Shaking grounds, unearthing palimpsests: Semiotic anthropology of disaster
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Ryo Morimoto,
Ryo Morimoto (b. 1981) is a PhD candidate at Brandeis University 〈ryo@brandeis.edu〉. His research interests include semiotic anthropology, anthropology of disaster, post-disaster trauma and social/cultural changes, and memory. His publications includeHow humanity came into being: Understanding the evolutionary dynamics of consciousness (with L. Martin, 2010).
Abstract
This article will engage with the current disasters in Japan from the perspective of semiotic anthropology. Disaster seems to produce two moments of the sign: signa naturalia and signa data. The translation of the sign mirrors the architectonic of the signified of disaster, which is mediated by a token-level instantiation of signifiers that initially appears either absent or in excess. The conceptualization of disaster as a zero sign, that is, unlimited possibility, allows an investigation of “a struggle of interpretants” in stipulating the interpretative grounds of the signified amid regenerative processes of social regularity. It is this very exact moment of translation that the sustained continuity reveals its culture-specific “deep social grammar.” Disaster or “shaking grounds” has the presenting effect of cultural palimpsests. These unearthed palimpsests enable a heightened metasemiotic awareness of institutional and ideological regimentations, on the one hand, and token-level recontexualizations, assimilations, and hybridizations of the depository of signs in society in the post-disaster contexts, on the other. The article concludes with an attempt to synthesize Peircean semeiotics and Saussurean semiology by assessing the two distinct modes of semiosis, culture and trauma, upon a sudden threat of the experience of discontinuity.
About the author
Ryo Morimoto (b. 1981) is a PhD candidate at Brandeis University 〈ryo@brandeis.edu〉. His research interests include semiotic anthropology, anthropology of disaster, post-disaster trauma and social/cultural changes, and memory. His publications include How humanity came into being: Understanding the evolutionary dynamics of consciousness (with L. Martin, 2010).
©[2012] by Walter de Gruyter Berlin Boston
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- Vision science: An empirical basis for Roentgen semiotics
- Do metaphoric gestures influence how a message is perceived? The effects of metaphoric gesture-speech matches and mismatches on semantic communication and social judgment
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- Review of Søren Brier's (2008) Cybersemiotics: Why information is not enough
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