Mimesis and rituals in the historical anthropology of Gunter Gebauer and Christoph Wulf
Gunter Gebauer and Christoph Wulf have founded historical anthropology, together with their German colleagues. Their transdisciplinary perspective bears the ambition to study the historical and cultural multiplicity of human experience. We present here the theoretical foundations of this historical anthropology through the concepts of mimesis and ritual. For these German scholars, mimetic action stands at the root of the diverse social and cultural life-forms. With the hypothesis that they put forward, rituals are corporeal and symbolic acts acquired through mimetism.