Cultural tourism as pilgrimage
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Michael Aeschliman
Abstract
In this recent address to a UNESCO doctoral summer school in northern Italy, the author argues that all cultural tourism has underlying and implicit philosophical-religious dimensions that are particularly important in the era of “late capitalism,” in which “the idiosyncratic has triumphed over the normative” and there is a deeply nihilistic drive and trajectory to the ascendant culture. After drawing on the sociologist Daniel Bell’s analysis of “the cultural contradictions of capitalism,” the author argues that there is an irreducible sacred dimension to the human person (res sacra homo) and his or her life always has the character of a pilgrimage, cognitively comprised of a quest for significance beyond the separate meanings of the normal occupational and utilitarian life. Master-works of urbanism, architecture, sculpture, painting, music, and literature offset the nihilistic dynamic of “late modernity,” and the author draws particular attention to literary works of cross-cultural understanding such as the trilogy of historical novels about India by L. H. Myers, The Root and the Flower and the novels of the great modern Japanese writer Shusaku Endo. As works of fundamental importance for orienting his analysis he adduces C. S. Lewis’s The Abolition of Man and Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning.
References
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Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Genome as (hyper)text: From metaphor to theory
- The work of Peirce’s Dicisign in representationalizing early deictic events
- The double function of the interpretant in Peirce’s theory of signs
- Integration mechanism and transcendental semiosis
- The communicative wheel: Symptom, signal, and model in multimodal communication
- Discursive representation: Semiotics, theory, and method
- Translation as sign exploration: A semiotic approach based on Peirce
- When does the ritual of mythic symbolic type start and when does it end?
- Iconoclasms of Emmett Till and his killers in Lewis Nordan’s Wolf Whistle: A new generation of historiographic metafiction
- A dialogical semiosis of traveling narratives for self-interpretation: Towards activity-semiotics
- Entre éthologie et sémiotique : Mondes animaux, compétences et accommodation
- A pentadic model of semiotic analysis
- Linguistic violence and the “body to come”: The performativity of hate speech in J. Derrida and J. Butler
- Cultural tourism as pilgrimage
- A simple traffic-light semiotic model for tagmemic theory
- From resistance to reconciliation and back again: A semiotic analysis of the Charlie Hebdo cover following the January 2015 events
- Bilingual and intersemiotic representation of distance(s) in Chinese landscape painting: from yi (‘meaning’) to yi (‘freedom’)
- Power-organizing and Ethic-thinking as two paralleled praxes in the historical existence of mankind: A semiotic analysis of their functional segregation
- Semiosic translation
- Construction of new epistemological fields: Interpretation, translation, transmutation
- A biosemiotic reading of Michel Onfray’s Cosmos: Rethinking the essence of communication from an ecocentric and scientific perspective
- Coherence and truthfulness in communication: Intracommunicational and extracommunicational indexicality
- Poetic logic and sensus communis
- Intrinsic functionality of mathematics, metafunctions in Systemic Functional Semiotics
- Ciudadanos: The myth of neutrality
- Multilingualism and sameness versus otherness in a semiotic context
