Avian Bedlam

Toward a Biosemiosis of Troubled Parrots

Bibliographic Data

ID3914282
AuthorsJean M Langford (corresponding author)
Year2017
Volume9
Issue1
Pages84-107
Publication date2017-05-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueEnvironmental Humanities (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 2201-1919 • E-ISSN: 2201-1919
PublisherDuke University Press (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1215/22011919-3829145
OpenAlexW2620818899
LanguageEN
Citations received3
References cited22

At an urban parrot sanctuary in the Midwestern USA, humans care for eightysome parrots from more than a dozen species.Many of these parrots have personal histories that include various forms of neglect, abuse, and abandonment.The article explores the forms of interspecies communication through which human caretakers interpret and respond to the psychic lives of these parrots-psychic lives that are marked by troubles ranging from social withdrawal to self-destructive behavior.These interspecies communications include body language, gesture, nonverbal vocalizations, and human-language phrases.While biosemiotic theory offers a provocative starting point for understanding these communications, sanctuary interactions destabilize certain semiotic distinctions, drawing attention to ambiguities between semantic and nonsemantic vocalization, vocalization and body language, informative speech and expletive, and communication and symptom.Building on ideas about metacommunication in animal play, I suggest that both psychic trouble and interactions to ease that trouble might be considered forms of biosemiotic creativity.By loosening and opening up the distinctions frequently drawn between human and other-than-human semiosis, it is possible to develop subtler accounts of the semiotic improvisations that emerge in uniquely configured multispecies communities such as the sanctuary

Political science · Geographies of human-animal interactions · History