STATE OF THE ART REPORT: ZOOSEMIOTICS.
By Dario Martinelli

Thomas Sebeok’s introduction of zoosemiotics within the scientific world, back in 1963, was obviously far from being the first attempt to study non-human signalling behaviour. Yet, Sebeok opened an avenue that scholars were a bit hesitant to explore. When we compare pre- or non-semiotic definitions of animal communication, such as those of Frings and Frings (“Communication between animals involves the giving off by one individual of some chemical or physical, that, on being received by another, influences its behaviour”), Cullen (“Animal communication evokes a change of behaviour in another individual”), or Dawkins and Krebs (“Communication occurs when an animal, the actor, does something which appears to be the result of selection to influence the sense organs of another animal, the reactor, so that the actor's behaviour changes to the advantage of the actor”), with those provided by Sebeok (“the discipline within which the science of signs intersects with ethology, devoted to the scientific study of signalling behaviour in and across animal species. The basic assumption of zoosemiotics is that, in the last analysis, all animals are social beings, each species with a characteristic set of communication problems to solve”) and other semioticians, we understand how, thanks to the semiotic approach, animal information exchange could finally get rid of the rigid stimulus-reaction scheme and achieve a whole, complex and flexible semiotic sense.

Unfortunately, the importance of zoosemiotics as discipline, or even as simple idea, have not walked hand in hand with its success among semioticians and other scholars. Honestly, we cannot really say that the scientific environment is invaded by zoosemioticians that are anxious to be acknowledged as such. On the one hand, forty-three years is still a very short period of time to entitle anyone to such statements, neither should we forget that semioticians are still complaining that institutions are still reluctant to officially ‘accept’ semiotics, the whole of it. A few considerations are worth to be mentioned anyway:

1) In terms of intensity, the spreading of zoosemiotics is not totally encouraging, especially if we compare it with equally (or even more) recent fields within semiotic research, such as musical semiotics or biosemiotics. The publication of an explicitly zoosemiotic text is much more a rare event than that of a musical semiotic or biosemiotic one.

2) As compared to other branches of semiotic research, zoosemiotics can hardly be considered a specialisation on its own. In other words, if it is not very difficult to encounter comments or topics of zoosemiotic concern, it is on the contrary rare to encounter self-styled zoosemioticians: rather, they might either belong to different disciplines dealing with the same issues (quite often the case of ethology, as the case of Marc Bekoff illustrates), or deal with zoosemiotic issues only in exceptional cases, their specialisation (and academic identity) being of quite different type (it is the case of John Deely or Susan Petrilli, for instance). This is another reason why

3) Zoosemiotics has not yet achieved a scientific autonomy. If a musical or media semiotician is rarely confused with a musicologist or a mass-mediologist, zoosemioticians seem often on the threshold of identity crises (ethologist? Biologist? Zoologist?), the contrary never of course occuring (never heard of a Von Frisch being called zoosemiotician as a result of his studies on bees)
An interesting support for such considerations can be provided by internet resaerch, through the use of the so-called search engines. I tried to type some key-words on three of the main search engines (Google, Altavista and Yahoo), in order to check the amount of matches found. The key-words were the following: “zoosemiotics”, “zoösemiotics” (variation proposed by John Deely, in order to ‘force’ the reader to pronounce the prefix “zoo-“ in the same fashion as “zoology” rather than “zoo”), “zoosemiotician”, “zoosemiotica” (translation of the term in Spanish and Italian), and “zoosémiotique (French translation). Results are reported in table 1.

Table 1: Matches found in three Internet search engines for zoosemiotics-related key-words

In order to handle some comparative material, I searched the terms “semiotics”, “ethology”, “biosemiotics” and “philosophy”, plus the relative adjective form (“semiotic”, “ethological”, “biosemiotic” and “philosophical”) and nouns indicating the profession “semiotician”,“ethologist”, biosemiotician”,“philosopher” on the Google search engine (which is normally considered the most authoritative as far as scientific-academic purposes are concerned). The reasons for the terminological choices are, I guess, quite clear: semiotics is the mother-discipline of zoosemiotics, biosemiotics is a sister-specialisation, ethology is a discipline zoosemiotics is often referred to, and philosophy is finally a possible instance of extremely known discipline, in comparison to which one can figure out the notoriety of zoosemiotics in the relative sense. Results are shown in Table 2.

Table 2: Comparative key-words, as found on the Google search engine.

These data call for a few reflections. First of all, it appears that zoosemiotics is quite definitely the least known among the mentioned disciplines. The sole biosemiotics is almost four times more recurrent in websites. Secondly, although appearing as the result of a general trend, the adjective form “zoosemiotic” is very rarely found. Even more impressive is the recurrency of the term “zoosemiotician”. Google found only nineteen matches. In other words, the label “zoosemiotician”, as applied to anyone, is a really exceptional event. I consider this as the most striking datum.

Further considerations need to be done about the contents of the websites found, also because they unveil two major limits of such Internet-based surveys. In the first place, it is mostly the last and the second last generations of scholars that make use of Internet. A zoosemiotics-related research on the Internet ends up providing information on the last ten years only of zoosemiotics, not on its entire existence. No wonder that Sebeok, who should be supposed to be a massive presence, occupies after all a marginal position within Internet world.

Secondly, countries that are more confident with Internet devices are obviously a more prominent presence. Scandinavian, Baltic and Anglo-Saxon countries are definitely more represented than New-Latin, Asian or African ones. Apart from myself (mostly appearing as a result of my own intentions, being for istance editor of the www.zoosemiotics.helsinki.fi website), easily recurring are Timo Maran (University of Tartu, Estonia), Aleksei Turovski (University of Tallin, Estonia), Henna Törmänen (high-school teacher in Kuusamo, Finland), Jim Nollman (from the States, and strict collaborator of Finnish resaerchers) and Jack P. Hailman (University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA).

The 11,600 matches for “zoosemiotics” are made even less consistent by those sites in which the term is used in generic, indirect or even metaphoric fashion (instances that, for the purposes of this research, we shall call “interference”). The term indeed appears also in the following contexts:

1. Articles or essays concerning ecosemiotics and/or biosemiotics. Here, zoosemiotics is (correctly) quoted as part of the above-mentioned disciplines, but there is no specific treatment of the matter;

2. Articles or essays concerning Sebeok. Here, zoosemiotics is referred to as a main specialisation/innovation of the late American semiotician, but – once again – the term is just mentioned within a list;

3. Occasional messages posted in some discussion group. Here, the term is just marginally mentioned for the purposes of totally different contexts;

4. Sites that – scientifically speaking – have nothing to do with zoosemiotics, but rather employ the term as effective metaphor (in particular I could find a multimedia installation named exactly “zoosemiotics”, and a photographic exhibition of animal tracks).

WHERE ARE THE ZOOSEMIOTICIANS?

One could easily object that very seldom, within semiotic disciplines, a scholar expressively declares being a specialist of a given field, thus it should not be so surprising that self-styled zoosemioticians are so rare. Still, if we once again think to a discipline like musical semiotics, dozens of names that, if not only, are also or mostly identified as musical semioticians, can be listed. It is the case of Tarasti, Fabbri, Stefani, Nattiez, Tagg, Marconi, Hatten and many others. Not the same can evidently be said for zoosemiotics. It is quite significant that Winfred Nöth, in writing the chapter for zoosemiotics in his ever precious Handbook of Semiotics, ends up referring quite exclusively to scholars belonging to other disciplines. Exceptions are evidently Thomas A. Sebeok, W.John Smith and – to a fair extent – Günter Tembrock.

Therefore, where are, who are the zoosemioticians? Besides Nöth’s list, one must add Felice Cimatti, author of the excellent and unfortunately not yet translated Mente e linguaggio nelgi animali, the already mentioned Maran, Turovski and Hailman; Heini Hediger, mostly a zoologist and an animal psychologist, but whose contents (especially in the important Man-animal communication) are of deep zoosemiotic concern; Martin Lindauer, because of the famous Botschaft Ohne Worte; Marc Bekoff, surely an ethologist, but profoundly interested in the issue of communication (he also published for Semiotica); Susan Petrilli and John Deely, both followers of the Sebeokian tradition, although evidently to be considered part-time zoosemioticians; up to – of course – the crypto-zoosemioticians par excellence, i.e., Charles Darwin, with particular reference to texts like The descent of man and The expression of emotions in man and animals, and Jakob Von Uexküll. However, a whole list of crypto-, pseudo-, proto- or para-zoosemioticians (which shall then include fundamental scholars like Morris, Thorpe, Griffin, Tinbergen, plus various experimental scholars in interspecific communication, like Fouts, Premack, Petterson etc.) could make us lose track of the purposes of this small survey.

TRENDS IN ZOOSEMIOTIC STUDIES

On the contrary, one important aspect to grasp is a little map of orientation of zoosemiotic studies during these first forty years of life. In other words, what has zoosemiotics been dealing with? To say it concerns animal communication is not only generic: it is probably imprecise, too, for it paradoxically gives, through an omnicomprehensive expression, a quite partial picture of reality.

In my opinion, at least two main branches should be distinguished within zoosemiotics, both to be divided in their turn in two more sub-branches. On one hand, I refer to zoosemiotics in the traditional sense, i.e., a discipline dealing with the behaviour called “communication”, through the most obvious theoretical tools of semiotics. I call such branch ethological zoosemiotics. In its turn, ethological zoosemiotics can be divided into a traditional current and a cognitive one. The former includes the studies performed by the earlier Sebeok, or Lindauer, or other scholars belonging to Lorenzian or behaviouristic traditions. I will later discuss the cognitive current more thoroughly, but here I mention the later Sebeok, Cimatti, Bekoff and others (not to mention strong anticipations provided by Darwin).

As for the second branch of zoosemiotics, which I here call anthropological, I refer to those studies dealing with the semiotic interaction between human beings and other animals, including those of cultural and/or sociological type. Interspecific communication experiments are one example (although very sceptic, Sebeok dealt quite often with those, and so did Petrilli, Deely, Cimatti, Bekoff and others). Such types of study fall under a sub-category of the anthropological zoosemiotics, which I call communicational. By this term, I refer to those contexts where human-animal interaction is of communicative type, i.e., interactive, reciprocal and intentional. Studies of applied zoosemiotics, such as human-pets or human-cattle interaction, fall under this group, as well.

The second sub-category within anthropological zoosemiotics is, by consequence, named significational: here, the non-human animal is a pure source of meaning, an object, rather than a subject, of signification. The model is this of ecosemiotic type: whereas, indeed, ecosemiotics is the study of human representation of nature, this typology of zoosemiotics deals with the human representation of other animals. It is evidently the case of myth, tales, allegories, but also systematic classifications, such as taxonomy.

It thus appears that ethological zoosemiotics has a close relationship with natural sciences (starting, obviously, from ethology), while anthropological zoosemiotics is a closer relative of human sciences, expecially the so-called anthropo-zoology and the social sciences, which nowadays show an increasing interest towards animal-related issues. In a way, the definition of zoosemiotics provided by Nöth appears as the most appropriate for this framework: zoosemiotics 1) is interdisciplinary, and 2) occupies an intermediary position between the natural and human sciences.

CONCLUSIONS

It seems that semiotics is finally enjoying its ethically-minded age (see the case of Ponzio-Petrilli-Deely’s Semioethics, or Tarasti’s Existential Semiotics), so perhaps I should not miss the chance, in this conclusive paragraph, to propose some reflections of ethical type.

As most persons in their forties, zoosemiotics seems to be driven by a desire to reflect about its life, its identity and its experiences.

So far, all the occasions I had for discussing or presenting zoosemiotic topics, have caused several reactions, most of them generally – and luckily – positive. However, they have caused mainly curiosity, that kind of curiosity that is manifested in the most diverse attitudes, from scepticism to ‘exoticism’. From questions regarding very detailed issues to those (in fact, more frequent) concerning very general principles, if not ancestral/transcendental/cosmic themes.
Not that I do not understand this. After all, we have seen it, we know very little about zoosemiotics, and the amount of information at our disposal is sometime quite confusing, if not confused. Forty-three years is a very young age, scientifically speaking, for a discipline to answer its most important questions, and moreover, it should be admitted that Sebeok’s work, outside semiotics, was not as influential as it probably deserved. In this sense, a diffused curiosity about the zoosemiotic discipline is more than comprehensible.

But this is not the whole story. There is a growing interest not only about zoosemiotics, but also about the whole area of non-human animal studies. Finally, after decades of prejudices, those studies caught the interest of cognitive sciences (see the most recent trends in ethology and zoosemiotics itself), human sciences (is it still fair to call them just human?), and more generally are now also approached in a ‘macroscopic’ fashion.

Indeed, most of the competencies so far collected on non human animals have been specialistic, punctual, exactly ‘microscopic’, and thus not so open and interdisciplinary. Consider zoology, its major focus being the anatomy, the structure, and the particulars of animals. Or consider classical ethology, the study of animal behaviour, as organised in patterns and ethograms. Or, finally, consider TV and other media, with their documentaries showing, say, a group of lions in the African savannah, dealing with the usual two or three situations (hunt, reproduction, territory defence). Looking carefully, the discussion on non-human animals, in terms of philosophical questions (i.e., macroscopic issues), is much more indefinite and incomplete. As far as non-human animals are concerned, it seems that we either (believe we) know things for sure, or we do not. Nothing seems to be in the middle. Not so often, we have had ‘doubts’, in the philosophical sense of the term. This, I feel, is mostly due to the fact that very seldom non-human animals have been studied by human sciences.

Yet, we feel now an urge to doubt, when discussing about other animals. We feel the urge to define and refine them, as concepts. And so forth. If it is true that human sciences are often so little practical and concrete, it is also true that biological sciences are too little abstract and theoretical, which is not so good, for excess of security may end up into a boomerang-effect, leading to superficiality and straight errors. Think about the Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy: how did it all begin if not with the superficiality of those ‘experts’ who thought that herbivorous animals could be fed with animal proteins with no dangerous consequences? In a way, it is significant that the BSE crisis became famous under the expression “Mad Cow”, because, after all, the mad ones are those who put into question normality and certainties. Of course, it should be interesting to learn why were the cows called mad, and not those experts who had that brilliant idea, but I guess this is not the right place to raise this deep question.

There is more. We realised that to study other animals under the perspective of human sciences helps us, as humans, to know more about ourselves. To start with, we ourselves are animals, thus, at least on a basic level, certain principles that are applicable to non-humans are of scientific interest for humans too. Further, we are pushed into questioning very important issues. Zoosemiotics suggests us that communication (in the most articulated sense of the term, not only as a simple exchange of signals) is a zoological phenomenon, rather than a simply anthropological one. Therefore: what is really communication? Where does it come from? What are the behavioural processes implied in its production?

Finally, to study other animals under the perspective of human sciences is the result of a very clear historical course in the human evolution, i.e., borrowing the expression from Johann Galtung, enlarging the centre and including more and more periphery. Who are WE? Nowadays, “we” corresponds to quite more individuals than just one century ago. “We” also means women, Australian aborigines, African pigmies, people with mental deficit, etc. Long time ago, “we” corresponded to a very limited set of beings. In years to come, “we” will cover also other animals, and this future has already begun, if we for instance think about New Zealand and the so-called Animal Welfare Act, that ascribes to Great Apes (chimpanzees, gorillas, bonobos, etc.) the same basic rights to life of the human being.

That may sound a marginal matter, for it regards only those animals that are genetically very close to humans. In fact, it is a revolution, because that was not the point. The point is that the big wall has been pushed further. That act is a serious threat to the humans-and-all-other-animals perceptive scheme. That act puts some species on the “we” side. This time, the draft is “Great Apes and all other animals”. In a time not so far from today, it will be “Mammals and all other animals”, and so forth.

Some may laugh at such an anticipation, which after all started in a country, New Zealand, that has an average of one human being for every thirty-five sheep, so that it looks ironically obvious that animals are more important there than anywhere else. However, whether we like it or not, laws similar to the Animal Welfare Act will soon be approved all over the world, and those countries lacking them will be considered ethically backwards, like today those that still keep death penalty in use, or still treat women in a different way than men. Maybe it is no chance that movements called eco-feminism or feminist animalism exist. Women realised that their civil problems, within a men-oriented world, are in principle very similar to those of non-human animals within a human-oriented world.

Naturally, we still have the option of closing our eyes and pretend that nothing like this is really going on (a right that still a lot of people seem to exercise), and therefore keep on applying the usual anthropocentric values to our knowledge (be that semiotic or whatever). It will work for a while, some years, maybe some decades. But those years will just make us more unprepared to when we will be brutally awakened by the new reality. I do not personally find it an inspiring perspective.

References:

Dennett D. (1996). Kinds of minds. New York: Hypercollins.
Sebeok, T.A. (1973). Perspectives in zoosemiotics. The Hague: Mouton