Case studies

Abstract

This part of the book will present two case studies based on two relatively recent (and now updated) investigations that I performed in the fields of musical semiotics and zoosemiotics respectively. These particular two were chosen as they were considered especially relevant within the discussion of Numanities, and in two different ways. In the first case study I discuss the most typical result (or perhaps cause?) of the technophobic attitude that I have addressed very often in this book: the issue of “authenticity”, as applied, in my particular study, to music (and even more specifically to popular music). In the second case study, I analyze two different forms of comparative analysis between human and non-human cognition: The question of human specificity within the animal kingdom, and the question of language and interspecific communication. Like in the former case, this study, too, is aimed at a critical commentary on (what I consider) redundant biases in current humanistic research—anthropocentrism and speciesism.