| Semiotics,
Communication and Culture.
Semiotics is the study of signs in social life. Human beings
employ various forms of significant expression – or signs
– in communicating messages to each other. They talk, write
and gesture to each other. They erect monuments. They engage in
complex, multiparty interactions that transform their physical
and social environment in mutually intelligible ways.
Such activities connect persons to each other and make possible
participation in a common culture. Broadly speaking, culture is
a set of socially learned and historically transmitted principles
for interpreting the world and acting within it. The processes
of learning and transmission that underlie culture depend upon
the use and exchange of signs – notably language, but also
visual signs, gestures, material artifacts, and the like. The
semiotic study of these processes allows social scientists to
investigate sociocultural phenomena at both micro- and macro-levels
of organization, including forms of interpersonal conduct, social
relations, regimes of power and authority, forms of belonging
and exclusion, economic and political formations, and other aspects
of human affairs.
Communication is sometimes conceived so narrowly that it’s study appears linked to extremely parochial concerns. Conversely, cultural formations are sometimes viewed so abstractly that the role of communication becomes invisible. The two images on this page depict these extremes.
At the top, Saussure’s ‘talking heads’ view of communication narrows its object to the exchange of mental contents between atomistic individuals. Bottom, Hobbes’ Leviathan embraces an image of politics in which thousands of undifferentiated heads make up the personified body of the State, an amorphous body politic which absorbs the activities of individuals and makes invisible the forms of communication through which political processes live.
A semiotic approach to communication bridges these scales of empirical concern.
The Semiotics Lab.
The Penn Semiotics Lab was founded in the year 2000 as a research
unit in the Department of Anthropology. Its basic rationale is
to facilitate faculty and student research and to encourage collaborative
projects among participants.
The Lab’s participants include an active group of faculty
and students. Their interests span several fields and thematic
areas, including linguistic anthropology, cultural anthropology,
medical anthropology, material culture, education, corporations,
political affairs and mass media.
The Lab provides state-of-the-art tools for the fine-grained analysis
of audiovisual data. These include equipment for recording, digitizing,
editing, and transcribing data, as well as computing resources
for their analysis. In addition, the Lab supports collaborative
activites in the form of research groups, colloquia and workshops.
The accompanying pages illustrate a few recent and ongoing projects.
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