Modern Western thought constructs non-human animals as Other – as lacking
all the supposed marks of the human, such as subjectivity, reason, language
and morality. Snakes, raptors and other liminal animal figures disrupt this
dominant anthropocentric worldview, and a comparison with non-modern
cosmologies shows how, in many cultures, non-human animals are recognized
as legitimate interlocutors, endowed with their own subjectivities and
agency. A reflection on a biocentric and intercultural ethics of interspecies
communication, capable of overcoming extractive logics and mending the
symbolic bonds severed with the non-human, shows how we can symbolically
decentre anthropocentrism, and open spaces for these non-human agencies.
Keywords: ecological empathy; human–nature dualism; worldview.
We live in a time when ecological upheavals and cultural fractures
converge to question the supremacy of the human. The erosion of
biodiversity and the spread of zoonoses not only signal a biological crisis, they
also expose the limits of an anthropocentric worldview that has long reduced
non-human animals to objects of fear or utility.
In this context, exploring animal subjectivities becomes a radical act. It is not
just about recognizing animal emotions or intelligence, but about asking how
human cultures – ours and others – have constructed the category of animal as
Other: deprived of reason, language and morality (Shepard, 1996; Lévi-Strauss,
1962). This dualistic opposition has had deep cultural and geopolitical
consequences, shaping the destinies of non-modern cosmologies as well (Descola,
2013). To reopen the question of animal subjectivities is therefore to reopen the
very meaning of what it means to be human (Latouche, 2009; Braidotti, 2013).
In this article I focus on species that occupy a particularly ambiguous place in
the human imagination: snakes and raptors. These are animals culturally
marginalized or openly feared, embodying ancestral fears and, at the same
time, deep symbolic fascinations (Kohn, 2013). I will also explore the concept of
liminal figures – beings who dwell on thresholds: between nature and culture,
wilderness and domesticity, object and subject (Maran, 2015).
Feared others
If we look closely at the historical relationship between humans and many
animal species, we notice that fear has often functioned as a powerful
epistemic device: a lens that does not merely distort the image of the other, but
actively constructs its meaning. We do not fear snakes and raptors because they
are ‘objectively’ dangerous. Rather, narratives of danger, suspicion and control
have shaped our understanding of their place in the world.
Snakes represent a paradigmatic case. Across cultures they have embodied
both renewal and danger, but in modern Western contexts a single image
prevails: the Edenic serpent, translated from religious symbol of temptation
into secularized figure of risk. This legacy justifies their preventive elimination
as an act of ‘safety’, a framing that still permeates popular science and wildlife
management practices (Descola, 2013).
Raptors have likewise been cast as adversaries, from the eagle accused of
stealing lambs to the owl associated with death omens (Shepard, 1996). Well
into the twentieth century, their shooting or poisoning was considered a civic
duty to protect livestock and ‘useful’ fauna. This rhetoric of defence
consolidated a hierarchy of value among species, rendering some worthy of
protection and others legitimately expendable (Kohn, 2013).
Beneath these schemes lies a deeper assumption: an anthropocentrism that
establishes hierarchies of life based on perceived utility or danger to humans. A
snake that does not bite, a raptor that does not prey on what is ‘ours’, may be
tolerated or even celebrated as spectacle; otherwise, they become objects to be
neutralized. Fear, far from being a mere instinct, thus acts as a normative
device that shapes ecological relations (Latouche, 2009; Braidotti, 2013).
Furthermore, human emotional responses such as fear, fascination or
affection do not erase animal subjectivity; they often presuppose it. As Winnicott
(1971) suggested, encounters with non-human presences open transitional
spaces where emotions become forms of symbolization. Marchesini (2017)
similarly emphasizes that emotions toward animals are not projections but
moments of relational recognition, in which the self negotiates its boundaries
with another subject. Even fear, as Shepard (1996) reminds us, can be read as the
trace of a long co-evolution, a response to beings perceived as active presences
rather than inert objects. For this reason, animals that provoke fear are not less
but more clearly revealed as subjects: they confront us with the limits of our
control, obliging us to acknowledge them as agents in the relationship.
Animated ontologies
In contrast to Western framings, many other cultures have inscribed snakes and
raptors into radically different ontologies, which do not sharply separate nature
and culture, human and non-human (Viveiros de Castro, 1998; Descola, 2013).
In Amazonian indigenous cosmologies, for example, snakes are not merely
predators to be feared, but entities endowed with subjective perspectives,
capable of seeing and acting upon the world intentionally (Viveiros de Castro,
1998). In these cosmologies the boundaries between species are not fixed lines,
but constellations of relations continually redefined. A snake, in certain ritual
contexts, can see ‘like a human’ or become a conduit for visions, revealing that
subjectivity is not the exclusive monopoly of Homo sapiens, but distributed
among many living beings inhabiting different natures.
Similarly, in many African and Asian cultures, raptors are regarded as
messengers or spirit guides. The eagle and falcon in particular embody the
ability to overfly borders, connect worlds and carry news from ancestors or
gods. Even barn owls, which in medieval European iconography were linked to
misfortune, appear in other traditions as threshold protectors and guardians
between life and death (Shepard, 1996).
This transformation is also visible within Euro-Mediterranean traditions if
we look further back in time. The figure of the serpent provides a striking
example. Jörmungandr, the great serpent encircling the world in Norse
mythology, is a necessary cosmic presence, a symbol of balance and renewal.
Its death at Ragnarök does not mark the end of everything, but the beginning
of a new cycle. In the Judeo-Christian tradition, by contrast, the serpent
becomes the embodiment of sin and temptation, bearer of a guilt that founds
the punitive order of the West and justifies its moral supremacy over the rest of
creation. These contrasts remind us that there is not a single, monolithic
‘Western thought’, but a plurality of traditions, often internally contradictory,
that have framed animal figures in divergent ways.
These cosmologies are not simply ‘folk beliefs’ to be contrasted with a
supposedly neutral and objective scientific knowledge. On the contrary, they
reveal how every culture – including modern Western technoscience –
constructs animated ontologies, ways of conceiving who or what possesses
interiority, intentionality and speech (Descola, 2013; Kohn, 2013). The
difference is that modernity has fenced off such qualities almost exclusively
within the human, leaving other beings only a remainder of merely mechanical
or biological functions.
To compare these visions is thus to problematize our very way of delimiting
subjectivities. It is to ask: what do we lose – ethically, ecologically,
epistemologically – when we refuse to entertain the possibility that a snake or
a raptor might be something other than a mere automaton guided by instinct?
And above all, what responsibility do we bear when transmitting to non-
modern peoples a paradigm that risks dissolving their more sober, cohabitant
cosmological relations with the living world (Latouche, 2009; Descola, 2013)?
It should be emphasized that focusing on the role cosmologies play in
constructing our ontology, does not mean denying that animals possess
autonomous subjectivities which precede and exceed human symbolic
constructions. As Marchesini (2017) has argued, animal subjectivity is not a
derivative of human recognition but an agentive and relational dimension in its
own right. Ingold (2000) has similarly shown that to perceive the environment
is to enter into a meshwork of relations that cannot be reduced to cultural
constructs, because beings are already enmeshed in processes of life and
meaning. In this horizon, Kohn’s (2013) insight that even forests ‘think’
through the semiotic activity of their non-human inhabitants further extends
the point: what human cultures construct are not subjectivities themselves, but
the frames through which these are acknowledged, valued or suppressed
(Descola, 2013).
Liminal beings
In many mythological and narrative traditions, certain animals occupy an
ambiguous position, oscillating between categories we usually consider
distinct: life and death, earth and sky, inside and outside, individual and
collective (Kohn, 2013; Lévi-Strauss, 1962).
Snakes are an emblematic case of such liminality: they crawl on the boundary
between surface and underground, shed their skins, regenerate. Thus they are
often associated with cycles of rebirth, but also with deep fears linked to the
unknown and the uncontrollable (Viveiros de Castro, 1998). Likewise, raptors
traverse a frontier space: they fly high yet hunt low, acting as mediators
between sky and earth, divine and terrestrial. Their gaze from above questions
the horizontal perspective typical of humans, destabilizing hierarchies of
observation and control (Maran, 2015; Martinelli, 2010).
There is another figure we can evoke as an example of radical liminality, one
that prompts us to question the very temporality of life: the Aldabra giant
tortoise (Aldabrachelys gigantea). With its slow pace, shell reminiscent of living
rock and longevity spanning centuries, this creature embodies a deep time that
far exceeds our individual human horizon. Encountering these tortoises can
thus produce a disorienting sense of suspension. Liminality, in this sense, does
not indicate a fixed border but a condition of oscillation and passage, where
categories blur without disappearing: the perception that our rhythms, our
urgencies, even our inner conflicts are tiny events on a temporal scale to which
we do not quite belong (Shepard, 1996).
Liminal figures thus have the power to unsettle the dichotomies upon which
we construct our identity – subject/object, culture/nature, rationality/instinct,
and, of course, human/animal – and help us to see the contingency of the
ontological boundaries we have constructed.
Interspecies communication and biocentric ethics
In light of all this, we might ask: what does it mean, in practical and normative
terms, to recognize animal subjectivities and their agencies? How can we
translate this perceptual shift into a biocentric ethics capable of decentering the
human without denying it?
This shift entails acknowledging the cultural pluralities in how human
relationships with other animals are conceived. An intercultural ethics cannot
simply impose Western categories – whether zoological or moral – on the
relationships that different peoples maintain with the living world. It must
instead open to a dialogue with cosmologies that see animals not as mere
organisms, but as non-human persons, allies or guardians – interlocutors in a
profoundly relational sense (Viveiros de Castro, 1998; Kohn, 2013).
Interspecies communication becomes the privileged laboratory for such an
ethics. It is not just about developing techniques to ‘better understand’ animals
or interpret their behaviours in utilitarian ways (for example in conservation or
training), but about cultivating forms of listening, attention and respect that
recognize in other living beings the capacity to signify, to choose and
sometimes to withdraw (Martinelli, 2010; Hoffmeyer, 2008).
In this context, a crucial contribution comes from zoosemiotics, the study of
sign processes involving animals not merely as receivers but as producers
of meaning (Hoffmeyer, 2008). As Martinelli (2010) and Maran (2015)
demonstrate, animal communication is a complex semiotic field where
animals interpret signals, construct meanings and modulate social and
ecological interactions. As Wheeler (2016) argues, this semiotic approach can
help us conceptualize human cultures themselves as ecologies of signs,
interwoven with the communicative practices of non-human beings. This
perspective reinforces the idea that animals are not biological machines but
active interpreters of signs and subjects endowed with their own interiority.
This approach is not limited to an interpretive level: it becomes a true
epistemic rewilding, a renaturalization of our own knowledge, dismantling the
cognitive barriers we have erected between ourselves and other living beings
(Hoffmeyer, 2008). It means reopening to the possibility that the signs emitted
by a snake vibrating its tail, a raptor in flight or a turtle moving stubbornly
forward are not merely physiological reactions, but components of a broader
ecological language of which we too are a part (Abram, 1996).
In this sense, zoosemiotics emerges as a critical device for deconstructing
anthropocentric categories and for relearning how to read the traces of agency
scattered throughout the living world, without immediately domesticating and
reducing them into ‘the useful’ or ‘the dangerous’. It is an invitation to reshape
our sensory and ethical literacy, reactivating a form of listening that precedes
and exceeds our own grammar, opening us to the multiplicity of worlds and
languages coexisting on the planet.
Decentering anthropocentrism
Ultimately, this perspective has an eminently political value: in an era marked
by ecological crisis, zoonoses and climate change, rethinking interspecies
relationships through a biocentric lens is not only an ethical exercise but
a strategic urgency. This implies what I call a symbolic decentering of
anthropocentrism, opening space for other agencies and ways of inhabiting the
Earth. In this sense, liminal figures such as snakes, raptors and tortoises provide
a privileged laboratory: they show us how to go about dwelling in thresholds, in
the interstices that unsettle our ontological boundaries – between human and
non-human, culture and nature, mortality and deep time (Descola, 2013;
Braidotti, 2013). Authors such as Braidotti (2013) and Maran (2015) have argued
that learning to live with and in these thresholds is essential for a post-
anthropocentric ethics. This entails no longer placing the human at the centre
of our imaginaries, but instead opening space for narratives, practices and
representations that restore agency and complexity to animal subjectivities.
This is not only of ecological or ethical significance; it also represents a
profoundly anti-colonial act. It allows us to strip away the attractive power of a
model of modernity which, when exported, pushes traditional cultures to
abandon their cosmological fabrics in pursuit of consumerist paradigms
(Descola, 2013; Latouche, 2009). In doing so, we risk destroying relationships
that for centuries ensured cohabitation and respect, replacing them with a
blind, purely economic relationship with the environment.
A symbolic decentering of anthropocentrism thus becomes a geopolitical
responsibility: allowing the plurality of ways of inhabiting the world to
flourish, without dragging them into a crisis that is, first and foremost, a crisis
of our own imaginary. If we in the West – heirs to a modernity that severed
symbolic ties with the rest of the living world – manage to regain a cultural and
mental connection with non-modern visions, we might finally mend our
ontological fracture without exerting that cultural soft power which pushes
other societies toward our same fate (Braidotti, 2013; Latouche, 2009). A
symbolic decentering of anthropocentrism thus means stripping power away
from a devastating imaginary, resisting the homogenizing pressure of our
cultural frames, and letting flourish the plurality of ways of dwelling on Earth
– including those that still today recognize in snakes, raptors and tortoises not
mere organisms, but interlocutors, allies and guardians of thresholds (Kohn,
2013; Viveiros de Castro, 1998).
To make this symbolic shift effective requires us to translate it into concrete
action. It means, for example, rethinking school and university curricula to
incorporate intercultural and semiotic perspectives that restore complexity
to non-human worlds. Concrete initiatives might include educational
programmes where raptors are engaged as liminal figures to foster
attentiveness and humility, or therapeutic projects involving giant tortoises,
whose deep temporality unsettles our human rhythms and offers a unique
pedagogical experience. It means fostering artistic and media forms that
deconstruct human centrality, staging animal agencies, relational ecologies
and deep temporalities (Martinelli, 2010; Maran, 2015; Wheeler, 2016). It also
means supporting community and institutional decisions that integrate
traditional knowledges, safeguarding historical relationships between peoples
and territories without reducing them to mere marketing assets or hollow
patrimonial rhetorics (Descola, 2013). Only in this way can this symbolic
decentering become a daily and shared experience, truly transforming our way
of inhabiting the Earth, rather than remaining a purely theoretical exercise.
Concluding remarks
Throughout this journey, we have shown how cultural representations of
snakes, raptors and other liminal figures are not mere symbolic ornaments,
but devices that concretely shape our relationships with the living. Modern
Western frameworks have often reduced these animals to objects to be
managed or neutralized, erecting the human as the measure of all things. In
contrast, non-modern cosmologies and the perspectives opened by
zoosemiotics invite us to recognize a plurality of worlds and temporalities,
where the human is neither centre nor apex, but one interlocutor among many.
Embracing this relational multiplicity means abandoning the claim to
epistemic or moral transparency, opening ourselves to situated forms of
knowledge, where listening to a snake vibrating its tail or watching a tortoise
advance becomes an act of mutual learning. Moving from a paradigm of control
to one of cohabitation entails rethinking educational institutions, environmental
practices and our own inner maps. It means welcoming alterity not as a deficit,
but as an opportunity to renegotiate our ontological, ethical and political
boundaries.
Perhaps only by lingering alongside those who live in different times and
worlds – from the raptor surveying from above to the tortoise crossing decades
– can we begin to cultivate a perceptual openness and an ecological
responsibility that is not paternalism, but a transformative alliance. To
embrace such a perspective is to resist the homogenizing force of modernity
and to let flourish a plurality of ways of dwelling on Earth that are truly
ecocentric.
References
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Francesca Romana Petroselli has a degree in psychology from the University of Padua, Italy, and is currently undertaking a Master’s degree in Philosophical Ethology and Environmental Ethics at the University of Cassino and Southern Lazio, Italy.
Her research focuses on interspecies communication, symbolic landscapes and the ethical bonds between humans and non-humans.
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