4106total visits.
DOI 10.33234/ssr.11.5
Coming out of Culture
Suggestions for the Semiotic Study of Acculturation in Migratory Contexts
Eduardo Chávez Herrera
University of Warwick, U.K.
Abstract
Acculturation is a transcultural process that is usually described as the set of outcomes and transformations that immigrants experience following their contact with new cultures. It is not a process of losing the own culture, or achieving a new one, but rather of cultural readjustment and reorganization within particular contexts of interaction; is a sign of cultural diversity and dynamism.This paper proposes a different approach to migratory situations from the semiotic point of view, dealing with a diverse object that is latent and present in most of 21st century contemporary societies. In this way, I foreground and explain a theoretical need to keep delving into this research object. The essay also touches on one of the most fundamental issues for cultural semiotics such as the seeking and construction of the self, and its counterpart — The other. On the one hand, I suggest to delve into the manifold reasons and mechanisms that conduce people to leaving their native culture, and on the other hand I set forth that self-understanding implies copying with a triple relationship: auto-communication, self-description and self-identification.
Keywords: cultural semiotics, acculturation, migration, identity, self-construction