Maran, Timo
University of Tartu, Department of Semiotics, Estonia
timo.maran@ut.ee

Zoosemiotics: History, Models, Challenges

Zoosemiotics as a field of semiotic scholarship has been around now for more than half a century. In my presentation I will give a short overview of the history of zoosemiotics, starting with the works of Thomas A. Sebeok and Heini Hediger in the 1960s. The development of zoosemiotic views can be shown to have taken place in interaction with animal-language experiments, cognitive ethology, biosemiotics and human-animal studies. I will give an overview of the theoretical premises of zoosemiotics and introduce Jakob v. Uexküll’s concept of Umwelt, Sebeok’s animal communication model, and Almo Farina’s concept of ecofield as the basic tools of zoosemiotic research. In the last decade the position of zoosemiotics has significantly changed due to the rise of interest in animals in the humanities. In the final part of my presentation I will discuss the challenges of contemporary zoosemiotic studies and show some potential applications of zoosemiotics for animal conservation and cultural/literary studies.