This article discusses peasants’ attitude to cows, the foundations and mechanisms of this attitude’s semiotization, and the mythological and poetic interpretations of the images of the cow (and of the calf) in various types and genres of Belarusian traditional spiritual culture. Inna Shved examines folkloric and ethnographic material recorded in the Brest Polesie region in the period 1990–2018. She identifies and describes the “cow-bull code”, which covers a wide range of phenomena in the spiritual and material culture of peasants and relates to objects of peasant life. Deriving its origin from mythology, this code is reflected in ritual terminology and in folklore texts used in rituals and otherwise.

The main goal of this article is to ponder the presence of horses in the urban space of Kraków. Due to their common presence on the streets, horses constitute an integral part of Kraków’s cityscape. Joanna Gellner treats the issue of using horses as draft force in urban transport, by fire brigades and order services. She discusses the situation of horses in the context of the emerging animal welfare movement, which dates to the nineteenth century. The large scale of using horses caused a similarly large scale of abuse against them.

New spirituality is a phenomenon in contemporary culture that has the extraordinary ability of adapting to various spheres of social life. The aim of this paper is to identify and examine the presence of the discourse of new spirituality in narratives by the leading propagators of natural horsemanship. The appearance of this discourse in a sphere apparently as distant from spirituality as horse-riding can be regarded as an indicator of broader cultural changes, which consist in the spreading of a characteristic language and a vision of the world over an increasing number of cultural spheres. Agata Rejowska’s analysis shows the presence of the following distinctive new spirituality motifs in the narratives of the propagators of natural horsemanship: holistic thinking; the rejection of the mind-body dichotomy; intuitionism; appreciation of nature; an understanding of “energy” reminiscent of Far Eastern views; the use of alternative medicine, and the recognition of values traditionally perceived as “feminine” (e.g., giving preference to cooperation instead of violence and domination).
and domination).

Celem tego artykułu jest pokazanie, że ciało konia może stać się metaforą ciała doświadczającego, przeciwstawionego baletowemu ciału idealnemu (nadrealnemu). Ważnym kontekstem jest dla mnie pozycja koni w cyrku tradycyjnym, których występy są traktowane jako forma manifestacji władzy człowieka nad światem natury. Ujarzmienie dzikości na cyrkowej arenie można bowiem rozpatrywać jako proces paralelny do dyscyplinowania ciała baletowego. Drugim ważnym dla mnie wątkiem jest związek koni z wojną. W kulturze i historii koń jest jednocześnie podbijanym i podbijającym. To samo można powiedzieć o ciele, które z jednej strony musi przejść represyjny i uprzedmiotawiający proces uspołeczniania, z drugiej – warunkuje „ja” bycie w świecie, realnie kształtuje tożsamość podmiotu. Do zilustrowania tych tez i przemyśleń służy mi spektakl kolektywu Via Negativa Dziewiąta.

This article offers an overview of the literary functions of the fly, that seemingly meaningless and inconspicuous creature. The main inspiration for this analysis has come from observations of the diversity of the images, ideas, and interpretations related to the fly found on the pages of literary works. In them, the fly often becomes man’s “faithful companion,” a being a person can identify with; but it also tends to be represented as a creature towards which people remain indifferent.

As a point of departure, article presents the Stoic understanding of human-animal relationships: the Stoic philosophers presupposed
human dominance over other creatures, which excluded the norms of justice as a means of limiting the human hegemony. On the basis of an excerpt from Pliny’s Natural History, which recounts a story of elephants, Tomasz Sapota examines the extent to which Pliny accepted this view of the Stoics.

This article treats the motif of the horse present abundantly in Bolesław Prus’s fiction, correspondence and journalism. As represented in Prus’s literary output, the horse is a participant in the everyday life, pastime and work of people living in the second half of the 19th century. Ewa Krzakowska-Łazuka discusses the following topics associated with horses and explored by Prus over the years: recreational horse-riding as Warsaw sports, horse racing, horse breeding, public transport, farm labor, the activity of charity organizations aimed at improving the fate of horses in the urban environment. She also makes an attempt to explain the author’s ethically motivated protest encoded in his images of abuse and exploitation of workhorses.

The sense of hopelessness vis-à-vis the anthropocentric paradigm makes it difficult today to think about the future of the planet and reinforces pessimism and resignation. This is also true of the eco-critically inflected humanities; they highlight the need for an awareness-raising transformation that could limit the extent of the expected climate catastrophe. At this point, they must be supported by tools capable of changing reality. Such tools must meet the social needs of wholeness, meaning, and spirituality and remain open to non-Western models of religiosity. It is especially worth looking for them in post-secular thinking, which combines a reasoned and an intuitive way of understanding reality.

The main problem that Tomasz Nowak discusses in this article concerns the boundaries of language and speech as set by both social sciences and the humanities and mathematics and natural sciences. His special focus is the fusion of semiotics and biology known as biosemiotics. Nowak argues that bio-communicative skills of human and non-human animals are divided by a gap which is both quantitative and qualitative. However, phylogenetic pre-adaptations and (pre)ontogenetic dispositions of human and non-human animals are, on the one hand, communicatively discreet, and, on the other, cognitively and behaviorally continual. The results of empirical studies cited and examined by Nowak support the idea that there are bio-communicative traits specific to humans.

This article describes anthropocentrically marked idioms with species names of birds in their structure. The material presented here shows the importance of the relationships between birds and humans as fixed in Polish phraseology. Structurally varied combinations of words containing a bird component serve as metaphorical characterizations of humans. Experiences and observations contained in them connote both positive and negative values. Those values concern not only the appearance of people, but also the intellect, human experience, and the general principles of human life.

Andrzej Pitrus writes about films showing the transgression of man towards animality. He is interested in human-animal hybrids, as well as prohibited sexual contacts between representatives of different species. These motifs are present in the cinema, but they are a kind of taboo, a line which filmmakers rarely cross. It turns out, however, that they can effectively problematize fundamental existential issues and more.

Animals are at the heart of biological and medical disciplines when carrying out educational and research exercises, both in the laboratory and in the classroom. Recent technological developments and the advancement of ethics have made it possible for traditional views on the relation of the researcher-experimenter to the research subject to evolve. At the Department of Physiology at St. Petersburg University, teachers are gradually abandoning the use of animals in practical exercises, actively introducing alternative methods of instruction to medical students. Such changes are taking place due to the fact that an increasing number of students defend the position that animals ought to remain unharmed. Replacing animals with alternative methods of research does not impair the quality of education and has a number of significant advantages: speed and depth of training, an individualistic approach, repeatability, ease of monitoring and evaluating results, the potential for autodidactic study, and a positive attitude to life.

Dogs and humans have relationships which are special in their emotional intensity. Aside from the fact that the dog performs many tasks that fulfil the needs of its human owner, it is also, and perhaps primarily, that owner’s friend and companion. At the same time, a dog may be regarded as a threat, due to associations with the aggressive nature of its wolfish ancestors. This ambivalence with regard to dogs can be detected in the modern history of robotics: the machines which are being developed seem to reflect both types of the dog’s image: that of a family member and that of a dangerous beast. Examples are supplied by the Aibo commercial robot created by Sony and the BigDog robot (including its subsequent advanced versions), created by Boston Dynamics for the military. Both these products can be seen as illustrations of the seemingly contradictory images of the dog in culture.

Lars Berge’s novel Project: Wolf was inspired by tragic events that took place in a zoological garden in Sweden in 2012. Among the garden’s commercial services, promoting an attractive place to spend time, was a project that offered close contact with wolves: visitors were able to enter the wolves’ run, where they could touch the eight males under the supervision of caretakers. Successful for some time, the projected eventually ended in a tragedy as the wolves attacked and killed a female caretaker after she had entered the run alone. The incident raises a lot of ethical questions and issues concerning relationships between humans and nonhuman animals. The novel sets these problems in the wide context of the humanities and social sciences as defined by the ideas of Jean Baudrillard and Michel Foucault.

Культурные источники антропопрессии [Рецензия на книгу Różnice kulturowe w traktowaniu zwierząt. Ред. Hanna Mamzer. Oficyna Wydawnicza ATUT, Wrocław 2020]

Sunaura Taylor: Beasts of Burden. Animal and Disability Liberation, The New Press, New York 2017, Hardcover, 260 pages