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While addressing the decolonial critique of Eurocentric modernity and the call for alternative cosmo-visions, this article retraces Juri Lotman's culturological exploration towards the concept of ternarity [mephaphocmb]: the scrutiny of the so-called binarism is what connects - without overlapping - the two perspectives. This long-distance dialogue will be built starting with the key notion of binary opposition, which will be analysed as a decolonial problem (Part I) and as a culturological problem (Part II). The analysis will focus on two central issues that stem from the either-or logic: the "othering mindset", and the culture-nature dualism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Identifying function of binary oppositions still remain actual in modern world, since binary oppositions are used in meaning-making and construction of sign processes. This study aims to examine binary oppositions, which form the basis of ethnic world-view of Japanese and Kazakh people. The research is based on semiotics approach, which considers language and culture as a single text formed by binary oppositions and contain “universal code” of national self-consciousness. In this study, binary oppositions are referred to as means that create culturally codified texts, where cognitive and conceptually significant relationship between cultural concepts, denoted by lexical antonyms, reflect language picture of the world as well as the world model of Japanese and Kazakh people. Sampling of binary oppositions was made on the basis of analysis of mythology and key cultural concepts of both nations. The results of comparative study made it possible to define core elements of ethnic culture of Japanese and Kazakh people that constitute fundamental factor in self-identification of both nations, and help to reconstruct their world model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Most accounts of Yuri Lotman’s legacy describe the evolution of his oeuvre from structuralism to a systemic version of post-structuralism. This article, however, suggests that Lotman valued highly the heuristic possibilities of the structural method throughout his career – he saw that, as a methodological approach, it enables the whole sphere of cultural studies to be taken into the realm of ‘science’. Lotman connected structuralism with semiotics and, as a result, produced a hybrid in the form of structural semiotics. Over time he enriched the structural method by making it more flexible, so that it could encompass as many cultural phenomena as possible. The principal difficulties in a structural description of a text arose from a fundamental conflict that exists between the integral and the dynamic nature of the text, and the static and analytical nature of the description. For Lotman, the way to make description more dynamic was to multiply the number of descriptions. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

As one of the most basic and accessible social codes, food has many social and cultural connotations. This article aims to offer a semiotic reading of ordinary Chinese meals. The three-meal structure and four binary oppositions (Cooked/Raw, Fan/Cai, Solids/Liquids, and Vegetable/Meat) are discussed. The laws that govern the Chinese meal system reveal how Chinese people see themselves and others, how they connect the past and present, and how they identify themselves with their culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The concept of "cultural identity" has gradually replaced such discredited concepts as "race", "ethnicity", even "nationality" in the conservative political discourse of recent decades which conceives, represents and performs culture as a closed system with clear-cut boundaries which must be defended from contamination. The article employs the theories of Derrida and Lot man as useful tools for deconstructing this understanding of cultural identity, which has recently become an ideological justification for socio-political conflicts. In fact, their theories spring from a thorough critique of the kind of internalizing self-enclosure which allowed Saussure to delimit and describe langue as the object of linguistics. The article identifies and compares the elements of this critique, focusing on Derrida's and Lotman's concepts of "mirror structure", "binarism", "numerousness", "textuality" and "semiosphere". An understanding of mediation emerges which is not reducible to any kind of definitive acquisition, thereby frustrating the pretences of identity, constantly dislocating and deferring any attempt at semiotic self-enclosure. My comparison suggests that Lotman's "translation of the untranslatable" (or "dialogue") and Derrida's dyfférance can be considered analogous descriptions of this problematic kind of mediation. The (de)constructive nature of culture, as described by Lotman and Derrida, challenges any attempt to view cultural formations as sources of rigid and irreducible identities or differences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The comments below are meant to show that considerations of public and private realms and the tension between these realms arise in a natural and persistent way in discussions connected with semiotics. In particular, they arise out of the themes of body and sociocultural mathematical meaning-making, which are recurring themes of the papers in this volume. The public-private dichotomy is related to other dichotomies such as those between outer and inner and collective and individual. For educators, such dichotomies are important in that they reflect the division between students' own inner and individual understandings of mathematical ideas and their functioning within a shared sociocultural world of mathematical meanings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

I analyse here some histories of people who lived in concentration camps and told their experiences: De Gaulle Anthonioz (La Traversée de la nuit), Geoffroy (Au temps des crématoires…), Semprun (L'Écriture ou la vie). These histories represent the lives of survivors, but they are also a form of literary expression with a narrative structure that codifies a genre. More particularly, I focus the attention on the incipit, a strategic place in which some of the specific features of the global meaning and structural organization of the whole text can be seized. My hypothesis is that in histories of survival, already in the incipit, the authors strive to convey the emblematic value of their history: an extreme and traumatic experience which is difficult to express. The analysis of these incipit shows that experiences related to concentration camps, to be expressed, need an elaborated message and that an artistic aim can contribute to the representation of these experiences. From the structural viewpoint, histories of survival amplify a dichotomy existing in several literary genres and currents: 'external reference' and 'internal organization', mimetic 'truth' and narrative 'structure', 'reality' and 'convention', 'experience' and 'narration'. In my opinion, histories of survival solve these oppositions by reconciling some contraries through the use of oxymora. Even narratives structures or key figures such as the author, the narrator, the observer, the witness and so on, tend to become oxymora. The study of these features (and combination) is pertinent for anthropology (by seizing facts thanks to elaborated 'ways of uttering' authors often redefine forms of humanity) and for semiotics (any form of expression, even if original, has to be collectively shared and based on a system of signs). In my opinion, a joint semiotic and anthropological approach can help analysing histories of survival as a 'literary genre' and as a 'historical tragic phenomenon'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Thomas A. Sebeok's global semiotics has inspired quite a few followers, noticeably Marcel Danesi, Susan Petrilli and Augusto Ponzio. However, for all the trendiness of the word, the very concept of global should be subject to more rigorous examination, especially within today's ecological and politico-economic contexts. With human and natural disasters precipitating on a global and almost quotidian basis, it is only appropriate for global semioticians to pay more attention to such phenomena and to contemplate, even when confined to their attics, the semiotic consequences of disasters. The paper probes into the semiotic implications of the tsunami disaster that claimed quarter of a million lives in South and Southeast Asia during the Christmas holidays in 2004, and proposes a semiotics of disaster, developed from the discussions of the eighteenth-century British Empiricist philosopher Thomas Reid and the contemporary semiotician David S. Clarke, Jr. As the word's etymology indicates, disaster originally referred to a natural phenomenon, i.e., 'an obnoxious planet', and only by extension was it later used to cover man-made calamities, be it political or economic. Although the dichotomy of nature versus culture no longer holds good, the author uses the word disaster in the traditional sense by referring to 'natural' disasters only. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Provides information on the theory of interpretants and its plausible contribution to literary semiotics by philosopher Charles Peirce. Potential sign relations without any reference to the actual act of apprehension; Panorama of exergetic literature on interpretant; Concept of interpretant from the perspective of the dichotomy between combination and selection.