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Looking at and through the Beast: Construction of 'Animal' within the Prague Zoo
Polakovičová, Dana ; Stella, Marco (advisor) ; Haywood, Mark (referee)
The thesis is based on the presumption that zoological gardens are cultural institutions which reflect social and cultural interpretations of what is called 'nature' and animals. By analyzing data gained through participant observation it focuses on the meanings and forms which are ascribed to animals living in the Prague Zoo via the gaze of visitors. Furthermore, by analysis of visual and textual sources provided by the zoo, I examine how the 'zoo animal' is constructed by the zoo itself. I argue that this zoo animal constitutes a specific form of the animal, different from both the domesticated and the wild one. The zoo and its visitors create a chimeric 'beast' which encompasses different and even contradictory trends and conceptions of thinking about the zoo animal.
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Anthropomorphization in Communication with Nonhuman Entities
Uhlíř, Vilém ; Stella, Marco (advisor) ; Markoš, Anton (referee)
In this thesis I pursue a critical summary of the so-called "talking animals" projects, wherein the researchers tried to train their animal subjects to perform "linguistic" feats. Considering both the fundamental dissilimarity of the projects and the uniformity of their results, I am lead to conclude that the shortcoming was that of the students - the animals, and not that of the teachers. Failure of the animal projects points mainly to the fact, that a core feature of language is missing in the pseudolinguistic feats of the animals that which is missing is the hierarchical recursive syntax. I conclude that no animal has had likely adopted the open, unbounded, hierarchically recursive system that allows us, quite literally, to express anything. Linguistic data that I considered indicates that language is most likely an inborn neural specialization of H. spaiens. All the available facts considered manage to show that the pseudolinguistic feats of the "talking" animals are most likely caused by a great plasticity of general cognition. General cognition has the capacity to virtually simulate (although imperfectly) certain aspects of human neural linguistic specialization. Neural linguistic specialization in H. sapiens is an evolutionary discontinuity, whereas the general cognition plasticity is...
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