(chimpanzee) "politics"

[Joel S. Berson]

At 1/14/2010 09:29 AM, Jonathan Lighter wrote:
>What makes you so sure?

Because you are an intelligent and reasonable man.  And I only said
"suspect".  :-)

More seriously, I don't own and haven't read de Waal's "Chimpanzee
Politics", which presumably goes into some detail. But I do have
"Chimpanzee Cultures" (one of whose editors is de Waal), which is
later and has in its index one entry "politics, chimpanzee, 271-2"
and another "political block, 252" (as in "party" or "faction").  De
Waal writes about "flexible, opportunistic coalition strategies" (p.
252); the table on that page enumerates a number of different
coalitions.  And the section on chimpanzee politics (in a chapter by
Jan A.R.A.M. van Hoof) is headed "Planning, Calculation, and
Reciprocity in Social Manipulation."

Joel


>JL
>
>
>
>
>On Wed, Jan 13, 2010 at 11:38 PM, Joel S. Berson <Berson at att.net> wrote:
>
> > ---------------------- Information from the mail header
> > -----------------------
> > Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> > Poster:       "Joel S. Berson" <Berson at ATT.NET>
> > Subject:      Re: "politics"
> >
> >
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
> >
> > At 1/13/2010 11:17 PM, Jonathan Lighter wrote:
> > >No need to conjecture on why they should think that, but the word has
> > >clearly suffered an extraordinary semantic pejoration.
> >
> > I suspect (not having read in particular "Chimpanzee Politics", but
> > rather other books by de Waal; a 1994 one is called "Chimpanzee
> > Cultures") that you will be convinced by him that "politics" is the
> > right word to describe behavior such as the alliances that chimps
> > form for various purposes.
> >
> > Joel
> >
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