Ethnosemiotics

Ethnosemiotics is a disciplinary perspective which links semiotics concepts to ethnographic methods. Ethnosemiotics is a disciplinary perspective which links semiotics concepts to ethnographic methods. Algirdas Julien Greimas and Joseph Courtés defined for the first time ethnosemiotics in Semiotics and language: an analytical dictionary. 'Ethno-semiotics is not truly an autonomous semiotics. If it were, it would be in competition with a field of knowledge already established under the name of ethnology or anthropology, whose contribution to the advent of semiotics itself is considerable. Rather, it is 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, once again, the privileged locus for the construction of general models of signifying behavior.'