Thank you everyone, for those insights and leads. It's been a fascinating morning following those all up!
The reason this question came about is that I'm studying the social values of Australian threatened birds, ie. I'm trying to find out what birds mean to Australian society in order to better conserve them. So I'm approaching this question from a social science perspective and from a values perspective.
To give some brief background...
My research is based on the Yale scholar
Stephen Kellert’s work on attitudes to wildlife. I’ve identified 12 different consumptive and non-consumptive values that humans hold for birds: physical aesthetic, cultural/symbolic, spiritual, conservation, ecological, biophysical, humanistic, experiential, mastery, negative, utilitarian, and moral/intrinsic.
Definitions I'm using are:
Aesthetic - primary interest in physical attractiveness / sensuous qualities of birds, their sounds, colours, appearance, textures and smells / symbolic characteristics of birds.
Cultural / symbolic - animals function as expressions of group identity or social experiences and the objects of specialized attachments.
Traditionally in social science, to find out how people value something, you'd ask them directly through a survey, but since I'm trying to capture values for as many of Australia’s 700 odd species as possible, and the general public's knowledge of birds is mostly limited to the more well-known species, I've been going about it a different way. The first stage of my research has therefore involved gathering nationally representative data on representations of different species across society, across all the value categories. The idea is to create a social profile for each species in terms of how it's valued and to see if, in the case of threatened species, this influences society’s interest in their conservation.
So for example for the symbolic category I identified which species are represented on stamps, street signs and place names, defence force mascots, sports team names, coins, council logos, etc. It's fascinating to see just how often birds show up on everyday items.
For physical aesthetic the range of representations appeared much smaller (I was limiting searches to publicly available, nationally representative data). I examined which species are found on artworks held in national galleries and libraries, individual species bird calls and media stories that discuss the physical characteristics of different species.
It seemed to me though that artworks were both potentially aesthetic and symbolic so I began to think I was trying to fit a square peg into a round hole by categorising them all as aesthetic. Hence my original question to this group, which you’ve all so thoughtfully responded to. I think we mostly agree that both aesthetics and symbolism play a part.
However, the literature on wildlife aesthetics that I've read so far (by philosophers and scientists such as Roger Scruton, Holmes Rolston III, David Stokes and Jamie Lorimer) suggests that aesthetics not only include the physical characteristics of an animal, but also the context (including the indexical signs you mention Andrew) and its life-force:
"Aesthetic experience of wildlife is one of spontaneous form in motion" says Holmes Rolston III.
Lorimer says that charisma or physical appeal is most relevant in living animals rather than representations of them because of their impact on our emotions.
This is where I got the idea that to truly judge a bird’s aesthetic appeal you have to be considering the living bird rather than a representation of it. halftwo, you described this beautifully in your post on zen birding.
But this leads on to several more related questions such as:
- do some birds seen in the wild have more aesthetic appeal than others, and why?
- as artists, do you have a preference for representing particular species over others and why?
- do you think this selective process can influence society’s understanding of which species are aesthetically or symbolically important?
- since humans are biologically programmed to be influenced by things like neoteny and anthropomorphism, will we ultimately prioritise which species of birds are conserved because of their looks or human characteristics, or will the other values we hold for them prevail (such as their intrinsic value)?
sorry, that's a lot of heavy questions for a Sunday morning! may have to go and lie down now, or better yet go out and do some birding. While writing this I had to dash outside with the bins as a pair of adult pheasant coucals and their chick were walking up my driveway, which has made my day. Much more exciting than the scores of humble doves also wandering around