CP – Number 20 (2015)

Issue:

CP, Number 20

Section:

No. 20 (2015)  Editorial

Abstract:

Robyn Davidson’s travel account Tracks, which documents her crossing of the Australian desert in 1977, was published in 1980 and includes feminist, environmentalist and ethnic issues. At the age of 27, Davidson travelled from Alice Springs across 2,700 kilometres of Australian desert to the Indian Ocean, alone with her dog and four camels. For Davidson, a white Australian woman, encountering Aboriginal territory and culture means, on the one hand, discovering her freedom and, on the other, understanding the rhythms and traditions of her home country, its landscapes and also its contradictions. Not only is Davidson’s journey an enterprise on the footsteps of the Victorian explorers, but it is also a way to find fulfillment in natural environment. Davidson’s journey and its textualization develop an interplay between inside and outside, possession and alienation; most importantly, the woman traveller becomes part of the landscape and her account lets nature speak: the language of the Australian earth is thus conveyed through its different tracks.

Keywords:

Australian desert, Davidson Robyn, Tracks, travel writing.

Code [ID]:

CP201520V00S01A0001 [0004346]

Issue:

CP, Number 20

Section:

No. 20 (2015)  Editorial

Abstract:

The paper aims at revealing the way the three semiotic concepts of relation, relationship and relatedness work when a human being’s identity is shaped through the roles s/he performs and the attitudes s/he takes towards nature and culture. Starting from theories such as Greimas’s semiotic square, the Tartu School’s studies on how cultures are encoded in/through language and how they are understood by others and by themselves, the mechanisms of representing the world vision of a specific community through models and codes (Eco 1976; Sebeok 1994; Sebeok and Danesi 2000; Peirce’s concept of semiosis) and the functions of conceptual metaphors (Lakoff 1987; Lakoff & Johnson 1980; Lakoff & Turner 1989), the author tries to map the traits which define a historically-rooted cultural model. We consider that the becoming of a community’s identity built up through its relation to nature and culture may be best represented by literary, particularly metaphorical, discourse, pursued in its diachrony.

Keywords:

discourse, relation(ship), relatedness, semiotic square, B/being, nature, culture, conceptual metaphors, identity.

Code [ID]:

CP201520V00S01A0002 [0004347]

Issue:

CP, Number 20

Section:

No. 20 (2015)  Editorial

Abstract:

What is a garden? What is reflected in gardens? What curriculum is refreshed, renewed and repeated in them? How is culture represented in and through this space of bounded nature? The paper considers these questions as it presents in parallel and interacting columns an historical review of a selection of gardens alongside meditations and marginalia that speak the unspoken cultural curriculum grown with and in them.

Keywords:

garden, nature, curriculum, learning, cultural history.

Code [ID]:

CP201520V00S01A0003 [0004348]

Issue:

CP, Number 20

Section:

No. 20 (2015)  Editorial

Abstract:

The paper is an attempt to reveal the relation between history, geography, expansion and adaptability against the global immigrant rhetoric. The discourse of the desert foregrounds, besides spatial borders, the crisis of political frontiers, the relationship between nature (ecosystem) - human negotiation and the representation of such transactions in and through unique hybrid cultural productions.

Keywords:

frontier, border, human history, 98th Meridian, dominant culture, quality of life, self-identity, “cultural bumping”.

Code [ID]:

CP201520V00S01A0004 [0004349]

Issue:

CP, Number 20

Section:

No. 20 (2015)  Editorial

Abstract:

The paper engages with the uncanny as a semiotic phenomenon in de-constructive/psychoanalytical reading of Poe’s Gothic tale The Black Cat. It approaches the uncanny in its triple semiotic manifestations: the theme of the double, repetition-compulsion and the return of the repressed. Delving into the complex, entangling nature of binaries or dualities, the paper offers a three-tier perspective on the uncanny as a means of de-constructing bothness and exposing the ultimate necessity of either-or-ness philosophy. Sadly, however, this analysis shows darkness and perverseness as the finite ‘choice’ in the absence of a creative, procreative and constructive response to life.

Keywords:

Gothic, uncanny, homely, double, repetition-compulsion, repressed, darkness.

Code [ID]:

CP201520V00S01A0005 [0004350]

Issue:

CP, Number 20

Section:

No. 20 (2015)  Editorial

Abstract:

In approaching Romanian dominant feeding and cooking practices diachronically, our paper intends to outline some specific social and cultural factors leading over the centuries to either scarcity or abundance of food, and ultimately, to the social phenomena of poverty and wealth. In addition to influencing culinary trends and fashions, the particular geo-political context of our country (including the cyclic change of the seasons and the alternation of peace and war times, on the one hand, and of fasting and fast-free periods, on the other hand) also played a significant role in getting the population divided into well-fed vs. starving people. The theoretical background is mainly provided by the anthropological food studies conducted by Levi-Strauss (particularly Le cru et le cuit, 1964 translated as The Culinary Triangle, 1966), whereas the research methodology is largely influenced by a model of analysis proposed by The Social Issues Research Centre from Oxford, in a 1998 report to the European Commission examining the Social and Cultural Aspects of Drinking. Applied to the situational context specific to the Romanian population, national foods and meals fulfil four symbolic roles similar to the ones attributed to drinking: situation definers, indicators of social status, gender/age differentiators and statements of affiliation.

Keywords:

natural food, cooked food, gastronomic identity, food culture, culinary practices and codes, symbolic function.

Code [ID]:

CP201520V00S01A0006 [0004351]

Issue:

CP, Number 20

Section:

No. 20 (2015)  Editorial

Abstract:

John Muir (1838-1914), a Scottish born American writer, philosopher, naturalist, farmer, mountaineer, inventor and conservationist, never wrote a philosophical treatise on his “wilderness theology”, as Max Oelschlaeger defined Muir’s biocentric perspective on nature, but indeed produced a voluminous set of works that disclose his belief that man is part of nature in the same way as plants, animals and rocks are, thus abandoning the anthropocentric viewpoint on nature.

Keywords:

John Muir, Ralph Waldo Emerson, humanisation of nature, wilderness theology, biocentric perspective, lexicon of religion, vocabulary of the sublime.

Code [ID]:

CP201520V00S01A0007 [0004352]

Issue:

CP, Number 20

Section:

No. 20 (2015)  Editorial

Abstract:

This paper departs from the confrontation of a biological-semiotic concept of Umwelt with a psychological-phenomenological concept of Lebenswelt aiming at exhibiting their interpretations in selected investigative domains of the philosophy of nature and culture. The first part is devoted to the question of how the semiotic relationships of animals and humans to their subjective universes are discursively modeled in phenomenology as a study of individual experience that is consciously realized by senses from the first person perspective. Animals are admitted to have relations with actual things in the observable reality through an outward extension of their body, but they are stated to lack a direct access to the things in themselves and to their various forms of being because they cannot transcend the imprisonment of their surroundings. In the second part exposing the framework of existential semiotics, the existence modes of animal and human subjects are considered in terms of being in the world as immanence and being for the world as transcendence. Immanent subjects are explained as existing in their environments and transcendent subjects as being able to go beyond their life-world. Reassuming the similarities and differences between the research conclusions of philosophers and psychologists, the author puts forward investigative postulates addressed to anthropological linguistics or linguistic anthropology substantiating the search for the defining characteristics of speech derivable from the contrast between the verbal and non-verbal means of communication used in the world of humans and animals.

Keywords:

ecology, existentialism, phenomenology, semiotics, subjectivity.

Code [ID]:

CP201520V00S01A0008 [0004353]