In the wave of Umberto Eco’s oppositional binomial Dictionary-Encyclopedia, the paper aims to apply the rhizomatic system to the practical case of the (ethno)racial lexicon as a broad semantic area of the word race, which previously involved both physical predisposition and cultural habits. Given its critical issues, the dictionarial approach is distinguished into two different stages, intra-dictionarial (properly dictionarial) and inter-dictionarial (resulting from the metaphorical chain of meanings). Originally, race referred to horses (stud and herds) and property (as ownership and (...) essential attribute), which extended metonymically to other senses – general zoological-botanic, human (lineage, offspring) and typological qualitative ones. Comparing its correspondents in Romance and Germanic languages, reference to many different contexts and a continuous misalignment between lexeme and concept emerge. The liquidity within the semantic sphere of race (embracing the three semantic cores racial, ethnic, and typological) can be explained by taking a phenomenological and semiotic perspective. If the ethnic sense (people, nation, etc.) is connected to a socio-cultural Lifeworld in an interplay of identities and differences, the aporia of synonymy emerging from the inter-dictionarial analysis finds its balance in the local encyclopedic approach, which proves to be the real deterrent to Porphyry’s tree through the rhizome, conceived not in its entirety, but in the partiality and contingency of its branches. (shrink)

In the multidisciplinary field of memory studies, remembering and forgetting have mainly been analyzed following two ideal-typical models: memory-as-containment (exemplified by the notions of framework and site of memory) and memory-as-flow (epitomized by the notions of afterlife and mnemohistory). These two models are often presented as mutually exclusive and counterposed. Yet, in linking past with present, and when connecting different spaces and generations, memory is always the result of circulation (flow) as well as of local semiotic conditions of production and (...) use (containment). By investigating memory-making and oblivion-making in processes of interpretation, the semiotic perspective elaborated by Umberto Eco allows us to envision memory-as-containment and memory-as-flow in a combined analysis, where the twofold conception of memory – either as movement or as form – merges. The aim of this article is, then, to provide an interpretative theory of memory, and to identify and describe the methodological tools capable of implementing such an approach. The memory of the former Italian concentration camp of Fossoli will serve as an exemplary and illustrative case study. (shrink)