Search results for "Semiotics"
showing 10 items of 438 documents
Cat Cafés and Dog Restaurants
2018
Starting from the assumption that space is a language and that food is also a language, what we will try to show in this paper is how these two languages, together, carry specific concepts of animality. For this reason, we will focus on two different places of food consumption that place animals at the centre of their proposal and that in recent years have spread in urban environments: cat cafes, where cats are conceived as subjects to pet, endowed with a predominantly emotional value, and dog restaurants, where dogs are in fact the real restaurant clients.
Dilettanti, fra resistenza ed estasi
2021
Who is the amateur? what does he do? what doesn't it do? And especially: what can he do and what can't he do? There is a very close connection between the problem of expert competence, today as yesterday, and that of dilettantism, yesterday as today. But it is not always the same link: the internal intensity of the relationship varies, the degree of certainty of those who assume it, the value of the terms involved. According to the Italian dictionary, a dilettante is someone who "shows little ability", therefore an incompetent subject, far from skilled, inexperienced, therefore narratively inconclusive. But if we insert this description in its appropriate context, i.e. in the complex of the…
Mangiare, viaggiare, fotografare
2020
C’è un nesso, logico e narrativo al tempo stesso, che non si finirà mai di considerare fondamentale, nella nostra come in altre culture: è quello fra mangiare e viaggiare, gustare preziose ghiottonerie e incontrare in nuovi luoghi altre popolazioni. Certo, c’è la cucina di casa, le tradizioni gastronomiche locali, il chilometro zero. Ma sono per lo più invenzioni leggendarie, o quanto meno turistiche. E ci sono tante persone che per tutta la vita ingurgitano sempre la stessa cosa, di modo che la minima variazione di gusto le mette in crisi peggio che l’imbattersi in un idioma sconosciuto. Ma sono soggetti da guardare con allarmato sospetto, poiché sempre pronti a garantire la sedicente – e …
Politiche della cucina: una prospettiva semiotica
2021
The title of the famous 2003 film by Tassos Boulmetis uses a hyponym in Italian (A touch of ginger), as it happens in Spanish (Un toque de canela). In English it was preferred to use a hypernym (A Touch of Spices). In Portuguese (O tempero da vida) the theme of spices disappears but the idea of essentiality remains, as a gustatory metaphor (salt is taste by definition), of the detail that makes the difference. The original Greek reads Πολìτικη Κουζìνα, an expression with a double semantic value, given that we can translate it either as The kitchen of the city (understood as Istanbul, the urban center that invests the heart of the story) or, better, as Political kitchen. This plethora of tit…
Propaganda alimentare
2020
How can we investigate the symbolic meaning of food without reading the thoughts of those who eat? The answer can be found in the slogans that advertising proposes. Advertising, in fact, has precisely the role of constructing the "good to think" of which anthropology speaks, and not because of some kind of occult power that is occasionally attributed to it, but because of the social function it performs. What it does is to make a given product relevant within a wider system composed of many others, but also of values, problems, traditions, tastes, disgusts, principles and practices. Advertising has, in a certain sense, made its own the function of the ancient storytellers who, by declaiming…
Il senso del dolce
2019
On the basis of which relations does the semiosphere of Sicilian sweets take shape, meant as a coherent structure inside and effective outside it? In what way does each sweet, as a component of this system, take on its virtuality? To what extent does it do so? How cohesive is the system that is created? These are all questions that have repercussions on the cultural value that this particular set of gastronomic products that are sweets produces, ending up by generating within the vast hive of culture a specific field that we have called gastrosphere. Therefore, dealing with the gastrosphere of Sicilian sweets means looking for how these particular elements of the culinary identity of this c…
L’Ateneo di Palermo, da Università a L’Univercittà: un caso di comunicazione pubblica in Sicilia
2014
Se consideriamo l'istituzione universitaria come un soggetto che si muove nella società e che agisce in essa, confrontandosi costantemente con i suoi pubblici, interni ed esterni, e, più o meno direttamente, con gli altri atenei, e se riteniamo significante ogni tipo di azione, a prescindere dalla sostanza espressiva, non potremo fare distinzioni tra immagine e identità, tra comunicazione e reputazione: l'identità si dà solo attraverso unÊimmagine percepibile (espressione), e viceversa, l'immagine non può che comunicare un insieme di valori, cioè un'identità (contenuto). L'identità di un soggetto sociale, come un'istituzione, va considerata come l'esito finale di tutte le manifestazioni tes…
Cura del senso e critica sociale. Ricognizione della semiotica italiana
2022
When a discipline starts looking back to write its own history, it is certainly in crisis. This is not the case for semiotics today in Italy, where it is in a moment of strong growth, both from the point of view of research trends and from the academic and cultural point of view. Notwithstanding the resistance (corporative? ideological? political?) to the development of the paradigm of studies on texts and socio-cultural models, Italian semiotics is experiencing euphoric intellectual growth: it has reaffirmed its programmes of action and passion, it has equipped itself with the appropriate instruments of investigation, it has passed trials and counter-trials, it has achieved many results: a…
Apprendre à manger. Sémiotique des objets de table pour enfants
2021
The subject of children at the table is related to that of conviviality on two levels. Firstly, at the level of the acquisition of social rules concerning the ways of being at the table, the codes of the meal, the recognition of appropriate behaviour in different contexts (at home, outside, formal, informal, etc.), in short, the "have to". Secondly, at the level of the acquisition of a general know-how, represented by all the somatic behaviours necessary for the consumption of the meal: learning to chew solid food, to drink from a glass, to use cutlery, to handle plates, bowls, soup plates, and so on. In this essay, we will analyse table objects designed for children (glasses, cutlery, plat…
Semiotic Roadmap for Designing Packaging
2015
This paper concerns the main aspects of semiotics of packaging. Packaging has to be considered as a special communicative touchpoint between brands and consumers, since it is a syncretic object (using various languages) with textures, materials, shapes and colours that consumers can see, touch, smell, involving different modes (visual, verbal, tactile) that convey a brand's core values.