Traditiones

Animals in Focus: Creative and Social Imagination

Marjetka Golež Kaučič — 2024-10-31

Placing animals in focus through imagination and reality, we are thinking about their position in new ontological paradigms in a multidisciplinary way. The article presents the relationship between man and animal through folklore, literature, film, language, and photography. The authors derive their research from the theoretical discourses of ecocentrism, new animism, ecocriticism, semiology, antispeciesism, cognitive ethological studies, and critical animal studies.

Bears and Humans

Zoltan Nagy — 2024-10-31

This paper concerns the relationship between bears and humans among the Khanty people: in particular, what is meant by their claim that the bear is ‘half man, half animal, half god’. Within this focus, it introduces the Khanty concept of a "more-than-human" society and examines the interconnections between its constituent parties. It explores the worldview in which the dividing lines between human and natural, and human and divine, are not as sharp as Cartesian logic would have them.

Ways of Seeing Polar Bears in Fantasy Films, Fiction and Folklore

Lizanne Henderson — 2024-10-31

The polar bear (Ursus maritimus) has had many archetypal functions throughout time and across cultures and has been a key character within traditional tales and mythologies across the Arctic regions. Within Inuit and Greenlandic hunting cultures the polar bear is an important resource for food and clothing, but the bear has also held folkloric and spiritual significance. However, within the realm of anglophonic fantasy-horror films and fiction, the polar bear has frequently been portrayed as a figure of fear, recalling nineteenth century European explorers descriptions of encounters with bears in accounts of Arctic expeditions. A sample of negative representations of polar bears within fantasy-horror film, television, and fictional adaptations are explored and compared to traditional Inuit perspectives, revealing profoundly different perceptions of the natural world.

Animals as a Stereotyping and Characterising Element in Slovenian Name-Callings

Saša Babič — 2024-10-31

The article discusses deeply rooted linguistic comparisons as stereotypical images in the form of name-callings. A very common element of these comparisons are animals as living beings with their own characteristics, living in a common environment: A human characteristic is compared to a prescribed, but not necessarily intrinsic, characteristic of a particular animal. The characteristics ascribed to animals are socially stereotyped and disseminated as generalised images using a metaphorical language that form so-called collective symbols.

Representations of Nonhuman Animals in Bulgarian Literary Education

Kalina Zahova — 2024-10-31

Through an educational perspective, the paper traces the attitudes towards nonhuman animals, the human-nonhuman relations, and the ideologies included in the literature curriculum developed by the Bulgarian Ministry of Education and Sciences. Comparing the official programmes with certain literary textbooks, I examine various representations of nonhuman animals in the latter. I study which authors who wrote about nature and nonhuman animals are included in the curriculum, which of their literary works are studied in school, what interpretational directions are offered, what approaches to human-nonhuman relations are chosen, and what types of thinking are encouraged and cultivated.

Exposed Animal Bodies: The Photographic Observation of the Body-Space of the Anthropocene

Branislava Vičar — 2024-10-31

Using Stacy Alaimo’s theoretical concept of trans-corporeality, the paper analyzes photographs of five award-winning photojournalists, capturing various sites of exposure of animal bodies in the Anthropocene. It is not only the exposed animal bodies (i.e. confined, depleted, or genetically modified animal bodies, impacted by the industrial agricultural system, climate crisis and ecological destruction) that are of interest but also the environments in which these bodies are photographed. These environments do not merely serve as backdrops but also affect animal bodies and reveal their interconnectedness with global economic, industrial, and environmental systems.