Chapter 7: The Living, the Un-Living, and the Hard-To-Kill: Acting and Feeling on the Boundary

We are interdependent with our environments in species-specific ways. In the case of Homo sapiens this entails cultural construction of meaningfulness for naturally occurring events within our lives’ experiences. We not just act in relation with our environment—we act and give meaning to that very acting. Human life is operating as such dual-channel process. A concise theory of Umwelt in the human case needs to start from accepting that premise— very well prepared already by von Uexküll in his treatise on meanings in animal lives (von Uexküll, 1940/1982). Heralded to be an example of qualitative organicism in biology (Emmeche, 2001, 2004) and the boundary field of biology and semiotics (Kull, 1998), the Umwelt focus can be a productive basis for new developments in cultural psychology. Human meaning construction takes place both in its “horizontal” (expansion of meanings through adjacent events and experiences) and “vertical” (abstractive generalization and creating hyper-generalized affective sign fields—Valsiner, 2005) dimensions. In this chapter we elaborate the latter—the construction of hierarchies of semiotic fields that regulate immediate action (and thinking about action). We do it on the basis of a selected range of issues of life and death—persons’ unexpected imagined encounters with killing different animals under differently defined social contexts.