Within cognitive science, narratives are regarded as crucial and fundamental cognitive instruments or tools. As Roger Schank suggests, the identity of (sub-)cultures is to a considerable extent based upon the sharing of narrative structures (Schank. 1995.Tell me a story: Narrative and intelligence. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.). According to Schank, culturally shared stories, as do many other stories, occur frequently in highly abbreviated form, as “skeleton stories” or “gists.” Collective identities are conveyed in and between cultures not only through verbal (...) discourse, but also by pictorial means. Many pictures and visual artworks have indeed been produced in order to establish and to consolidate a home-culture and to demarcate it from conceived extra-cultural counterparts.Some of my previous work on these lines has been concerned with demarcation efforts in visual media of “Jews” as extra-cultural, since the Middle Ages onwards, in the Third Reich’s iconography, as well as in modern, radicalized forms of anti-Semitic picturing in Arab media (Ranta. 2016. The (pictorial) construction of collective identities in the Third Reich.Language and Semiotic Studies2(3). 107–124, Ranta. 2017. Master narratives and the (pictorial) construction of otherness: Anti-semitic images in the Third Reich and beyond.Contemporary Aesthetics15.https://contempaesthetics.org/newvolume/pages/article.php?articleID=765(accessed 17 November 2019.). In building upon and extending this work, I shall focus in the current paper upon attempts of creating cultural and political cohesion by means of pictorial propaganda in post-war China from the early 1950’s onwards, as promoted by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) under the leadership by Mao Zedong. Some concrete pictorial examples indicating these attempts will be discussed from a narratological and cultural semiotic perspective. (shrink)

Comparative modeling is necessary for semiotic inquiry. To better theorize such pursuits, a reflexive turn is in order: comparative modeling needs comparative modeling. In search of experientially grounded analogies better suited for understanding, validating, scrutinizing, and accounting for the situation of the semiotic inquirer, this paper applies insights from Peircean process semiotics and Göran Sonesson’s extended theory of cultural semiotics toward two ends: one theoretical, the other applied. First, I undertake a critical review of recent scholarly and creative works that (...) attempt to adapt concepts of “parallax” as a source domain for comparative modeling activities. I do this in order to continue laying groundwork for a more complex, systematic theory of reflexive semiotic modeling in human inquiry, building on my earlier work. Second, I explore a specific case study of comparative intercultural modeling: namely, nationalist ethnic classification strategies in China and Vietnam. While many researchers have considered the onomastic and geopolitical dimensions of state-sanctioned ethnic categorization programs in these two countries, little has been done to unpack the powerful visual and narratological strategies employed by both; and little has been done to compare the intercultural categories these strategies serve to legitimize. The Vietnamese classification program is clearly modeled on its Chinese counterpart historically, but important categorical mismatches emerge between the two that indicate the presence of hidden diversity. Comparing the two systems also leads to a number of discoveries with implications for further developing the theory of cultural semiotics. Ultimately, the function or purpose of parallax modeling is shown to both comprehend and point beyond nascent intercultural and intracultural models toward more complex blends, by holding all such relations in a comparative frame, not as irreconcilable positions but as a more developed composite sign indicating the presence of yet more deeply buried dynamic objects to be searched out through further collateral experience. (shrink)

This a contribution to the cultural semiotics of African cultural encounters seen through the eyes of Swedish naturalists at the end of the eighteenth century. European travellers faced severe problems in understanding the alien African cultures they encountered; they even had difficulty understanding the other culture as a culture. They were not just other cultures that they could relate to, but often something completely different, belonging to the natural history of the human species. The Khoikhoi and other groups were believed (...) by Europeans to be, from their perspective, the most distant culture. The Linnaean disciple Anders Sparrman and others, however, tried to transcend this cultural gap, and used their cognitive resources, such as empathy and intersubjectivity, in order to understand the alien culture they encountered.The aim of this paper is to unearth the cultural semiosis of African encounters and the intersubjective challenges that human interactions provoke. These encounters not only changed the view the travellers had of the Other, but also changed themselves and their self-perception. The encounter between the Ego and the Other is, however, not static, something predestined by the differences in their cultures, but dynamic, changing according to individual encounters and the actual intersubjective interplay that transform and change the perception of the Other. There are in particular four meaning-making processes and challenges within cultural encounters that are in focus: recognizing cultural complexity; invoking intersubjectivity; determining similarities and dissimilarities; and identifying the Other as a mirror of oneself.The triad of cultures – Ego, Alter, and Alius – can be understood as gradual and changing aspects depending on the actual situation of the encounter and the personal perspectives, interpretations, and behaviour of the thinking subjects involved. Using concrete examples from Southern and Western Africa in the 1770s and 1780s, this study aims to explore this dynamic semiosis. One of the conclusions is that the relation between the Ego and the Alter/Alius is not something only predetermined by the cultures involved and their ideologies, but also depends on the individual thinking subjects and how they use their specific cognitive and semiotic resources, not least their intersubjective abilities, within specific temporal and spatial contexts. (shrink)