Interspecies Semiotics and the Specter of Taboo: The Perception and Interpretation of Dogs and Rabies in Bali, Indonesia

Abstract

ABSTRACT The anthropological fields of ethnobiology and ethnoscience, in their analysis of indigenous environmental knowledge, have largely focused on forms of conceptual knowledge such as biological terms and taxonomic categories. However, their examination of subjects’ environmental knowledge does not explicitly address how subjects relate to their environment through varied cognitive and phenomenal mechanisms. By including other types of knowledge, such as perceptual acuity and interpretive range, differences in indigenous knowledge and the processes that shape such knowledge may be better understood. In this article, I report the results of experiments comparing the abilities of Hindus and Muslims in Bali to discern the differences in dog vocalizations and to diagnose the presence of rabies in dogs. The results highlight the importance of a negative symbolic association, the Muslim taboo on interaction with dogs, which constrains both perceptions of dogs and interpretations of the animal's behavior. Evidence for significant variation in a subject's perceptions of dog vocalizations provides greater context to prior studies that found a common ability to understand the vocalizations of dogs. Such differences, combined with the restriction of a subject's interpretative range and depth in analyzing the presence of rabies, illustrate how symbolic systems can induce a form of what psychologists refer to as “perceptual narrowing.”

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