Ethnography and semiotics: about divinity, ascetics, stones, and other recalcitrant subject

Abstract

In the contribution that I present, I wish to continue the comparison between semiotic work on texts and anthropological work on the field posed by Greimas, taking some of his postulates to their extreme consequences. He mentions some of the classic problems inherent in fieldwork, namely (1) the diversity or otherness of the object of study, (2) the positioning of the researcher in the field (empathy or hypocrisy, naivety or fiction? ), (3) the difference between the knowledge of the anthropologist and the knowledge of the natives, and finally (4) the discovery of ethnographic data capable of deeply shaking our certainties and our models.