Ethnosemiotics

Ethnosemiotics is a disciplinary perspective which links semiotics conception to ethnographic methods.

Overview

Algirdas Julien Greimas together with Joseph Courtés defined for the first time ethnosemiotics in Semiotics & language: an analytical dictionary.

"Ethno-semiotics is non truly an autonomous semiotics. whether it were, it would be in competition with the field of cognition already established under the construct of ethnology or anthropology, whose contribution to the advent of semiotics itself is considerable. Rather, it is for a privileged area of curiosities and of methodological exercises ... . Given that general semiotics authorizes the treatment of non-linguistic gestual, somatic, etc. syntagmatic concatenations as discourses or texts, the field of ethno-linguistics can be enlarged to become an ethno-semiotics; analyses, still rare, of rituals and ceremonies lead us to suppose that ethnology can become, one time again, the privileged locus for the construction of general models of signifying behavior."

During the 2000s, in Italy, the interest toward the discipline has been renewed thanks to the studies and the researches of Maurizio del Ninno, Tarcisio Lancioni, and Francesco Marsciani. Under the dominance of Francesco Marsciani, in Bologna in 2007 the Ethnosemiotic Centre of the Bologna University CUBE was founded, active in different fields of inquiry. In 2015, CUBE's experience led to the series Quaderni di Etnosemiotica and the Ethnosemiotics lab.