Umwelt, milieu(x), and environment: A survey of cross-cultural concept mutations
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Jui-Pi Chien
Her research interests include semiotics, comparative literature, comparative arts, and the history and philosophy of sciences. Her publications include ‘Schema as both the key to and the puzzle of life: Reflections on the Uexküllian crux’ (2006); ‘Of animals and men: A study of
Umwelt in Uexküll, Cassirer, and Heidegger’ (2006); ‘From animals to humans: Uexküll'sUmwelt as read by Lacan and Canguilhem’ (2006); and ‘The French reception of Jakob Von Uexküll'sUmwelt : A regional variation of global semiotics’ (2007).
Abstract
This essay explores the historical development of Umwelt and its links with related terms, such as environment, milieu(x), ambiens-ambiance, and circonstances, the latter of which are used by Jakob von Uexküll's predecessors to different ends in France. To observe the conditions in which the concepts of Umwelt, milieu, and environment have crossed the borders, this essay offers a narrative for each word derived from dictionary entries and articles in the encyclopedia of semiotics, and relates these materials to four surveys by Spitzer, Canguilhem, Aarsleff, and Sutrop. The process will basically reveal the loaded value of a word within its national and disciplinary boundaries. However, it is argued that, in making sense out of a discipline like Umweltforschung, it is neither sufficient nor wise to stay within the German boundary. As the travelling of a word has been more purposeful than simply accidental, the history of its routes can reveal its conceptual equivalents hidden in other linguistic, scientific, and cultural constructs, which go beyond the word equivalents compiled in the dictionaries. From the hindsight of the positive receptions of the concept of Umwelt by the French philosophers during the 1930s and 1940s, the essay alleviates the charged hostility against Taine's concept of milieu in Germany and brings forward the sense of biological harmony and equilibrium shared between Uexkuuml;ll and his French predecessors.
About the author
Her research interests include semiotics, comparative literature, comparative arts, and the history and philosophy of sciences. Her publications include ‘Schema as both the key to and the puzzle of life: Reflections on the Uexküllian crux’ (2006); ‘Of animals and men: A study of Umwelt in Uexküll, Cassirer, and Heidegger’ (2006); ‘From animals to humans: Uexküll's Umwelt as read by Lacan and Canguilhem’ (2006); and ‘The French reception of Jakob Von Uexküll's Umwelt: A regional variation of global semiotics’ (2007).
© Walter de Gruyter
Articles in the same Issue
- Plant names and folk taxonomies: Frameworks for ethnosemiotic inquiry
- Towards a grande paradigmatique of film: Christian Metz reloaded
- Umwelt, milieu(x), and environment: A survey of cross-cultural concept mutations
- Bridging theories: A logical-functional perspective on languages
- The ‘handles’ and ‘sides’ of metaphor
- Here is the author! Hyperlinks as constitutive rules of hypertextual communication
- Race, pigskin, and politics: A semiotic analysis of racial images in political advertising
- The serpent's egg: Communication and the bio-semiotics of image making
- Semiotic interpretations of biological mimicry
- Symbol-intertextuality-deconstruction (on the dialectic of stability and variability of concept and symbol)
- Analyse paradigmatique d'un corpus de proverbes à l'aide des matrices de concepts
- Semiotic silence: Its use as a conflictmanagement strategy in intimate relationships
- Peirce on categories: Towards a metaphysical foundation of pragmatics
- Narrative and ontology in Hesiod's Homeric Hymn to Demeter: A catastrophist approach
- Traveling and family in the 1970s British circus
- Structures and semiotic systems
- Eye on Picasso
Articles in the same Issue
- Plant names and folk taxonomies: Frameworks for ethnosemiotic inquiry
- Towards a grande paradigmatique of film: Christian Metz reloaded
- Umwelt, milieu(x), and environment: A survey of cross-cultural concept mutations
- Bridging theories: A logical-functional perspective on languages
- The ‘handles’ and ‘sides’ of metaphor
- Here is the author! Hyperlinks as constitutive rules of hypertextual communication
- Race, pigskin, and politics: A semiotic analysis of racial images in political advertising
- The serpent's egg: Communication and the bio-semiotics of image making
- Semiotic interpretations of biological mimicry
- Symbol-intertextuality-deconstruction (on the dialectic of stability and variability of concept and symbol)
- Analyse paradigmatique d'un corpus de proverbes à l'aide des matrices de concepts
- Semiotic silence: Its use as a conflictmanagement strategy in intimate relationships
- Peirce on categories: Towards a metaphysical foundation of pragmatics
- Narrative and ontology in Hesiod's Homeric Hymn to Demeter: A catastrophist approach
- Traveling and family in the 1970s British circus
- Structures and semiotic systems
- Eye on Picasso
