Mapping The World

Mapping the World: Towards a Sociosemiotic Approach to Culture. Tartu University Press, 2004. 162 lk

Selle väljaande peale juhtusin juhuslikult, kui otsisin raamatu "Introducing Social Semiotics" kohta infot. Wikipedia artiklist sotsiaalsemiootika kohta leidsin aga viite õppejõule, kes annab Ülikoolis ainet "Ühiskonnateooriad ja semiootika". Tartu Ülikooli Press on selle doktoritöö avaldanud internetis tasuta, kuigi eelmisel aastal avaldas selle dissertatsiooni raamatuna LAP Lambert Academic Publishing. Amazon.com müütab seda 84 dollari eest.

Raamat sisaldab palju tuttavaid nimesid, mitmeid tuttavaid mõisteid ja mõtteid, aga üldiselt on see ikka väga võõras ja keeruline maailm. Anti Randviir kirjutab samavõrd kompleksselt ja teaduslikult kui ta loengus kõneleb. Umbes 140 lehekülge tihket teksti sai ühte õhtuga läbi näritud ja õnneks ei olnud see tühi vaev - nii mõnigi mõiste või teema haakus loengus kuulduga. Sotsiosemiootikat analüüsiv osa tuleks taas üle lugeda. Tegelikult tasuks terve teos üle lugeda siis kui terminid vähe paremini selged on. Põhiosa mis tegeleb kartograafiaga, selgitab mõneti seda, miks Randviiri loeng toimub geograafide kabinetis. Väga palju juttu oli ruumisemiootikast, aga õnnestus ikkagi leida ka mõned väga paeluvad katkendid:

J.C. Risingh describes the city of Tartu as its “[...] shape being almost a circle and is
viewable as a human heart, and is therefore worth of adoration” (Risingh 1996:24). In other cases significance is laid upon spatial connotations and associations with an artifact (e.g. the Third Rome, the Eternal City). Textuality is thus viewable on several levels: one can analyse how a Weltanschauung imposes textual ideology on the surroundings in general (“world as text”, “life as text”), or analyse a worldview in textual terms, or analyse diverse representations of a worldview as texts (from written texts to rituals, verbalised myths and artefacts).

Bible was a text in a narrow sense of the term, whereas the culture surrounding it can be viewed as a text-code through which cultural circumstances were continuously reproduced, unifying thereby the cultural tradition by relatively limited number of criteria and strict norms.

The structure of these fields is organised according to a more subtle differentiation between research objects (e.g. in the general area of cultural semiotics we can find literary semiotics, semiotics of theatre, semiotics of advertising, cinema, etc.). There are virtually no limitations to the branching of semiotics in this manner and therefore we can even come across such terms as semiotics of traffic signs (e.g. Krampen 1983) or steam iron semiotics (see, e.g., Vihma 1995). Such tendencies of ‘refrigerator semiotics’ that at least partially freeze holistic semiotic methodology can possibly fragment the domain of semiotics into extremely minute fields that hardly can be regarded as independent disciplines.