Narcoculture? Narco-trafficking as a semiosphere of anticulture
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Julieta Haidar
Abstract
In this paper we approach a current issue related to the so-called concept of narcoculture. Several works in Latin America and the United States have addressed this matter and not only accept the term narcoculture, but also stress both the symbolic and aesthetic perspectives. In order to rethink the concept of narcoculture from different angles, we appeal to Juri Lotman and Boris Uspensky’s proposals regarding the concepts of culture, non-culture and anticulture. Rather than accept and reproduce the concept of narcoculture, by means of linking Lotman and Uspensky’s approach with the standpoint of complexity thinking and transdisciplinarity, we propose the treatment of drug trafficking as a semiosphere of anticulture. We emphasize the contradictions inherent in the actors dwelling in this semiosphere, incorporating reflections from chaotic and barbaric processes designed to wreak havoc in Mexican society. The common acceptance of the concept of narcoculture does not acknowledge the current devastation and bloodshed produced by narco-traffickers and others in cahoots with the Mexican government and its militarized drug war strategy. During the last few decades, drug trafficking has inspired organized crime and their actors, spurring the representation of everyday societal features such as music, fashion, architecture, or traffickers’ social status.
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Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Intrasemiotic translation in the emulations of ancient art: On the example of the collections of the University of Tartu Art Museum
- Groupuscular identity-creation in online-communication of the Estonian extreme right
- Bilingual representation of distance in visual-verbal sign systems: A case study of Guo Xi’s Early Spring
- Semeiotic logic or, deduction, induction, and semeiotic
- A conversation analytic study of error correction outside of the second language classroom
- Sensory representation in literature
- Differentiated non-differentiation: A diagrammatical approach to the trialectics of difference – from mono-dialectics to mono-trialectics
- Narcoculture? Narco-trafficking as a semiosphere of anticulture
- Interpretant, pure rhetoric, and semiotics of poetry
- Spatial composition as intersemiotic translation: The journey of a pattern through time from a translation semiotics theory perspective
- The dichotomy of society and urban space configuration in producing the semiotic structure of the modernism urban fabric
- Finite cognition and finite semiosis: A new perspective on semiotics for the information age
- Necrosemiosis: The CSI effect
- Semiotic resources for navigation: A video ethnographic study of blind people’s uses of the white cane and a guide dog for navigating in urban areas
- Borges, Pierre Menard, rhizomaticity, and the simulation of palimpsestic writing
- Shaken and stirred: Social representations, social media, and community empowerment in emergency contexts
- A Peircean epistemology of metaphor
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Intrasemiotic translation in the emulations of ancient art: On the example of the collections of the University of Tartu Art Museum
- Groupuscular identity-creation in online-communication of the Estonian extreme right
- Bilingual representation of distance in visual-verbal sign systems: A case study of Guo Xi’s Early Spring
- Semeiotic logic or, deduction, induction, and semeiotic
- A conversation analytic study of error correction outside of the second language classroom
- Sensory representation in literature
- Differentiated non-differentiation: A diagrammatical approach to the trialectics of difference – from mono-dialectics to mono-trialectics
- Narcoculture? Narco-trafficking as a semiosphere of anticulture
- Interpretant, pure rhetoric, and semiotics of poetry
- Spatial composition as intersemiotic translation: The journey of a pattern through time from a translation semiotics theory perspective
- The dichotomy of society and urban space configuration in producing the semiotic structure of the modernism urban fabric
- Finite cognition and finite semiosis: A new perspective on semiotics for the information age
- Necrosemiosis: The CSI effect
- Semiotic resources for navigation: A video ethnographic study of blind people’s uses of the white cane and a guide dog for navigating in urban areas
- Borges, Pierre Menard, rhizomaticity, and the simulation of palimpsestic writing
- Shaken and stirred: Social representations, social media, and community empowerment in emergency contexts
- A Peircean epistemology of metaphor
