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Rachel Holmes profile

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Rachel Holmes

Kingston University London (2019)

Thesis

The Language of Birds: lucky rituals and nature

About

Drawing from ethnobotanist Dale Pendell and anthropologist Eduardo Kohn to develop a methodology to represent beyond-human communication, in the mythopoetic tradition. Applying this to a semiotic construction of human and non-human relations, gauged in the "language of birds" – chance, fortune and pre-linguistic modes of communication, including dream. Identifying the body as the site of dreaming, and drawing from Georges Bataille to characterize the "lacerated body" as ritualistically cultured.