ABSTRACT
Children’s drawings In my earlier work on children’s drawing, I discovered that the earliest markmaking and the later ‘scribbling’ was important in the formation of symbolic thought. I found that so-called ‘scribbling’ had structure, organisation and meaning. Soon I found that even scribbling was not the beginning of the story but had itself a developmental pre-history which stretched even further back in time. What people thought of as ‘scribbling’ turned out to be a rather sophisticated type of drawing, emerging relatively late on in developmental time. So, scribbling has predecessors. Now I wanted to go even further, back into deep time, to the origins of representational, expressive and symbolic thinking. In my child studies, I located the act of drawing within intellectual and emotional development as a whole. I realised that the role of play was crucial to development in symbolisation. I focused especial attention on the example of drawing but I located drawing within a background of trivial-seeming actions which had received little attention. These chaotic looking actions set the context for drawing. Note carefully that we are not here discussing drawings as depiction. Most other work (exceptions include Athey, 1990/2007; Bruce, 1987, 1991; Costall, 1993, 1995; Maurer & Riboni, 2010; Stamatopoulou, 2009; Wolf, 1983) habitually equates drawing with picturing and in doing so misses an opportunity to study a family of activities which accompany drawing and which are critically connected with it. These actions are usually considered extraneous and irrelevant to the act of drawing. On the contrary, I found that, to fully appreciate the meaning and signifi cance of the acts of drawing and writing, it was vital to study precursor actions which led toward symbolic thought. I wanted to show that expressive and representational thought was built gradually, incrementally, in a process involving evolution, development and learning. My work with children taught me that symbolisation was built slowly upon behaviours which were not initially symbolic in themselves. This approach to the dawning of semiotic thought is in contrast to a prevailing view at present that symbolic thought has no developmental or learned aspect. Currently, many psychologists think that representation is the province of human thought alone and that it appears ‘just like that’, as Alan Costall (2010, personal communication,
Tate Modern Art Gallery) aptly writes – the product of special ‘modules’ unique to the human brain (Leslie, 1987). The ideas contained within the present book do not fi t into this paradigm at all. Nor do my studies seem to fi t in with the idea that human learning is so vastly different from that of the chimpanzee. Tomasello, Kruger and Horn Ratner (1993) think that only humans consciously ‘teach’ their young but my observations challenge this, revealing some rather active, sensitive, and structured teaching offered to the young chimpanzee by those more experienced. In order to counter the prevailing notion that expression, representation and symbolic thought are unique to humans and just appeared ‘out of the blue’ I knew I had to look very carefully and in an unbiased way at both the child’s and the chimpanzee’s actions and interactions with the environment in a range of behaviours which had received scant attention. These were actions which, on the face of it, seemed trivial, chaotic and meaningless. The book focuses on a group of chimpanzees in a zoo but we immediately see in their world our own human society. We can see an eerie refl ection of the human family and how the child grows up within it and how his or her natural development and learning is supported. We can see our own, human condition; our moments of despair and transcendence. I thought that my 35 years or so of study of children’s drawing and play was complete. After learning about the chimpanzees I realised I was wrong. I had to start again. I had to start from scratch.
