Abstract
Umwelt theory is an expression of von Uexküll’s subjective biology and as such usually applied in analysis of individual animals, yet it is fundamentally relational and therefore also suitable for analysis of more complex wholes. Since the birth of the modern environmental movement in the 1960s, there has been growing scientific and political acknowledgement of there being a global environmental crisis, which today manifests itself as a climate change and biodiversity crisis. This calls for a multi-scale ecosemiotic approach to analysis of human ecology at various levels and scales. In this article I explore to what extent ecosemiotic methodology, drawing on Umwelt theory and its consistently subjective perspective, can be applied in analysis of human ecology at different geographical and ecological scales ranging from the global to the local. The article incorporates a case study of human–animal relations in Mamirauá Sustainable Development Reserve in the Central Amazon. This is a seasonal floodplain forest area surrounded by rivers. I investigate aspects of the living conditions and ecology of the reserve, with a main focus on indigenous communities and the circumstances of two primate species, namely the red howler monkey (Alouatta seniculus) and the black-headed squirrel monkey (Saimiri vanzolinii). I outline matrixes of levels of study in ecosemiotics, and scales in human ecology, and apply two scales to the Mamirauá case. These take an individual animal’s and an individual human being’s subjective experience as their respectively starting points. This allows for multi-scale studies of human ecology from complementary angles.
Highlights
If you were to ask why on Earth anybody should study multi-species environments that involve humans, the informed response would be that human environments are typically multi-species, and that several environments which have for most of their history been largely non-human are increasingly affected by anthropogenic environmental change
How can ecosemiotics contribute to studies of multi-species environments in this context of global environmental change? That is the central question of this paper
There is no ready-made model of or framework for global human ecology that can be reinterpreted in ecosemiotic terms – or rather, that would only take us so far
Summary
If you were to ask why on Earth anybody should study multi-species environments that involve humans, the informed response would be that human environments are typically multi-species, and that several environments which have for most of their history been largely non-human are increasingly affected by anthropogenic environmental change. How can ecosemiotics contribute to studies of multi-species environments in this context of global environmental change? Our starting point is the subjective experience of humans, animals and the like, and the relations they engage in with other organisms This results in a perspective that is simultaneously organismic and ecological. Ecosemiotics implies “a realist view” (Maran and Kull 2014: 42) and involves semiotic framing and interpretation of real-life processes of nature, with nature and society being seen as interconnected systems, “both of which are simultaneously material and communicative” (Hornborg 2001: 122) In this perspective, “spatial environments or landscapes as perceived today have largely resulted from sign processes of humans and other organisms” (Maran and Kull 2014: 42), with anthropogenic influence trending towards increasing. This can be done using Umwelt theory, with emphasis on ‘Umwelt transitions’, i.e. systematic changes in the appearances of Umwelten (Tønnessen 2009)
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