Biosemiotics and Religion: Theoretical Perspectives on Language, Society and the Supernatural

Abstract

An anthropological perspective on biosemiosis raises important questions about sociality, ecology and communication in contexts that encompass many different forms of life. As such, these questions are important for understanding the problem of religion in relation to social theory, as well as understanding our collective, biosocial animal history and the development of human culture, as an articulation of power, on an evolutionary time scale. The argument presented here is that biosemiotics provides a framework for extending Talal Asad’s genealogical critique of religion to culture more broadly, providing an important perspective on power in relation to communication and in relation to the ‘supernatural’ attributes of language in a multi-species environment of signs and sign relationships.

Biosemiotics and Hominidae history: technicity, animals, and the limitations of human exceptionalism

“…1‐9, 66‐136). Representations of experiential, perceptual reality take on supernatural characteristics as a result of abstraction and correlated dissociation, quite apart from, but in anticipation of, more explicit forms of distortion, emphasis, and mythopoetic symbolic exaggeration (see Alter 2022).…”