Zoo-aesthetics: A natural step after Darwin
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Katya Mandoki
Katya Mandoki (b. 1947) is a full professor at Universidad Autonoma Metropolitana 〈kmandoki@gmail.com〉. Her research interests include everyday aesthetics (prosaics), biosemiotics, and aesthetics of politics and propaganda. Her publications includeEveryday aesthetics: Prosaics, the play of culture and social identities (2007); andEl indispensable exceso de la estética (2013).
Abstract
As a category, poiesis can be extended beyond the standard anthropocentric use and applied across three radically different scales: auto-poiesis in everyday self-organization of every living creature, phylo-poiesis in the shaping of a species by sexual selection across various generations and onto-poiesis as an individual's development of formal skills and creative modification of its environment.
In this paper, I apply these distinctions and argue, following Darwin and Sebeok, for the possibility of considering poietic and aesthetic manifestations among various animal species in their ability of both appreciating and expressing rhythm, visual decorative patterns, and chromatic qualities. In music we can find song and equivalents to instrumental playing (cicadas and crickets), theater in representing fictitious situations (killdeer's broken wing act and playing), acrobatic skills (various types of woodcocks and paradise birds) and dancing (cranes and eleonora cockatoo). I do not claim there is animal art, since the very concept of the “artistic” is a result of convention. What I do assert, however, is that human aesthetic appreciation did not emerge ex nihilo nor was granted by God to humans only (as Wallace believed) but has evolutionary relevance and is preceded by the zoo-aesthetics in many other species.
About the author
Katya Mandoki (b. 1947) is a full professor at Universidad Autonoma Metropolitana 〈kmandoki@gmail.com〉. Her research interests include everyday aesthetics (prosaics), biosemiotics, and aesthetics of politics and propaganda. Her publications include Everyday aesthetics: Prosaics, the play of culture and social identities (2007); and El indispensable exceso de la estética (2013).
©2014 by Walter de Gruyter Berlin/Boston
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Articles in the same Issue
- Dimensions of zoosemiotics
- Frontmatter
- Dimensions of zoosemiotics: Introduction
- The semiome: From genetic to semiotic scaffolding
- Codes and coding: Sebeok's zoosemiotics and the dismantling of the fixed-code fallacy
- Zoosemiotics is the study of animal forms of knowing
- Zoo-aesthetics: A natural step after Darwin
- Curs, crabs, and cranky cows: Ethological and linguistic aspects of animal-based insults
- On zoosemiotics and bridging the value gap
- Umwelt or Umwelten? How should shared representation be understood given such diversity?
- Umwelt trajectories
- Training guide dogs of the blind with the “phantom man” method: Historic background and semiotic footing
- From sign to action: Studies in chimpanzee pictorial competence
- Patterns and dynamics of (bird) soundscapes: A biosemiotic interpretation
- Observation ↔ Text/e ↔ Culture
- Introduction
- Culture, power, dictionaries: What lexicography reveals about cultural objects
- La culture comme objet
- La mémoire et l'événement: Les autobiographies intellectuelles au Brésil
- Human voice: Its meaning and textuality outside the verbal and the musical
- Des parcours interprétatifs à la réception des textes médiévaux
- Semiotic of pretext, semiotics of pre-text
- From text to culture through corpus: Interactivity as an argumentative keyword of contemporary cyberculture
- Le texte comme fragment culturel: Trois scénarios d'observation
