He is a tiger: human/non-human perceptual semiosphere and trans-umwelt
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.11606/issn.1980-4016.esse.2026.244068Keywords:
Semiosphere, Trans-umwelt, Cosmoexistence, Tiger dancesAbstract
The animal and human perceptual universes are connected by a bridge dating back to ancient origin myths, where an intersubjective dialogue exists: animals converse with humans, they have a voice, they are our siblings and advisors. From this perspective, we would be considering the existence of two realms of meaning: on the one hand, a human perceptual semiosphere, and on the other, a non-human perceptual semiosphere. The permeable boundaries between these two semiospheres have allowed, since ancestral times, the building of bridges through complex ritual texts, where the encounter with non-human otherness is empirically observable. In the case of the dances currently practiced within the chronotope of the festival in Mesoamerican ethnic groups, it is possible to observe, since ancestral times, how a bridge is established between the subjective universes of the human and animal worlds, which I will preliminarily call trans-umwelt. I will take as a case study the Tiger Dance, which demonstrates how the ritual specialist embodies and perceives the animal world within a sacred context. The aim of this article is to show how Uexküll's theory of the umwelt can gain greater heuristic force by integrating Lotman’s proposals, and how it can be applied as an analytical tool in ancestral cosmosemiotics.
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