Understanding the return of the wolf - ecosemiotics and landscape hermeneutics (original) (raw)

Understanding the Meaning of Wolf Resurgence, Ecosemiotics, and Landscape Hermeneutics

2016

We have entered the era of the Anthropocene, so it goes. More and more people are becoming aware the planet we live on is increasingly changed by human activity. When in 1980, Caroline Merchant (1980) talked about the ‘death of nature’, and criticized the death of the concept of nature, she did not foresee nature itself disappearing. In 1989, conservationist Bill McKibben (1989), in one of the first public books 1 on global warming, proclaimed “the death of nature” and stressed that nature no longer was a force independent of humans but instead was deeply influenced by humans, this caused a shock in public debate. In 2000, Nobel Prize Laureate Paul Crutzen and his colleague Eugene Stoermer proposed using the term Anthropocene for the current geological epoch – which was then still considered a controversial position (Crutzen & Stoermer 2000). Today, saying that we entered the Anthropocene sometimes almost feels like a truism. An increasing number of people are coming to terms with t...

New Nature Narratives. Landscape hermeneutics and environmental ethics

In: F. Clingerman, M. Drenthen, B. Treanor, & D. Utsler (Eds.), Interpreting Nature; The Emerging Field of Environmental Hermeneutics (pp.225-241), 2013

In this paper, I seek to provide building blocks for a reconciliation of the ethical care for heritage protection and nature restoration ethics. It will do so, by introducing a hermeneutic landscape philosophy that takes landscape as a multi-layered “text” in need of interpretation, and place identities as build upon certain readings of the landscape. I will argue that from a hermeneutic perspective, both approaches appear to complement each other. Renaturing presents a valuable correction to the anthropocentrism of many European rural cultures. Yet, heritage protectionists rightly point to the value of narratives for Old World identities. I will conclude with a short reflection on how such a hermeneutic environmental ethic can be helpful in dealing with environmental conflicts.

Reading ourselves through the land: landscape hermeneutics and ethics of place

F. Clingerman & M. Dixon (Eds.): Placing Nature on the Borders of Religion, Philosophy, and Ethics, p.123-138., 2011

In this text, I discuss the environmental education project "Legible Landscape", which aims to teach inhabitants to read their landscape and develop a closer, more engaged relationship to place. I show that the project's semiotic perspective on landscape legibility tends to hamper the understanding of the moral dimension of reading landscapes, and argue that a hermeneutical perspective is better suited to acknowledge the way that readers and texts are intimately connected.

Crossing the ecotone : on the narrative representation of nature as 'wild

Borstner, Bojan; Gartner, Smiljana & Deschler-Erb, Sabine (Red.), Historicizing Religion. Critical Approaches to Contemporary Concerns. EDIZIONI PLUS Pisa University Press., 2010

This chapter analyses some of the recurrent narrative patterns used in representing certain cultural landscapes as wild. Focusing on Scandinavia, it describes how in legal and political treatises, as well as in folk religious traditions, an otherwise familiar and subdued nature was represented as a place of mystery, both promising and dangerous. The ‘Outside’, the ‘North’, and the borderland of settlements are given as examples that helped shape the dichotomy between civilization and wilderness in contexts where local and political identities were negotiated. It is argued that ‘wilderness’ to this day is conceptualised primarily as a liminal space and thus a social category, providing a semantic vacancy for the negotiation of norms and values. Der Beitrag untersucht narrative Muster, mit denen Kulturlandschaften als eine dem menschlichen Zugriff entzogene Wildnis dargestellt wurden. Der Fokus liegt dabei auf Skandinavien. Sowohl in juristischen und politischen Schriften, wie auch in...

From Ricœurian Hermeneutics to Environmental Hermeneutics. Space, Landscape, and Interpretation

The analysis of fundamental texts such as "Architecture and Narrativity" and Memory, History, Forgetting aims to fill a gap in studies of Environmental Hermeneutics. Indeed, the analogy between space and narrative, through parallelism with the process of triple mimesis, is usually deduced by environmental hermeneuticists from the works Time and Narrative and Oneself as Another. However, Ricoeur himself took it upon himself to make this transposition in a direct and elaborated way from a phenomenological and hermeneutic analysis of the built space (through architecture) and the inhabited space, opening the way for a broader and more grounded epistemology of environmental hermeneutics. The introduction of the critical concept of landscape, as seen today by constructivist and cultural geography, legitimizes the claims of an environmental hermeneutics as an interpretive process of formally non-textual objects. Indeed, landscape in its connection to territory has its own semiotic and semantic character, which is appealed to for reading and interpretation.

Semiotic study of landscapes: An overview from semiology to ecosemiotics

Sign Systems Studies, 2011

The article provides an overview of different approaches to the semiotic study of landscapes both in the field of semiotics proper and in landscape studies in general. The article describes different approaches to the semiotic processes in landscapes from the semiological tradition where landscape has been seen as analogous to a text with its language, to more naturalized and phenomenological approaches, as well as ecosemiotic view of landscapes that goes beyond anthropocentric definitions. Special attention is paid to the potential of cultural semiotics of Tartu–Moscow school for the analysis of landscapes and the possibilities held by a dynamic, dialogic and holistic landscape definition for the development of ecosemiotics.

The Beasts of Wisdom: Ecological Hermeneutics of the Wild

The article explores the presence of animals' silent voices in Wisdom literature. It draws on recent ecological exegesis to "un-mute" the creaturely wisdom surrounding Job and post-exilic Israel. It argues that human speech about God in Job gives way to biophilic attainment to the world.

“Following the Animal. Place, Space, and Literature” (peer-reviewed article)

Animal Places. Lively Cartographies of Human-Animal Relations, eds. Bull, J., Holmberg, T., Åsberg, C. London: Routledge., 2017

Which is the potential of introducing spatial perspectives at the intersection of literary interpretational theory and the field of human-animal studies? Firstly, the significance of the non-human is discussed in relation to ‘place’, poststructuralist theory, and conventional definitions of ‘literature’ in literary scholarship. The presence of certain animal species create textual threads in humanly phrased narratives, it is thus possible to define ‘literature’ according to an understanding of intertextuality as a potential that is inherent in all kinds of bodies. Secondly, the semantic effects of the conventional, symbolical organization of literary texts as a hierarchic ‘space’ – a surface and a depth – are investigated in relation to the human/animal divide. The animal figure is constantly challenging the boundaries of both of these levels; a subversive oscillation which depends on certain ways of reading in order to be visible. Such a ‘lively cartography’ interpretational reading practice is outlined in the third part of this chapter, ‘following the animal’: a multifaceted, multilevel tool to employ in the process of producing ‘more-than-anthropocentric’ meaning in literary texts.