Book review - zoosemiotics

Just finished my book review of

* Dario Martinelli, Zoosemiotics: Proposals for a Handbook (= Acta Semiotica Fennica XXVI). Imatra/Helsinki: The International Semiotics Institute, 2007.

Review article
A stroll around the worlds of zoosemioticians and other animals
Morten Tønnessen

Abstract
Zoosemiotics is on various levels encyclopaedic in its form, but not systematically so in its content. More often than not, it is highly informative. The broad, systematic project of the book, however, is undermined by a poor selection of references to zoosemioticians and an apparent bias for anthropoid animals. Nevertheless, Dario Martinelli's spotlight on human-animal relations, including their ethical aspects, deserves attention. Close to 50 years after its explicit conception, zoosemiotics remains a promising, rather than accomplished field of scholarly discourse.

[Keywords]
aesthetics
animal signification
anthropocentrism
human-animal relations
zoosemiotics
Thomas Sebeok

[Bionote]
Morten Tønnessen (born 1976) is a Ph.D. student at the Institute of Philosophy and Semiotics, University of Tartu. The work title of his doctoral thesis is 'Umwelt Transition: Uexküllian Phenomenology. An Ecosemiotic Analysis of Norwegian Wolf Management.' Within Sebeok's scheme of zoosemiotic classification it can be located at the border between descriptive and applied zoosemiotics.