Biosemiotics is the study of signs and meaning in living things: the field that holds that every organism, from a bacterium to a human, reads its world as signs, as food or danger, mate or rival, and that meaning is therefore part of life itself, not a late human addition. It grew from the work of the zoologist Jakob von Uexküll, the semiotician Thomas Sebeok and the biochemist Jesper Hoffmeyer, and draws on the philosopher Charles Peirce’s theory of signs. Therapeutic Shamanism shares its picture of a world full of communication that goes far beyond human words, and holds that this communicating, conscious world includes the Stone PeopleStone People. All physical matter: mountains, sea, rivers, clouds, sun and stars: the oldest and widest of the Peoples. As some animist cultures put it, ‘we are just the Stone People, dancing for a while’. Read the full answer as well as the living.
What is biosemiotics? #
The study of how living things make meaning, interpret signs and communicate.1 Its name joins biology with semiotics, the study of signs. The starting point is that living things are not only machines pushed about by chemistry. A bacterium swimming towards sugar, a moth drawn to a scent, a bird reading a hawk’s shape in the sky. Each is taking something as a sign of something else, something that matters for its life. For biosemioticians this interpreting is what living beings do, at every level, from the cell to the animal to the human.1
The field divides life’s sign-making into broad kinds: the sign processes of cells and plants, sometimes called vegetative semiotics; animal sign-making, or zoosemiotics; and the human kind, with its words and symbols, which is one branch among many, not the model for all the rest.1
Where did it come from? #
From several roots. The Baltic-German zoologist Jakob von Uexküll, who popularised the word ‘umwelt’ in 1909, described each animal as living in its own umwelt, the world as its senses and needs make it, where only what means something to that animal exists for it at all.2 The word ‘biosemiotic’ was first used by Friedrich Rothschild in 1962.3 The Hungarian-born American scholar Thomas Sebeok, of Indiana University, coined ‘zoosemiotics’ in 1963 for the signs and signals of animals and became, with Thure von Uexküll, one of the founders of the modern field.4
What is known as the Copenhagen-Tartu school gave biosemiotics its present shape. The Danish biochemist Jesper Hoffmeyer, of the University of Copenhagen, wrote Signs of Meaning in the Universe (1996) and developed the idea of semiotic freedom, the growing depth of meaning that living beings can communicate or interpret as evolution goes on.5 The Estonian biologist Kalevi Kull, professor of biosemiotics at the University of Tartu from 1997, was among the authors of “Theses on Biosemiotics” in 2009, a short statement of the field’s aims.6 The field has had its own yearly meeting, the Gatherings in Biosemiotics, since 2001, a society since 2005, and a journal, Biosemiotics, since 2008.3 See What is an umwelt, and what does it tell us about how animals experience the world?
What kinds of sign are there? #
Many biosemioticians follow Peirce’s three. A symbol, such as a word, is a sign by agreed convention, and on this planet, in Kohn’s account, only humans use symbols. An icon works by likeness, and an index points to something it is really connected with, as smoke points to fire. Icons and indices are older than symbols and shared by all life. The anthropologist Eduardo Kohn, who brings biosemiotics into the study of the Runa of Ecuador’s Upper Amazon, gardeners who also hunt, fish and gather, gives the example of a scarecrow made to look like a hawk, not to human eyes but to a parakeet’s, and it works.7 From the same reasoning Kohn concludes that wherever signs are read there are selves, and that a forest is a web of thinking selves. See Who is Eduardo Kohn, and how do forests think?
The biologist and philosopher Andreas Weber, whose Biopoetics (2016) appeared in Springer’s Biosemiotics book series, takes the field towards feeling. The hypothesis of his book is that reality, and in it the biosphere, is alive, “constantly revealing meaning and inwardness”.8 See What does Andreas Weber argue in Biopoetics?
Is biosemiotics accepted? #
It is a small and still disputed field, and some of the sharpest arguments are inside it. The biologist Marcello Barbieri, whose approach is known as code biology, agrees that meaning is real in living things but holds that it lies in the rule-like codes cells use, such as the genetic code, and that true interpretation needs memory and the kind of guessing only a brain can do, so cells do not interpret. Biosemioticians in the tradition of Peirce, Hoffmeyer among them, reply that interpretation goes along with life itself, so that even a single cell is an interpreting system.9
From outside the field, the French anthropologist Martin Fortier, reviewing Kohn’s book in 2018, objected that counting every kind of representation as thinking gives thought a rather thin definition.10 Kohn’s position is that his claim about selves is made from close attention to how living beings actually deal with one another, not stretched over them from outside.11
How does biosemiotics connect with Therapeutic Shamanism? #
In a world full of communication beyond human words. In shamanism everything is made of Spirit, and Spirit is conscious, so everything is conscious, in ways unlike ours.12 Journeying goes beyond language, into a deeper reality experienced through sensations, imagery and metaphor. Lower-WorldLower-World. The realm of Mother Earth: pure, unspoilt, wild nature, with no technology and no agriculture. Home of the Peoples and of our own Soul, and completely safe: feeling threatened in a journey is a reliable sign of not having reached it. Read the full answer GuidesGuides. The Lower-World and Upper-World beings a practitioner works with and learns from, of whom the Power Animal is the first and foremost. True Guides are ethical to their core; the shaman’s power comes from the depth of these bonds, not from the shaman. More about this often speak little, if at all, and when they do it may be only single words or simple sentences, such as “Pay close attention”; often they bring something to the journeyer’s attention, and it is up to the journeyer to notice and explore what it means.13 When a Power AnimalPower Animal. The Oversoul of a wild species, met as a single Lower-World being and bonded with in a deep, committed, usually lifelong soul-bond of unconditional love. The practitioner’s first and foremost Guide: Panther, not “my panther”. Read the full answer is asked whether it is willing to work with someone, its answer more often comes as a kind of hearing in the head, like telepathy, but it may instead do something that signals yes, such as hugging the journeyer, or show itself from four different directions in close succession.14 Much of this is meaning carried by gesture and likeness, the older kinds of sign that biosemiotics finds throughout life, and it is usually beyond words. See Why are there no words or symbols in the Lower-World?
Where does Therapeutic Shamanism see further, or differently? #
At the line between life and the rest of the world. Biosemiotics generally ties sign-making to life: the cell, the plant and the animal interpret, but on its usual account a stone does not. Kohn puts it bluntly, “life thinks; stones don’t.”15 Therapeutic Shamanism holds otherwise. The Stone People are all physical matter, the chemical elements and everything made from them, rocks and water and air, and also plants, animals and humans, who are the Stone People too. They are conscious and alive, in a way so very different from us that most modern humans do not perceive them as alive at all, whereas animist ancestors knew that the mountain, the rivers, the rocks and the waterfalls were alive and to be treated with honour and respect.16 For biosemiotics the world comes alive with meaning where life begins; for Therapeutic Shamanism it was never anything else. See What are Stone People and what gifts do they bring?
