Deaf poets and other skilled signers are very good at deliberately giving human characteristics to non-human entities, such as animals or objects. They also "accidentally" accord human form to things that have non-human forms whenever they engage in roleshift. Once the poetic signer has shifted role to "become" a dog or a lion or a tree, spoon or street-lamp, all the human physical features of the signer must be mapped on to the new entity at some level. Even if the signer doesn't mean to accord eyes to a street-lamp, when there is roleshift the signer's eyes will be there, so at some level the street-lamp has eyes.
There are some lovely words for the figurative tropes that represent non-humans as human or humans as non-human. For the attribution of human qualities to the non-human, there are terms like "anthropomorphism" and "personification", although I confess I find it devilishly hard to find a clear distinction. For some people, the distinction seems to be that giving human form to an abstract concept (i.e. one that has no form at all) is personification and giving human qualities to animate or inanimate objects is anthropomorphism. Still, this seems a rather arbitrary division when we assume that they all get human form at the end of the process.
The poems I mention here are at http://www.bristol.ac.uk/education/research/sites/micsl/poems/
It seems to me that there must be something about giving human form to a non-human thing in "anthropomorphism" (if we are to take it etymologically with the "morph" bit meaning "form"). There are different levels of this, though, because as soon as the signer has opted to shift roles and "become" the non-human entity, it has taken on human form simply by virtue of the embodiment. John Wilson's Home describes how Laika (the first animal to go into orbit) is sent into space and he does not explicitly accord her human form - she's still a dog - but the human body shows the dog's body and the human head shows the dog's head, so at some level Laika is anthropomorphised. Richard Carter's Mirror has far more human qualities than Laika when he performs the poem, although the form of the mirror is still two-dimensional and square. Richard uses his head, face, eyes and body to accord some human form to the mirror.
Personification as a term might helpfully be reserved for times when the entity is rendered so humanly that you might forget it is not human. We see this in Paul Scott's Roz; Teach a Dog a New Trick in which Deaf Education is entirely human (a man or a woman? See my post from 26th November) to the extent that we may not even notice that the ball-thrower is an abstract concept. But, surely, there are degrees of personification because the key to personification ought to be to keep just enough of the non-human entity present in the personified form to allow it any figurative effect. From what I can make out, personification might be differentiated from anthropomorphisation by its attribution of the power of language to the entity. Anthropomorphised entities might be able to communicate, but only personified entities can use language (and don't call me Shirley). Again, there are myriad examples of entities at different places along a continuum for this use of language. Richard Carter's Reindeer in Snow Globe signs like a reindeer (using remnants of the reindeer's form by signing with its antlers) but the books in Paul Scott's Two Books sign like humans (using completely human form).
"Reification" is another term I have seen used, and occurs when an abstract quality is treated as though it is concrete. Cued speech, Paget-Gorman Signed speech and oral methods of education are all abstract concepts but Paul Scott in Macbeth of the Lost Ark has made them into three witches. Eerily, they only have a face and the sign identifying them, but the hands that make the sign itself are human, witch's hands. Thus the sign itself is reified.
Going in the opposite direction, for the de-humanisation of humans there is "zoomorphism" if we are referring to the human in terms of animals. There are also plenty of examples when humans describe themselves in terms of non-humans, for example saying that our batteries are low when we are tired or allowing children to let off steam. I'm still looking for the word for that. I do think there must be a word.
Embodying an animate non-human entity might mean that the signer always becomes zoomorphised in some way.
However, there are also plenty of times when the signer will accord animal or other non-human characteristics to a human character. Paul Scott does this in his poem Roz: teach a Dog a New Trick. The human Deaf child is represented as a dog in this poem. But, at the same time, there is underlying anthropomorphism here because the dog shows obedience, enthusiasm and resilience and zoologists would claim that these are qualities accorded to a dog through an anthropomorphic "fallacy" or error, as we have no idea if dogs feel these.
So we have a sort of 'Victor Victoria' situation here (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victor_Victoria), with the human embodying the character of a dog representing a human, and the human characteristics to be foregrounded are shown as characteristics of a dog.
The same multi-layering is also seen in Richard Carter's 'Birthday' in which the bear that can sign (i.e. an anthropomorphised bear) turns out to be the child's father in a bear-suit (a zoomorphised human).
It's not easy this stuff, but it's great fun.
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