Naturekind : language, culture and power beyond the human / Melissa Leach, James Fairhead.

Contents Introduction -- Language and Culture Beyond the Human: Rethinking Communication Across Naturekind -- Chickens -- Horses -- Plants -- Bees -- Bats -- Forests -- Soils -- Seas -- Cities -- Conclusion: A Political Naturekind.
Abstract "A new paradigm that integrates human and nonhuman communication and cultureAre language and culture uniquely human, justifying an exceptionalism that sets people apart from the rest of nature? New discoveries in the biological sciences have challenged this assumption, finding syntax, symbolism and social learning beyond the human, and identifying culture as a second inheritance system across the phyla from whales to insects and plants. Biologists are constrained, however, by the mechanistic ways communication is understood. In Naturekind, Melissa Leach and James Fairhead address this impasse by extending insights from structural linguistics, social semiotics, anthropology and Indigenous theorization into wider life, integrating them with new biological findings to develop a new structural biosemiotics paradigm.Leach and Fairhead argue that such a paradigm can provide a unified theory of meaning-making across all of nature, or "naturekind," allowing new theorisation about human and nonhuman communication and culture. They examine people's communicative encounters with chickens, horses, bees, bats and plants, and with assemblages of living and nonliving entities-forests, seas, soils and cities. Marrying the new biology with the structural social sciences, they contend, provides powerful insights for living well with wider life on a shared planet and transforming political relations"-- Provided by publisher.
Bibliography noteIncludes bibliographical references and index.
Issued in other formOnline version http://id.loc.gov/entities/relationships/onlineversion Leach, Melissa Naturekind Princeton : Princeton University Press, [2025] 9780691270722
LCCN 2025014816
ISBN9780691270661 paperback
ISBN069127066X
ISBN9780691270678 hardback
ISBN0691270678
ISBNebook
Standard identifier# CIPO000285643

Availability

Library Location Call Number Status Item Actions
Joyner General Stacks QH331 .L38 2025 ✔ Available Place Hold