Crowning, rotating, and emanating hierophanies with elevatio aspect in wayside shrines

My aim in this paper is to investigate the variants of directionality implied in visual hieratic texts as religious markers in the sacrosphere, which are substantially expressed in the form of a wayside shrine/cross. The methodological underpinnings for this project rely on the proposed semiotactics (cf. Haładewicz-Grzelak, Małgorzata. 2012. Dynamic modeling of visual texts: A relational model. Semiotica 190(1/4). 211–251): the investigative perspective modeled after phonotactics – a branch of phonology investigating the restrictions on and the possibilities of phoneme combinations in languages (cf. Dziubalska-Kołaczyk, Katarzyna & Daria Zielińska. 2011. Universal phonotactic and morphonotactic preferences in second language acquisition. In Katarzyna Dziubalska-Kołaczyk, Magdalena Wrembel & Małgorzata Kul (eds.), Achievements and perspectives in SLA of speech: New sounds 2010, 53–64. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang). The study draws on digital documentation of wayside shrines, crosses, and sacrality markers on houses collected by the author in various European countries (2009–2021), focusing in particular on the material collected in the area of present Slovakia, Ukraine, Austria, Slovenia, and the region of the Beskid Mountains in Poland. It shows how bodily hexis is inscribed into the phenomenology of a wayside shrine through particular types of hierophanic dynamics. The study also focuses on the aspect of headedness and markedness in the nano-structure of a sign, surfacing as directionality in the conceptualization of the religious sphere by particular communities.

Virgin Territories

In this wide-ranging conversation, David Serlin (University of California, San Diego) and Roland Betancourt (University of California, Irvine) discuss questions of sexual consent and sexual violence in the visual culture of early Christian art as inspired by Betancourt’s recent book, Byzantine Intersectionality: Sexuality, Gender, and Race in the Middle Ages (2020). Drawing on rare manuscripts and other objects of worship from institutional archives, Betancourt analyzes and contextualizes numerous Byzantine visual texts featuring often confounding representations of sexual acts or gendered behavior that later Christian interpreters would treat as conventional or settled. For Betancourt, early Christian authors and artists were far more open to troubling and experimenting with depictions of sexual and gendered narratives than many medievalists (and, importantly, non-medievalists) have been trained to see.

Las polacas w Buenos Aires: prostytutki w historii i kulturze

The article discusses the literary and cultural uses of so-called white slavery – the prostitution and pimping in the Americas (especially in South America) of women from Eastern Europe at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. This motif, tragically linking the history of Poland and Argentina, is associated with historiographic, literary, and sociological research. The article analyses various attitudes of historians towards the issue and the scope of ideological issues (in particular, the issue of anti-Semitism) and criticises the impact of the specificity of media coverage on the sensational nature of reports on the white slave trade. The main aim of the work is to present to the Polish reader both the historical context and the literary and cultural realisations of the subject in a multi-faceted manner, especially since only a few works have been translated into Polish. The second goal is to identify repetitions in prose, dramas, and audio-visual texts depicting the stories of Eastern European prostitutes in South America.

Drawing Into Being: Charter Graphics and Their Functions

Prior researchers have identified charter documents as texts that serve an outsize role in stabilizing social reality and mediating work, writing, and network building. While charter documents are typically authoritative and text-only tomes, this article expands the category to include charter graphics, visual texts that serve similarly important genre and network functions. Through retrospective analysis of one charter graphic and its role in a decade-long project by a nonprofit organization, this article demonstrates the potential rhetorical, social, and network functions of charter graphics; distinguishes them from charter documents; and offers suggestions for both practitioners and researchers.

analysis model of impolite Indonesian language use

This research was based on the reality of the use of Indonesian language on social media that was vulgar, destructive, full of blasphemy, scorn, sarcasm, and tended to be provocative. This condition has destructive power because it spreads very quickly and is capable of arousing very strong emotions. This article aimed at presenting the results of research on the analysis model of impolite Indonesian language use. This model was developed from tracing status on social media which included language impoliteness in 2019. The novelty of this analysis model was that it involved a factor of power that allowed the appearance of such impolite speech. Therefore, this model is composed of several stages. First, presenting text in the form of spoken, written, and visual texts. Second, transcribing texts. Third, interpreting language impoliteness. At the interpreting stage, the impoliteness of the speeches was carried out by: (1) analyzing the contexts, (2) analyzing the power, (3) analyzing the dictions and language styles that contained impoliteness, (4) analyzing ethical speech acts, and (5) manipulating language politeness. From these language manipulation efforts, they were made to habituate language discipline to create a polite language society.

Social Meanings in School Linguistic Landscape: A Geosemiotic Approach

As an approach to multilingualism, the study of linguistic landscape (LL) in educational settings is still underexplored. LL study is significant to disclose various aspects of language existence and use. In the school context, it might reveal what and how languages are used among school members and their relevance to education. This article aims to examine the emerging themes of signs’ messages in school LL and the contribution of multimodal social semiotic elements to the signage social meanings. It studied 890 signs from five senior high schools in Yogyakarta, Indonesia and used a geosemiotic approach to analyse the verbal and visual texts. The findings reveal eight major themes of messages: (1) location or place direction, (2) morality and religion, (3) environment and energy, (4) school identity and information, (5) activities, (6) how to comport oneself, (7) science and knowledge and (8) rules, regulations and acts. The three main modes (language, image and colour) in the school LL serve the functions to communicate and to represent the schools’ social reality relevant to the emerging themes through iconic and symbolic semiotic systems. The school LL is a multifaceted social construct that also reveals the relationship between the sign makers and the addressees.

When Walls Could Talk

How can visual texts, closed books, and painted images work together in Buddhist temples to reinforce one another and act upon viewers? The fourteenth-century murals at the Tibetan temple of Shalu integrate pictures with long passages of Tibetan texts and select inscriptions that explain the powers of seeing paintings. The murals combine and mix media—books, paintings, cloth—into expressive wholes that ultimately argue that walls are in fact much more than walls. The paintings find ways to make the temple's book collections more accessible. Here we find a public art effort that weaves together a compelling argument for why religious texts and religious art both “work” for and on their audiences. Shalu was a grandly expanded temple showing off its resources and its connections in a broader cosmopolitan sphere of production and exchange. Its walls were designed to weave media together, finding ways to celebrate and explain larger and newer corporate productions (book projects, larger monasteries). An intentional play of materiality (clay, cloth, book) emphasized by the inscriptions and performed in the pictorial compositions assists in the imaginative act of directly seeing deities, while also playing with the awareness that acts of imagination entail the play of just-like/seeing-as. Since neither clay nor cloth nor word on their own are adequate vessels for representing an enlightened being, here they collaborate with each other and with viewers in the imaginative act, promising that the deity, like the teachings, can be directly experienced.