Talking With Animals

Undergraduate / Graduate

All over the world, children have long learned the lessons of what it means to be human from what other animals tell them. In addition to ventriloquizing non-human animals to socialize human ones, projects for facilitating cross-species communication abound. These projects not only reveal how humans imagine their relations with other animals, but also how we conceive of the possibilities and limits of different sign systems. And while many focus on whether and to what degree non-human animals can apprehend linguistic signs, others suggest that animals are effective communicators precisely because they lack language, raising fascinating questions about ideologies of (im)mediation on the one hand, and multi-modality on the other. As we learn how Peruvian kids talk with llamas and American cowboys whisper to wild horses, and explore what spiders say and how apes read the human keepers who teach them to sign, this class explores how distinctions are drawn between human and non-human animals, as well as attempts to cross those divides through communicative forms and technologies.