Animal Umwelten in a Changing world: Zoosemiotic Perspectives

Abstract

Animals are. A multitude of diff erent species surrounds us in our everyday doings, and infl uences our behaviour and culture. Dogs and cats develop delicate and personal relationships with the families they belong to. Swans and geese are waiting to be fed by passers-by. Th e wing-strokes of doves and jackdaws give a subtle ephemeral atmosphere to our cities. Spiders, snails and snakes are met with surprise or disgust. Beavers are blamed for reshaping the landscapes, and wolves for killing livestock. People and animals engage and interact in a number of ways: from hunting and fi shing to bird-watching, from the help provided by assistance dogs to family holidays in zoological gardens and animal parks. Children's fi rst encounters with the written word oft en take place through animal stories. And many fi ctional animal characters are known and internationally celebrated by name: Lassie, Moby Dick, Bambi, King Kong, etc. None of these interactions would be possible without semiotic processes: perception, communication and interpretation occurring between humans and animals. Sign relations or mediated relations that connect humans with other animal species are the very subject of this collective monograph. We make an inquiry into the semiotic character of diff erent species, study the ways in which humans endow animals with meaning, and analyse how animal sign exchange and communication has coped with environmental change. In this research, our core disciplinary framework is zoosemiotics, the semiotic study of animals-the paradigm that was proposed by the eminent American-Hungarian semiotician Th omas A. Sebeok in the 1960s and that recently had its fi ft ieth anniversary. Our approach is essentially semiotic and biosemiotic. At the same time, we engage in dialogues with ecocriticism, Actor-Network Th eory, posthumanism and other contemporary schools of the humanities, as well as with more practically oriented research topics in visitor studies, animal welfare studies and humananimal studies, not to forget ethology and conservation biology. Th is book is a collective eff ort. Its authors belong to the research group in zoosemiotics and human-animal relations based in the Department of Semiotics at the University of Tartu in Estonia, and at the University of Stavanger in Norway. Th e two opening chapters are written and edited collectively and present a framework of philosophical, historical, epistemological and methodological matters of zoosemiotic research. Th ese initial considerations are followed by specifi c case studies that have been conducted by individual authors. Th e specifi c chapters, however, have been cross-edited and commented on by other TIMO MARAN ET AL

Everything seems so settled here: The conceivability of post-Peircean biosemiotics

“…This is not limited to Peirce's concept of the sign, though. Aside from the sign and its methodological usefulness, there are other elements of Peirce's philosophy that are attractive to some areas of biosemiotics, such as the firstness/secondness/ thirdness triad of categories as ontological support for the concept of the sign in order to argue for the emergence of semiosis (Emmeche 2011;El-Hani et al 2009) or as a type of phenomenal categorization to explain specific semiotic phenomena (Maran 2016), to name only a couple of notable examples.…”