A fresh assessment of the workings of animal symbolism in diverse cultures. Reconsiders the concept of totemism and exposes common fallacies in symbolic interpretation.
Introduction 1 The pangolin revisited: a new approach to animal
symbolisim 2 Cultural attitudes to birds and animals in folklore 3 Animal
language in the Garden of Eden: folktale elements in Genesis 4 A semantic
analysis of the symbolism of Toba mythical animals 5 Back to the future:
trophy arrays as mental maps in the Wopkaimins culture of Place 6 Sheep bone
as a sign of human descent: tibial symbolism among the Mongols 7 Ecological
community and species attributes in Yolngu religious symbolism 8 Pictish
animal symbols 9 The idea of fish: land and sea in the Icelandic world-view
10 Animals in Hopi duality 11 Eat and be eaten: animals in Uwa (Tunebo) oral
tradition 12 Tezcatlipoca: jaguar metaphors and the Aztec mirror of nature 13
Nanook, super-male: the polar bear in the imaginary space and social time of
the Inuit of the Canadian Arctic 14 Antelope as self-image among the Uduk 15
The track of the python: a West African origin story 16 Nigerian cultural
attitudes to the dog 17 Rodeo horses: the wild and the tame 18 The beast
without: the moa as a colonial frontier myth in New Zealand 19 The meaning of
the snake
Roy Willis, Department of Social Anthropology, University of Edinburgh.
