Signifying Animals

"Signifying Animals" examines what animals mean to human beings around the world, offering a fresh assessment of the workings of animal symbolism in diverse cultures. The essays in the book are based on first-hand field research with peoples as dissimilar as the Mongolian nomads of Soviet Central Asia, Aboriginal Australians, Inuit hunters of the Canadian Arctic and cultivators of Africa and Papua New Guinea. The essays look at accounts of mythical beasts among the Amerindian peoples of Andean South America, alleged sightings of an extinct giant bird in New Zealand as well as the complex symbolism of the American rodeo. Others discuss animal symbolism in the Middle East, India and the ancient picts of Scotland. The book advances a powerful argument against some prevalent fallacies in symbolic interpretation.

Introduction 1 The pangolin revisited: a new approach to animal symbolisim 2 Cultural attitudes to birds and animals in folklore 3 Animal language in the Garden of Eden: folktale elements in Genesis 4 A semantic analysis of the symbolism of Toba mythical animals 5 Back to the future: trophy arrays as mental maps in the Wopkaimin's culture of Place 6 Sheep bone as a sign of human descent: tibial symbolism among the Mongols 7 Ecological community and species attributes in Yolngu religious symbolism 8 Pictish animal symbols 9 The idea of fish: land and sea in the Icelandic world-view 10 Animals in Hopi duality 11 Eat and be eaten: animals in U'wa (Tunebo) oral tradition 12 Tezcatlipoca: jaguar metaphors and the Aztec mirror of nature 13 Nanook, super-male: the polar bear in the imaginary space and social time of the Inuit of the Canadian Arctic 14 Antelope as self-image among the Uduk 15 The track of the python: a West African origin story 16 Nigerian cultural attitudes to the dog 17 Rodeo horses: the wild and the tame 18 The beast without: the moa as a colonial frontier myth in New Zealand 19 The meaning of the snake