Doctoral dissertations in semiotics have been defended at the University of Tartu since 1999; since the year 2000, these theses have been published as the series Dissertationes Semioticae ...Universitatis Tartuensis. The present paper provides an up-to-date bibliography of the dissertations.
The public transport sector in the urban landscape in Nigeria is a prominent social site for the spatial distribution of automobile graffiti signatures. Transporters have various kinds of symbolic ...tags on their vehicles that convey different messages which represent their local attitudes, beliefs, religious identities, folk psychology, and safety precautionary measures to recipients (other road users and passers-by). This article, based on two case studies, examines the practice of automobile graffiti on trucks and lorries in Calabar metropolis, Cross River State, south-eastern Nigeria. It investigates the motivations, thematic categories, and subjective semiotic interpretations of these verbal signatures from the perspectives of visual semiotics theory using participant observations, semi-structured interviews, and informal conversations. The study demonstrates that truck drivers/owners use their vehicles as visible artistic platforms in the public space to express their thoughts and sentiments on personal, social, and religious issues affecting the society. The study concludes that these inscriptions and imageries are artistic subcultures that mirror wide ranging value categories and provide outlets for spatial transformation, creative agencies, and social commentaries.
In this article I have attempted to use Umberto Eco’s semiotics of the text in order to analyze the famous “parable of the banquet,” which has come down to us in three versions from the gospels of ...Luke (14,15–24), Matthew (22,1–14) and Thomas (
64). In particular I have tried to consider (i) the socio-cultural context, or in other words the
of the community within which the parable was written; (ii) the narrative structure of the parable, with the
that stimulate the reader to cooperate in the work of interpretation and to draw inferences; (iii) the way in which the Model Author is portrayed in the text; (iv) the kind of Model Reader who is prefigured in the parable. The analysis has shown how in the parable of the banquet, the original level (deriving directly from the preaching of Jesus) characterized by a salvationist and social slant is always overlaid with another level that is hortatory, pedagogical or ecclesiological, and which takes on different connotations according to the different contexts. Generally the Evangelists are suggesting to their communities that they make changes in their behavior ranging from renunciation of wealth to the resetting of social ties, from a stance of constant vigilance to the practice of an active faith, from healthy detachment from worldly frivolity to a rigorous asceticism. Thus the editorial layers reveal differing
in function of particular interpretative responses, different Model Authors and different Model Readers.
This article briefly describes the geographical environment of Meizhou Island, analyzes the origin and aesthetic characteristics of the giant statue of Mazu, and focuses on its semiotic meaning from ...the perspective of the giant statue of Mazu as a visual image resource, it has function of education, this is conducive to develop Mazu culture.
This article introduces the crucial yet much overlooked dimension of verticality to landscape‐related research through a case study of one of the most iconic skyscrapers in Hong Kong, the world's ...most vertical city. A tripartite analytic model is proposed to examine the dialogical interaction between the discursive and material landscapes in a vertical layout, while at the same time to explore the intricate interrelations among social actors, practices, functions of space, levels of access and forms and functions of semiotic resources, all within one single site of varying levels of verticality. In the process, the study reveals the vertical space as a highly stratified and hierarchical system, and underlines the value of taking a functional approach to verticality in order to deepen our understanding of its indexical social meaning and its role as an active agent both in reflecting and shaping social stratification in today's globalised and consumerist world.
本文探討景觀研究中,一項重要而常被忽略之元素 — 垂直性。在世界最垂直的城市 — 香港,我們透過一案例,分析香港其一最具標誌性的高樓大廈,從而提出一個三部份的縱向分析模型,以檢視話語景觀與物料景觀,在一個垂直的空間中的交流及相互作用。與此同時,我們探究在此一垂直的空間中,社會行動者、社會行為、空間功能與使用權限,及話語資源的形態及作用,其錯綜複雜的相互關係。在此過程中,本研究揭示垂直空間的高度分層性及階級性,並突出在全球化及消費主義下,我們如何透過以功能為重的研究方法,更深入了解垂直性的指引社會含意,及其於反映及同時塑造社會分層化的重要角色。Chinese
Following the heyday of Lévi-Straussian structuralism in the 1970s-80s, little attention has been paid by scholars of religion to semiotics. Semiotics of Religion reassesses key semiotic theories in ...the light of religious data. Yelle examines the semiotics of religion from structural and historical perspectives, drawing on Peircean linguistic anthropology, Jakobsonian poetics, comparative religion and several theological traditions. This book pays particular attention to the transformation of religious symbolism under modernization and the rise of a culture of the printed book. Among the topics addressed are: - ritual repetition and the poetics of ritual performance \- magic and the belief in a natural (iconic) language \- Protestant literalism and iconoclasm \- disenchantment and secularization \- Holiness, arbitrariness, and agency Building from the legacy of structuralism while interrogating several key doctrines of that movement, Semiotics of Religion both introduces the field to a new generation and charts a course for future research.
There is a need to define the term intimocide in order to problematize other dimensions, besides those of genocide and ethnocide, of violence inflicted on human beings. As an excessive constraint on ...the most intimate area of citizens’ lives, intimocide is a step in extending the domain of death, it targets the last bulwark of the meaning of existence, destroying it in its depths. It is a political phenomenon, linked to the government of a society and to the aspirations that this government expresses towards the individual. It is also a strategy of total domination. At the crossroads of semiotic and anthropological approaches, our study aims to differentiate intimocide from neighboring terms, while demonstrating its aspects, found in the literature as well as in our own participatory observation of the totalitarian communist regime and the post-communist regime.
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