could understand provoked strong attacks from some zoologists.

Chapter 6 argues that evolutionary theories of crypsis and display served as models for thinking through the positions of disempowered, marginalised groups at the turn of the century. Israel Zangwill sometimes invoked protective mimicry to decry Jewish assimilation as the degenerate defence mechanism of helpless dependents. Persecution, he complained, had driven Jews to become invisible and, thus, alienated from their own nature. Conversely, Charlotte Perkins Gilman made sense of women’s perceived weakness via the conspicuous display of sexual selection. Gilman argued that women’s eye-catching, impractical clothes reflected their feeble dependence on men. Through their rhetoric of standing out and blending in, both authors sought to recover the imagined authentic essences of their group identities, which regimes of Gentile or male surveillance had repressed. Yet they also imagined this self-realisation being asserted through visual display. The intersubjectivity of display rendered it inherently inauthentic, mediated by arbitrary symbols. This contradiction caused Zangwill’s vision of Jewish self-realisation to vacillate between essentialism and anti-essentialism, between a return to pure origins and progression toward open-ended, heterogeneous identity. Gilman’s vision similarly vacillated between the restoration of a primordial female ‘modesty’ and the progressive transcendence of visible sex distinctions.

The Introduction outlines the historical context in which evolutionary theories of animal mimicry, concealment and display (grouped under the term ‘adaptive appearance’) emerged, and how they interacted with broader Victorian culture. It is argued that adaptive appearance constituted a shared discourse in which scientific arguments overlapped with more general ideas about appearance, perception and semiosis that can be traced in the period’s literature. Adaptive appearance was symbiotic with new models of communication that located meaning in receiver interpretations instead of sender intentions. In this way, it challenged the Cartesian binary between semiotic humans and mechanistic animals, suggesting that non-humans might be imagined as performers, deceivers and interpreters. This implication problematised the ideal of scientific objectivity, framing subjective perceptions and misperceptions as intrinsic to nature’s processes. Equally, adaptive appearance inspired reimaginings of human social interactions involving appearance and interpretation as biological processes instead of moral acts. It is suggested that, by materialising mind and meaning, adaptive appearance in some ways prefigured contemporary theories of biosemiotics and zoosemiotics. However, such discourse was not necessarily politically progressive. Adaptive appearance was ideologically adaptable, triggering different connotations for different observers, at once divine presence and absence, progress and degeneration, creative individuality and mindless conformity.

This chapter explores the relationship between ICC interventions and efforts to reform the normative legal frameworks in Uganda, Kenya and the Democratic Republic of Congo with respect to atrocity crimes. It argues that it was less the ICC’s intervention or the desire to undertake domestic prosecutions that catalysed the passage of national implementation legislation in Uganda or Kenya; rather, implementation of the Statute was undertaken at certain political moments in order to ‘perform’ complementarity, typically for international audiences. But while the power of external constituencies was largely responsible for driving the implementation process, it often glossed over deeper concerns about the desirability of pursuing criminal accountability. The chapter also illustrates how the near identical importation of the Rome Statute’s substantive and procedural provisions reflects an increasingly disciplinary approach to implementation. By contrast, in the DRC, political mistrust in international judicial intervention not only thwarted the passage of comprehensive implementing legislation for many years, but appeared to encourage a more syncretic approach to implementation later on. Further, political contestation within the DRC was itself a catalyst that allowed other implementation strategies to take root, including the direct application of the Rome Statute by Congolese military judges in domestic proceedings.

This chapter examines the emergence of specialized domestic courts as a frequently cited outcome of ICC interventions. It highlights the shifting, adaptive nature of complementarity as the basis for reforming domestic judicial systems, even though the link between these efforts and the ICC itself is often tenuous. The chapter highlights how, in contexts like Uganda and Kenya, the threat of the ICC’s jurisdiction was used to prompt the setting up of domestic legal bodies and to buttress putative admissibility challenges. By contrast, recent descriptions depict these bodies more literally as extensions of the ICC: Rather than displacing the court, they are meant to complement and ‘complete’ its work. Non-state actors in the Democratic Republic of Congo have invoked complementarity in a similar manner, even though the domestic proceedings there through military courts are not materially connected to - nor the direct result of - the ICC’s undertakings. In tracing these shifts, the chapter considers complementarity’s duelling impulse towards conformity (specialized domestic courts often mimic the ICC) and competition (such courts are often in tension with the ‘ordinary’ justice system). I also suggest the concept of a ‘justice meme’ to understand how the perceived need for conformity with ICC practice is transmitted and replicated.

This chapter discusses how and why emotions affect other people’s actions, appraisals and emotions. One popular explanation of interpersonal influence is primitive emotional contagion. According to this account, people arrive at similar emotional states because they copy one another’s gestures and expressions (mimicry). The feelings and sensations produced by these gestures and expressions then produce convergent emotional experiences (interoceptive feedback). However, mimicry effects are too selective and feedback effects too weak to make this process work consistently. An alternative process is social appraisal, which involves calibrating emotional orientations to objects or events in the shared environment. Most studies of social appraisal present participants with verbal or facial information about someone else’s emotion and assess their inferences about that information. However, relation alignment may also operate at a more implicit level when people adjust to each other’s developing object-directed signals and movements. Similar processes may also produce divergent or conflicting emotional orientations when two people approach the same event from different angles or interpret its consequences in different ways.