Lotman’s tradition: Semiotics of culture from a Latin American perspective

Based on the theory of semiotics of culture developed by Juri Lotman, the Grupo de Estudios de Retorica at Universidad Nacional de Cordoba (Cordoba, Argentina) has been working intensely for the past thirteen years in a fi eld that seeks to expand rhetoric, extending its boundaries beyond its traditional conceptualization and enabling description of cultural semiosis. Our research team has taken up Lotman’s semiotics in order to support a theory of rhetoric that studies the tropical operation that samples the multiple textualities in diff erent orders of Latin American culture, including art, science, myth and daily life. Directed by Silvia Barei, Vice-rector of Universidad Nacional de Cordoba and a specialist in literary theory and criticism, the Grupo de Estudios de Retorica research team is made up of researchers and professors from diff erent disciplines such as linguistics, translation, communication and literature: Marijo Villa, Maria Ines Arrizabalaga, Pablo Molina Ahumada, Ana Ines Leunda and Ariel Gomez Ponce. For over ten years, our team has relied on Lotman’s postulates (1990) to study the way in which tropes of analogue (namely metaphors) function in the creation and preservation of cultural information:2 it revises the way in which tropes build up networks of meaning and defi ne order and disorder according to the tropes’ own ideological baggage in the light of each author-creator’s vantage point. Th is prompted us to focus on the ideas of otherness generated by rhetorical means such as the “immigrant/foreigner”, analyzing how hospitality in some cases, and hostility in others, bring up highly complex coexistence policies whose importance is key to understanding Latin American reality.