CALL FOR PAPERS: "The Sense of Action: Dialogues between Semiotics and Anthropology"

[Tatsuma Padoan]

Dear SLA mailing list members,

I send you below a call you might be interested in participating to, about
the topic:

"The Sense of Action: Dialogues between Semiotics and Anthropology"



The panel will be held on Thursday 18 September in Sofia, Bulgaria, at the
12th World Congress of Semiotics, the meeting of the International
Association for Semiotic Studies (IASS):


The call for papers attached below can also be found at the following link:



http://semio2014.org/en/the-sense-of-action-dialogues-between-semiotics-and-anthropology


The deadline for the call has been postponed to 10 August, and the congress
will take place on 16-20 September.

If you wish to apply you can send your abstract (max 500 words) directly to
the convenors (email contacts are in the CfP).

Best regards,
Tatsuma Padoan


------------------------------------------
Tatsuma PADOAN, PhD

Newton Postdoctoral Fellow (British Academy)

Department of the Study of Religions

School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London

Thornhaugh Street, Russell Square

London WC1H 0XG

UK

https://www.soas.ac.uk/staff/staff90819.php

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 *12th World Congress of Semiotics*

*International Association for Semiotic Studies*

Sofia, 16-20 September 2014

New Bulgarian University

*Proposal for Study session*



*The **Sense **of Action: Dialogues between Semiotics and Anthropology*

(in collaboration with the LISaV - International Semiotics Laboratory of
Venice)

*http://semio2014.org/en/the-sense-of-action-dialogues-between-semiotics-and-anthropology
<http://semio2014.org/en/the-sense-of-action-dialogues-between-semiotics-and-anthropology>*



Coordinators: Dr. Tatsuma Padoan (SOAS, University of London)

[ tp26 at soas.ac.uk ]

and Dr. Franciscu Sedda (Università di Roma “Tor Vergata”)

[ franciscu.sedda at gmail.com ]



It was 1923, when the British-Polish anthropologist B. Malinowski, in an
essay later highlighted by Benveniste (1974) himself, attempted to define
language as a “mode of action”, and meaning as an active, pragmatic and
emotional force, which escapes from a purely logic and cognitive
understanding of speech. Several years later, Greimas and Courtés (1979) in
their *Semiotics and Language: An Analytical Dictionary*, invited to
analyse bodily behaviours in terms of narrative programmes and multimodal
texts, by extracting semiotic models adopted to describe fictional action,
in order to give rise to a “semiotics of action” (*ad voces* *Action*,
*Gestuality*, *Semiotic Practices*). More recently, the anthropologist M.
Silverstein (2004) has conceived a semiotic theory of ritual action based
on the concepts of text and discourse, studying the poetic structure of
interaction and the subject’s assumption of values through categories as
diagram and indexicality, which are fully coextensive with the continental
notions of semi-symbolic and enunciation. These are only some of the
theoretical positions in common between semiotics and anthropology about
the topic of action. Reflection on this topic in anthropology started from
the ethnographic analysis of everyday behaviour among non-European people,
and from the study of cultural phenomena as rite and ritualisation. In
semiotics it started instead from the analysis of literary texts,
originally folkloric (Propp) and mythological ones (Dumézil, Lévi-Strauss).
We should not forget that the influence of Lévi-Strauss on Greimas has been
fundamental for the development of semiotics, a discipline which still
shares with anthropology an interest in the signification of social
behaviours and lifestyles. This is evidenced by the recent ethnosemiotic
projects triggered in Italy by M. Del Ninno (2007) and F. Marsciani (2007),
who quote respectively the works of Lévi-Strauss and C. Geertz – the latter
advocating in turn a semiotic definition of culture. Also, the theoretical
reflection on passions, which in semiotics has followed and integrated
considerations about action, found a parallel in anthropologists as C. Lutz
e G. M. White (1986) already during the early years of its elaboration (see
Fabbri 1987). This long story of criss-crossing between the two disciplines
still continues in North American linguistic anthropology, in STS-related
anthropology (influenced by Actor-Network-Theory) and in the perspectivism
of E. Viveiros De Castro (1998) – based on Benveniste’s theory of
enunciation and Deleuze’s semiotics. This workshop intends to take stock of
the situation concerning the relationship between semiotics and
anthropology, by investigating the *meaningfulness of action* within
different genres of discourse (ritual, politics, everyday life, art,
entertainment, professional world, etc…). Through an examination of this
shared theoretical object, we shall attempt to understand whether, given
the current state of research, it is possible to set a fruitful and
productive dialogue for the future development of both the disciplines.