ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the concept of zoomimesis – human imitation of animals that is grounded in meticulous observation of animal behaviors and that deeply influences human behavior and culture. Zoomimesis is an interpretation not a reproduction, which is to say a transformation in one's own being in the prospect of reflecting the other, exactly like an oak that is capable of reflecting the environment, or the geography of radiation, conforming it to its own foliage. The capacity/tendency to enter into accord with external reality seems to be a foundational characteristic of human beings that incorporates alterity into identity, refiguring it through a representation centered on one's own body. Mimesis, as an aspect characterizing the human being in a hybrid sense, opens us to ways of reading anthropopoiesis – that human doing that cannot but be shaped in culture – that repudiate the idea of an identitary emergence as self-referential process.
