Rethinking Milton Singer’s semiotic anthropology: A reconnaissance

What is it about?

The article discussed the possibility of using the cognitive tools of semiotics (theory of signs) for theoretical considerations for social structures from the anthropological perspective. In the literature on the subject, this approach is defined as anthropological semiotics, the term coined by Milton Singer. The article emphasized the possibilities; untapped within the mentioned author's offer, of further epistemological research within the scope of the "cultural theory of signs" and reduction of the paradigms of research on culture from philosophical and philological, as well as, anthropological and ethnographic paradigms to the semiotic paradigm, enabling one to analyse meanings of the broadly taken cultural messages, starting with architecture and painting, through eating habits (scil. cooking), and ending up with systems of values and literature. In this sense, anthropological semiotics represents the position of "mild holism" and becomes a tool supporting exploration of culture

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Why is it important?

Anthropological semiotics, as a research programme, sets itself several targets. The first one is establishing a "cultural theory of signs" as a hypostatic object functioning in higher-order ontologies . The second goal is reducing the paradigms of the research on culture to one, joining philosophical-philological and anthropological-ethnographic perspective together in order to unify methodology and specialise research techniques. In this sense, anthropological semiotics ought to perform an auxiliary function; in other words, semiotics is always the semiotics of something, e.g. the semiotics of a city (Bagrationowsk). The third goal is developing an effective analytical tool of cultural messages as architecture, painting, as well as, eating habits or fashion which constitute material reflections of the systems of values of a certain community. The cultural messages recorded the "world of culture" of people who perceived the reality in a certain way. The interpretation of this closed "world of culture" is a difficult but also useful task as it enables one to understand the people creating this world better.

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