COTTON UNIVERSITY
Department and Environmental Biology and Wildlife Sciences cordially
invites you to a talk entitled
Gestural Communication of Wild Bonnet Macaques *Macaca radiata* in the
Bandipur National Park, Southern India
*by *
Dr Shreejata Gupta
SERB-National Post Doctoral Fellow. She will soon join the Department of
Environmental Biology and Wildlife Sciences, CCSU as a postdoctoral
research scholar
*Co-ordinated by Narayan Sharma, Head i/c, Department of EB&WLS, CCSU*
Conference Hall, MCB Building at 1500 hr on Tuesday, April 25, 2017
*ALL INTERESTED ARE WELCOME*
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*Abstract*
Human language is probably one of the most mysterious and intriguing of all
behavioural expressions in the living world. Although language is mostly
viewed as expressed through spoken words, a crucial component of human
language also comprises gestural acts. Gestures are communicative signals
performed through limb-, head- and/or body-movements. Moreover, gestures
are produced in order to achieve an intended goal, thus, being more complex
as a cognitive phenomenon in contrast to innate signals. It has been
hypothesised that gestural communication is an evolutionarily older
phenomenon, which developed much earlier than did speech in the modern
human lineage. Gestural communication has also been suggested to lie at the
roots of language producing capacities in humans. It is therefore logical
to assume that such gestural communication exists in other nonhuman
primates (primates) as well. Over the past few decades, systematic methods
used to study human gestures have been applied to investigate gestural
communication in apes, primates genetically closest to humans. Observations
have revealed remarkable similarities between apes and humans in terms of
flexible production, intentional use and arguably, even referential use of
gestures. There remain, however, significant gaps in various parameters
such as iconic and symbolic gesturing. In non-ape species, as, for
instance, monkeys, gestural communication has rarely been studied and not
always following the definitions standardised for apes. Thus, there is a
mismatch in the comparative understanding of gestures in apes and non-apes,
given the lack of common ground, an enterprise essential to trace out
language-like markers in the primate lineage. I provide fundamental
insights in this regard through my doctoral research that attempted to
understand the gestural communication system of bonnet macaques, an Old
World monkey species endemic to peninsular India, in the Bandipur National
Park of Karnataka state. I have defined the gestural repertoire of this
species following the criteria established in ape gestural research,
investigated age and sex differences in gesture use by individual macaques
and, finally, tried to understand the developmental processes underlying
their ontogeny. The results of my study indicate that bonnet macaques do
gesture in ways similar to those of apes, although with distinct
characteristics of their own. This thesis is, thus, a first step in an
endeavour to fill the gaps that have existed in our knowledge of nonhuman
primate gestures, a field in its infancy, and especially so by bridging the
ape and non-ape worlds of gestural communication.
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narayan sharma phd
assistant professor and head i/c
department of environmental biology and wildlife sciences
cotton college state university
pan bazar, guwahati - 781001, assam
phone: +91 78969 51705
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