Abstract
This paper is about a story in which men and animals meet, in the deep of the wilderness, where nature is resisting culture. Although they, men and animals, do not share a language, or anything else that could be regarded as a system of conventional signs, nevertheless they communicate, revealing to us an idea of “community,” and subsequently of “culture,” that goes far beyond the common distinction between nature and culture.
It is of course fiction, but sometimes fiction, especially great fiction, represents a perfect laboratory which allows us to study not what or how things “are” but what they mean, to better understand the reason why things are what they are to us and how languages work to turn these things into what they are to us, whether we are men or animals.
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Notes
- 1.
Listen to me, the poets laureate
walk only among plants
with rare names: boxwood, ligustrum and acanthus.
But I like roads that lead to grassy
ditches where boys
scoop up a few starved
eels out of half-dry puddles:
paths that run along the banks,
come down among the tufted canes
and end in orchards, among the lemon trees.… (Montale 2012)
- 2.
Always to me beloved was this lonely hillside
And the hedgerow creeping over and always hiding… (Leopardi 1819)
- 3.
It is necessary, however, to acknowledge Descola’s awareness of this fact when he cites Spinoza’s distinction between natura naturata and natura naturans (Descola 2011).
- 4.
- 5.
I will limit myself to noting “The story of Asdiwal”, and how the rituals associated with seafood processing were seen as a means for redefining the distances between the human and salmon “brothers”, without which every salmon meal would have been viewed as an act of cannibalism. (Lévi-Strauss 1973).
- 6.
Cfr. Lancioni 2015.
- 7.
All quotations from Faulkner 1955.
- 8.
Who in turn are reinforced by the packs of hunting dogs, which seek in vain to show their courage confronting the bear.
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Lancioni, T. (2018). Of Men, Dogs and Bears: Communication in the Wilderness. In: Marrone, G., Mangano, D. (eds) Semiotics of Animals in Culture. Biosemiotics, vol 17. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-72992-3_11
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