Bogdana Paskaleva. Ethnography and the Problem of the Other in Saussure

Semiosalong is the afterhours Tartu semiotic salon, active since 2011

“To see the world through someone else’s eyes”: Ethnography and the Problem of the Other in Saussure.

Bogdana Paskaleva teaches “Ancient and Medieval Literature” and “Literature of Western Europe” at the Faculty of Slavic Studies of Sofia University “St. Kliment Ohridski”, Bulgaria. Prof. Paskaleva's central scholar interests concern the problems of literary theory and history, especially the literature of Classical Antiquity and Italian Renaissance, as well as the problems of visual and literary image. She is the author of a monograph dedicated to Ovid’s Metamorphoses.

Here is the abstract of her talk:

The presentation will address the problem of selfhood and otherness in semiotic terms through analyzing some passages of Ferdinand de Saussure’s less well-known texts and handwritten fragments. Apart from being interested in the problems of general linguistics and linguistic semiology, Saussure demonstrated a strong involvement in the junction of linguistics and ethnography – a promising new discipline in 19th-century academia. As a specialist in Sanskrit, Saussure was viewing language in the first place through the lens of a schooled Neogrammarian (as he acquired his degree at the University of Leipzig). His interest in the points of intersection of linguistic research and ethnography, or what could be today defined as “cultural anthropology”, never ceased, while general linguistics receded to the margins at certain periods of his career. Thus, he kept ardently researching Classical Ancient literature, Vedic texts, Medieval epics, like the Nibelungenlied, etc. in the attempt to reach earlier forms of culture and premodern mentality. Taking some fragments of his handwritten notes as a point of departure, we would suggest that ethnographic-linguistic research was envisioned by Saussure as an opportunity to “see the world through the eyes of someone else” (Harvard manuscripts). This dimension of language, we claim, is also present in Saussure’s concept of language and verbal semiosis – he tried to include in his linguistics the consideration that language, as a semiological human activity, shapes a worldview, so that entering another language would let us enter the worldview of another.

Here is the series theme description for Alter-semiotics:

Semioticians have stated in many occasions that semiotics, or the study of signs in any case, has something to do with distinguishing between reality and illusion. Umberto Eco’s famous definition of semiotics as the study of anything that can be used to lie might even be paralleled by Sebeok’s claim that semiotics’ main object is an ‘illimitable array of concordant illusions’ and thus semiotics’ goal is to ‘search for the reality that lurks behind illusions’. John Deely similarly stated that ‘semiosis provides the path to distinguish between reality and illusion’ and followed Alain Rey in that semiotics should, from the outset, make no distinction between ontology and epistemology. On the other hand, when tackling ideology, Roland Barthes, Luis Prieto, and other structural semiologists also pointed out the fact that ideological knowledge is a type of knowledge that aims to disguise itself as reflecting reality, yet it actually builds an illusion. It can surely be recognized by most semioticians that signs create a reality that does not always correspond to material reality, and thus it is to some extent illusory. Yet, if illusions and signs are so tightly related, and if signs are first and foremost a matter of agents that engage in interpretative processes, is the agency behind sign-functions also illusory? We organizers of this Semiosalong series propose our participants to answer this question in the affirmative, and to think together what the consequences are of such an answer. If the agency required to engage in sign interpretation is called ‘selfhood’, and if this is an illusion; how to think any other thing in relation to which a given system might exhibit selfhood-like properties? A case in point is that of anthroposemiosis: it is assumed by most people that they have a self, but if the self is built up by signs and they beget illusions, how to be sure that there is a self in the first place? And, perhaps more importantly, how to explain the existence of another, an alter, in relation to which the self is established? We thus invite our speakers to think through these questions and to reflect on how they affect semiotic research at large, mainly by weighing their impact on the problem of how to give an account of ourselves and of ‘the other’ in cultural, biological, linguistic, or philosophical line of inquiry.