Semiotic multimodality and the perception of the past

The senses play a major role at the moment of perceiving the environment, and consequently they are able to provide different sorts of information, which will result in the perceiver´s different pragmatic interpretations and cause a particular phenomenological experience. In addition to this, every individual already carries along with his/her own past, experiences, memories and own worldviews, and they differ from one person to another. All these create diversity in the production of immediate meanings; this is the case of the perception of the past. Nowadays there are different interactive ways of experiencing the past, where the multimodalities and senses provide to the people the possibility to learn and re-create a possible different conception of the past. Yet, the questions which raise are: how do people use and interpret signs from the past such as the artifacts that we excavate in archaeology, or past events for that matter?, and how do those meanings shift across contexts? Time Travel –approach is a social practice and experience in the present that brings back the past realities, and its appearance focuses in narratives, phenomenological experiences, and the stimulation of the senses. What is involved here is the interaction among people, and between people and the world; time travel manifests common and different aspects in the perceptions particularly by people from different cultures. This approach strives for an interactive way of using the past in the present and renewing it in the future with different conceptions of it, enriched by different cultural backgrounds. This is particularly evident in the present world of migration and constant cultural transfers. The interpretation of the past is not a task just for archaeologists or historians as many people think. The aim of this paper is to show that: 1) People have different conceptions of certain event of the past at different levels, depending on the temporal, corporeal, and sensorial experience. 2) All the participants to this process are mutually influencing each other, and both archaeologists and people involved can learn from it. Hence, based on the interviews of people with multiple backgrounds, this paper proposes avenues for a multivocal and multitemporal conception of diverse experiential practices of the past. (In Theme and Axes I chose Semiotics and Anthropology, because my topic is related mainly to archaeology and I did not find the option of Semiotic and Archaeology.)
País: 
Finlandia
Temas y ejes de trabajo: 
Semiótica y antropología
Institución: 
University of Helsinki
Mail: 
jimena.biga86@gmail.com

Estado del abstract

Estado del abstract: 
Accepted
Desarrollado por gcoop.