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Displaying: 21-40 of 45 documents


cultural ecosemiotics
21. Sign Systems Studies: Volume > 29 > Issue: 1
Christina Ljungberg Metsik loodus ökosemiootilises perspektiivis. Kokkuvõte
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22. Sign Systems Studies: Volume > 29 > Issue: 1
Svend Erik Larsen Nature between fact and fiction: A note on virtual reality
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The paper places the trendy notion of virtuality and virtual reality in a conceptual and historical context that makes it useful in a semiotic perspective. Virtuality is connected with the classical notion of fictionality, in its meaning of both invention and deception. Historically an active, a passive, and a neutral version of the concept can be distinguished. The notion is reinterpreted as a variant of the semiotic processes of deixis. In relation to nature - scenarios, prognoses, hypotheses, etc. - virtuality is seen as a means of anchoring the human subject in nature instead of constructing a nonreal universe separated from it.
23. Sign Systems Studies: Volume > 29 > Issue: 1
Svend Erik Larsen Loodus fakti ja väljamõeldise vahel: tähelepanek virhlaalse reaalsuse kohta. Kokkuvõte
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24. Sign Systems Studies: Volume > 29 > Issue: 1
Andreas Roepstorff Thinking with animals
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A central claim of biosemiotics is the ascription of semiotic competence to nonhumans. For strange historical reasons, this claim has been quite controversial in much of standard biological discourse. An analysis of ethnographic material from Greenland demonstrates that people regard animals as nonhuman "persons". i.e., as sensing and thinking beings. Like humans. animals are supposed to have knowledge about their environment. Taking this semiotic competence as a fact beyond any doubt enables skilled hunters and fishermen to rely not only on their own interpretation of the environment. but also on the animals' interpretation of their environment The behaviour of fish, seals, and land animals, meditated by their acknowledged semiotic competence, can thus be interpreted as giving signs about the behaviour, e.g., of whales and icebergs. This a priori ascription of semiotic competence is also apparent in discussions about management and regulation of animals. Rather than discussing whether "the stock" is depleted, much of the discourse among fishermen and hunters focuses on whether animals can be semiotically disturbed by what people are doing.
25. Sign Systems Studies: Volume > 29 > Issue: 1
Andreas Roepstorff Mõeldes koos loomadega. Kokkuvõte
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semiotic perspectives of the ecological crisis and globalization
26. Sign Systems Studies: Volume > 29 > Issue: 1
Max Oelschlaeger Ecosemiotics and the sustainability transition
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The emerging epistemic community of ecosemioticians and the multidisciplinary field of inquiry known as ecosemiotics offer a radical and relevant approach to so-called global environmental crisis. There are no environmental fixes within the dominant code, since that code overdetermines the future, thereby perpetuating ecologically untenable cultural forms. The possibility of a sustainability transition (the attempt to overcome destitution and avoid ecocatastrophe) becomes real when mediated by and through ecosemiotics. In short, reflexive awareness of humankind's linguisticality is a necessary condition for transforming ecologically maladaptive cultural forms. As a multidisciplinary, interdisciplinary research program integrating the human and natural sciences, ecosemiotic inquiry closes the gap between biophysical ecology and human ecology. A provisional outline of a pragmatic theory of ecoserniotics attempts to describe the processes by which adaptive cultural changes might be facilitated and points toward substantive content areas that constitute sites for further research. Ecosemiotic inquiry frames cultural codes as these shape and reproduce the ongoing stream of individual and societal choices that shape distinctively human existence in a larger context of biophysical realities that drive natural selection. However, while ecosemiotics is a necessary condition for the sustainability transition, it is not a sufficient condition.
cultural ecosemiotics
27. Sign Systems Studies: Volume > 29 > Issue: 1
Max Oelschlaeger Ökosemiootikaja üleminek säästlikule eluviisile. Kokkuvõte
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28. Sign Systems Studies: Volume > 29 > Issue: 1
Claus Emmeche Bioinvasion, globalization, and the contingency of cultural and biological diversity: Some ecosemiotic observations
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The increasing problem of bioinvasion (the mixing up of natural species characterising the planet's local ecosystems due to globalisation) is investigated as an example of an ecosemiotic problematic. One concern is the scarcity of scientific knowledge about long term ecological and evolutionary consequences of invading species. It is argued that a natural science conception of the ecology of bioinvasion should be supplemented with an ecosemiotic understanding of the significance of these problems in relation to human culture, the question of cultural diversity, and what it means to be indigenous or foreign. Bioinvasion, extinction of native species, and overall decrease in biodiversity, may go along with decreased cultural diversity; as when the loss of local agricultural traditions lead to genetic erosion. There are possible ecosemiotic parallels between language extinction and species extinction, both being related to globalisation. It is argued that the case of bioinvasion reveals the existence of two kinds of ecosemiotic contingency, (1) evolutionary openended and partly random generation of new species and extinction of old ones; (2) the historicity of culture in general and "culture's nature" specifically in the demarcation of a set of landscapes characteristic to a particular nation and piece of human history.
29. Sign Systems Studies: Volume > 29 > Issue: 1
Claus Emmeche Bioinvasioon, globaliseerumine ja kultuurilise ning bioloogilise mitmekesisuse võimalikkused - ökosemiootilisi vaatlusi. Kokkuvõte
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30. Sign Systems Studies: Volume > 29 > Issue: 1
Augusto Ponzio, Susan Petrilli Bioethics, semiotics of life, and global communication
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Ethical problems connected with biological and medical discoveries in genetic engineering, neurobiology and pharmaceutical research, reach a unified and critical point of view in bioethics as a specific discipline. But even before reaching this stage, ethical problems already belong to two totalities: the semiobiosphere. and the current social form of global communication. Coherently with its philosophical orientation, bioethics must necessarily keep accountof this double contextualisation. The semiobiosphere is the object of study of global semiotics or the semiotics of life. Global semiotics is of particular interest to bioethics not only because of the broad context it provides for the problems treated by bioethics, but also because it provides bioethics with an adequate contextualisation both in terms of extension, of quantity, as well as of quality. From this point of view, "contextualisation" also means critical reformulation. We are now alluding to the need of viewing bioethical problems in the light of today's socio-economic context, that is, in the context of global communication-production. These contextualisations are closely related from the viewpoint of ethics. Semiotics as global semiotics or semiotics of life must accept the responsibility of denouncing incongruencies in the global system, any threats to life over the entire planet inherent in this system.
31. Sign Systems Studies: Volume > 29 > Issue: 1
Augusto Ponzio, Susan Petrilli Bioeetika, elusemiootika ja globaalne kommunikatsioon. Kokkuvõte
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32. Sign Systems Studies: Volume > 29 > Issue: 1
Jesper Hoffmeyer S/E ≥ 1: A semiotic understanding of bioengineering
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Natural (non-cultivated) systems are nmed to economize their use of energy as much as possible, and thereby to produce minimal amounts of entropy. It is suggested that this has been obtained by optimizing the evolutionary creation of semiotic controls on all processes of life. As long as biological (ultimately photosynthetic) energy sources satisfied most human needs for energy consumption, these biosemiotic controls remained largely undisturbed, with the result that production systems remained sustainable. The industrial revolution instantiated a ruphure of this balanced situation. The semiotic control function (S) would no longer match the size of the energy flow (E). In the industrial production system, energy flows have dramatically been increased, while the S component has not been taken care of. This has created a dangerously low S/E ratio, and it is suggested that this low S/E ratio constitutes a fundamental explanation of the environmental crisis. In order to restore a sustainable production system, we will now have to develop technological means for a strong increase in the S factor of the production system. It is suggested that this can be obtained through a development of considerate, gentle, and clever forms of biosemiotic technology.
33. Sign Systems Studies: Volume > 29 > Issue: 1
Jesper Hoffmeyer S/E ≥ 1: semiootiline arusaam biotehnoloogiast. Kokkuvõte
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34. Sign Systems Studies: Volume > 29 > Issue: 1
Luis Emilio Bruni Biosemiotics and ecological monitoring
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During the recent decades, a global culrural-institutional network has gradually grown lip to project, implement, and use an enormous technological web that is supposed to observe, monitor, communicate, inventory, and assess our environment and its biodiversity in order to implement sustainable management models. The majority of "knowledge tools" that have been incorporated in the mainstream of this "techno-web" are amply based on a combination of mechanistic biology, genetic reductionism, economical determinism and neo-Darwinian cultural and biological perspectives. These approaches leave aside many of the qualitative and relational aspects that can only be grasped by considering the semiotic networks operative in complex ecological and cultural systems. In this paper, it is suggested that a biosemiotic approach to ecology may prove useful for the modelling process which in turn will allow the construction of meaningful monitoring systems. It is aJso advanced that it may as well serve to better integrate our understanding and monitoring of ecosystems into the cultural process of searching for (human) sustainability.
35. Sign Systems Studies: Volume > 29 > Issue: 1
Luis Emilio Bruni Biosemiootika ja ökoloogiline seire. Kokkuvõte
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36. Sign Systems Studies: Volume > 29 > Issue: 1
Riste Keskpaik Towards a semiotic definition of trash
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The phenomenon of trash has rarely been addressed in the cultural theoretical literature. However, its structural similarity with the concept of taboo as well as its role in the dynamics of culture has been stated. Current paper aims to summarize the partial contributions that have been made so far, localize them in a larger semiotic framework, and deriving from Lonnan's approach to culture suggest a few further ideas for a semiotic definition of trash. It is proposed to define trash as a phenomenon marking the boundary between culhlre and non-culture/nature. In the context of the deepening environmental crisis (to which accumulation of trash contributes) a semiotic approach opens a new perspective for identifying the origin of the problem in our mind/culture rather than in nature.
37. Sign Systems Studies: Volume > 29 > Issue: 1
Riste Keskpaik Prügi semiootilisest defineerimisest. Kokkuvõte
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topics in biosemiotics
38. Sign Systems Studies: Volume > 29 > Issue: 1
Timo Maran Mimicry: Towards a semiotic lmderstanding of nature
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Mimicry has been an important topic for biology since the rise of the Darwinian theory of evolution. However. by its very narure mimicry is a sign process and the quest for understanding mimicry in biology has intrinsically always been a semiotic quest. In this paper various theories since Henry W. Bates will be examined to show how the concept of mimicry has been shifted from perceptual resemblance to a particular communicative structure. A concept of mimicry will then be formulated which emphasizes its dynamic properties, and finally, mimicry will be considered in the framework of ecosemiotics.
39. Sign Systems Studies: Volume > 29 > Issue: 1
Timo Maran Mimikri: looduse semiootilise mõistmise poole. Kokkuvõte
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40. Sign Systems Studies: Volume > 29 > Issue: 1
Dario Martinelli Methodologies and problems in zoomusicology
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The article sketches an introductory outline of zoomusicology as a discipline closely related to zoosemiotics, focusing on the existing results and formulating few further problems. The analysis addresses the limitations and potentials of zoomusicological research, problematic topics, a basic framework of possible methodologies, and an attempt to situate the discipline in relation to other fields, ethnomusicology in particular.