Observing wildlife through the eyes of Nils Lindahl Elliot

Abstract

Nils Lindahl Elliot has significantly contributed to semiotic analysis of nature and to the ways in which it is mediated, especially with his transdisciplinary social semeiotic approach that he developed in Mediating Nature (2006). This book propelled his recognition in the field of semiotic studies, especially amongst the ecosemiotic community. In Lindahl Elliot’s newest book Observing Wildlife in Tropical Forests. 1: A Geosemeiotic Approach he delves even deeper into transdisciplinary inquiry of observing wildlife, using what he calls a geosemeiotic approach (with the extra “e” serving as a tribute to Peirce). More traditionally, geosemiotics is seen as a research field that studies social meanings of signs, discourses and actions as related to a specific place (Scollon, Scollon 2003). Although both Lindahl Elliot’s and Scollon and Scollon’s approaches incorporate Peircean semiotics when introducing the nature of signs, and consider the specificity of the place of communication in its widest sense to be of utmost importance, the essences of these approaches could not be further from each other. While geosemiotics turns its attention to visual semiotics, interaction order and semiotics of place, geosemeiotics emphasizes the encounter of dynamical bodies; while geosemiotics is concerned with humans, geosemeiotics stresses the coming together of human and more-than-human bodies which constitute assemblages. These are just some cursory differences between geosemiotics and geosemeiotics; what Lindahl Elliot actually proposes is a new transdisciplinary approach, which encompasses different perspectives (semeiotic, geographic, ecological and socioanthropological) on wildlife observation, forming his multifaceted theory into a single coherent framework.