Contributions to a semiotics of religion: the semiosis from sign to meaning

This article approaches theoretically the religious experience in toto. Considering the semiotics applied to religion, contributions to understand and recognize the relevance of this discipline are proposed. Such approach to the semiotics of religion justifies the aim of the article: to understand the meaning structures of religious experiences. These experiences are diverse, intimate, subjective, but all have an idea of the “transcendent” as a referent and they are based on structures of meaning, expressions, and representations of the sacred, forms, uses and interpretations of religious signs, systems of collective thought and symbolic action. It is intended to advocate that: 1) the semiotics of religion is an interdisciplinary branch of social sciences and humanities and a sort of semiotics of culture; religion is a form of culture, as well communication and social meaning; 2) religion is a semiotic phenomenon; it is sustained by signs, representations, processes of signification and cultural construction of the world, without which there could be no religion. This is followed by a conceptual, theoretical strategy of critical discussion of the structures of meaning on which manifest culture is based through what we say or do, the way we behave and the attitude we have towards signs.

Performing Crisis Management: National Repertoires of Symbolic Action and Their Usage during the Covid-19 Pandemic in Europe

The role of the symbolic is often overlooked in the public policy literature. Yet, it is a key component of public action, particularly in crisis management. During the Covid-19 pandemic, all democratic states needed to carry out cognitive and emotional work to persuade their citizens to show solidarity and comply with heavy restrictions. The near-simultaneous occurrence of the pandemic’s first wave (March–May 2020) allows us to compare the patterns of symbolic crisis management across four European countries (France, Germany, Italy and the United Kingdom). Our analysis finds significant variation in governments’ usage of the symbolic. We analyse leaders’ performances (wordcraft and stagecraft) as they try to reassure citizens, unite the nation, and legitimise themselves and their decisions. Our article shows not only that national leaders pay great attention to the symbolic in the management of crises, but also that their performances differ systematically in line with their personas and distinct national political cultures.

TANGO: Commonsense Generalization in Predicting Tool Interactions for Mobile Manipulators

Robots assisting us in factories or homes must learn to make use of objects as tools to perform tasks, e.g., a tray for carrying objects. We consider the problem of learning commonsense knowledge of when a tool may be useful and how its use may be composed with other tools to accomplish a high-level task instructed by a human. We introduce TANGO, a novel neural model for predicting task-specific tool interactions. TANGO is trained using demonstrations obtained from human teachers instructing a virtual robot in a physics simulator. TANGO encodes the world state consisting of objects and symbolic relationships between them using a graph neural network. The model learns to attend over the scene using knowledge of the goal and the action history, finally decoding the symbolic action to execute. Crucially, we address generalization to unseen environments where some known tools are missing, but alternative unseen tools are present. We show that by augmenting the representation of the environment with pre-trained embeddings derived from a knowledge-base, the model can generalize effectively to novel environments. Experimental results show a 60.5-78.9% improvement over the baseline in predicting successful symbolic plans in unseen settings for a simulated mobile manipulator.

Just “performance nonsense”?: How recipients process news photos of activists’ symbolic actions about climate change politics

In this article, I investigate how recipients make sense of images that show symbolic actions by environmental activists during two recent United Nations Climate Change Conferences. Environmental advocacy groups are successful in creating visibility for their symbolic actions via news visuals, but little empirical evidence exists about how ordinary media recipients engage with this type of imagery. Can they understand the intended meaning of complex visual rhetoric used by environmental activists? I use think-aloud protocols to uncover the cognitive strategies which are used in processing these stylised visual claims. Results show that news photos rarely manage to communicate the intended meaning of symbolic actions. By systematically analysing various stages of visual frame processing, this study offers insights into specific configurations of the image-viewer relationship that cause high levels of ambiguity and prevent staged visual claims from being understood as intended. Yet I also find empirical evidence for a visual framing approach that works well and describe this recipe for effective communication via symbolic action photography.

Relational Work and the Knowledge Transfer Process: Rituals in Rural Ghana

We advance understandings of knowledge transfer by showing the central role of symbolic action, taking the form of ritual, in contexts characterized by worldview differences. Using qualitative data from interactions between farming communities in rural Ghana and agriculture development specialists, we examine how rituals do relational work that enables informational work. We find that rituals (i.e., visits, value affirmations, gift-giving, prayer, performing, storytelling) do so by means of their functions–bracketing worldview differences, modeling collaboration between farmers and agriculture development specialists, and packaging new knowledge in displays of compatibility. Our work also expands scholarship on the role of rituals in organizations and on management practices in Africa. Overall, our paper offers a complex, comprehensive view of knowledge transfer as involving both relational and informational work and relying on both symbolic action and tangible elements.

The oath of a judge – oath of office and judicial symbol

The oath of a judge as an oath of office and as an element of judicial symbolism is considered in the article. The oath of a judge belongs to the categories of oaths of office, taken by an official upon taking office. At the same time, it belongs to the judicial oaths used in the justice process and is an element of judicial symbols. The oath of a judge as an oath of office symbolizes the endowment of a judge as an official by the state (judicial) power, the moment of his acquisition of powers (it is the inauguration ceremony), and the duty of a judge as an official to perform his duties properly. The oath of a judge as a judicial symbol represents a public and solemn obligation of the judge to exercise a fair trial in all its manifestations, including: independence and impartiality of the court, adversarial proceedings, equality of arms, and the rule of law. The judge takes the oath in a solemn atmosphere in the presence of senior officials (in Ukraine – in the presence of the President of Ukraine). It is an important ritual – a symbol of giving a person judicial power. The oath itself is a symbolic action of conscious choice of responsible and impartial observance of the law in the professional functions of realization of the rule of law for the good of all people. The coronavirus pandemic has shown that gathering a large number of people in one room can be problematic, so the oath ceremony was held even outdoors. It is stated that holding a ceremony in one of the judicial bodies, for example, in the premises of the Supreme Court or (subject to quarantine restrictions) in the territory of the Supreme Court may symbolize the independence of the judiciary and each judge from other branches of power. The peculiarity of the oath of a judge in Ukraine is its one-time nature. It should be taken only by a person first appointed to the position of a judge. In case of an appointment or transfer to another court, the judge shall not take the oath again. In this aspect, the oath of a judge is similar to the oath of a civil servant, which is taken only by persons recruited for the first time.

“Out of the Black, Into the Big Blue” on a Single Breath: Sport Event Value Co-Creation as Symbolic World-Making

Building upon the perspectives of sport value co-creation and symbolic action, this study employs a hermeneutic analysis of the socio-cultural dynamics shaping value in events. It examines the symbolic co-construction of a participatory small-scale event and the attached meanings that instantiate perceptions of value. The authors investigate a free-diving event held on the Greek island of Amorgos commemorating the 1988 film “Big Blue.” Fieldwork was conducted during the event, including focus groups, semi-structured interviews, and observation. Findings demonstrate the event’s dramaturgic hypostasis acting both as symbolic social space and multi-stakeholder value co-creation platform. Three overarching themes epitomize the actors’ experience: connecting, communing, and belonging. This reveals a dramaturgical world-making stage in which co-creative instantiators embody meanings that coordinate interaction, communicate information, integrate resources, and evaluate value. This study calls for comprehensive dramatological inquiries embracing the collective embodiment of events as social dramas that enable collaboration through the instantiation of shared meanings.