Abstract

BONDI, Antonino  and  LUCA, Valeria De. Form and cultural complexity: epistemological notes for a semiotic anthropology. Tóp. Sem [online]. 2020, n.43, pp.35-63.  Epub Aug 07, 2020. ISSN 2594-0619.

The epistemological relations between complex and dynamic systems and the understanding of semiotic/semiolinguistic and anthropological complexity, properly human, have become an indisputable necessity. The epistemological relations between complex and dynamic systems and the understanding of semiotic/semiolinguistic and anthropological complexity, properly human, have become an indisputable necessity. The question of terminological transfer and the transposition of descriptive resources from the physical and chemical sciences to the study of social and symbolic behavior raised doubts about the legitimacy of the transposition itself, but also about the effectiveness of approaches taken from the natural sciences to describe social-symbolic interactions and complex semiotic forms. Recently, the ecological turning point in the cultural sciences has distanced itself from this problem and has highlighted the importance of a pluralist and unifying perspective in relation to the modes of description and objectivation of the phenomena studied. In fact, an ecological approach to a given cultural phenomenon seeks the integration of a plurality of heterogeneous descriptions coming from different disciplinary strategies; in so doing, such an approach aspires to recover not so much the internal systematicity of the phenomenon as its lines of development and change within increasingly richer systems of organization, spheres of existence and evolution that are always open to change, variation and rebalancing. One might even add that ecological approaches in the cultural sciences have explicitly addressed the idea of a complexity of human life and its forms, mainly emphasizing the idea of a constant and non-linear interaction with the environment and inhabited environments. An important consequence concerning this study on symbolic behavior is derived from this: the epistemological questioning of the roles to be assumed in epistemological and descriptive strategies by many concepts, such as: form, sociality, incorporation, fluctuation, mediality.

Keywords : forms; linguistics; cultural complexity; instability ecologic; semiotic anthropology.

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