Abstract
Through the empirical analysis of a concrete phenomenon (the traveler’s encounter with another culture), the authors attempt to describe what criteria people apply in everyday life to determine the place of a particular culture (their own culture and the foreign culture) within a (subjective) hierarchy. They distinguish nine dimensions of classification: according to their hypothesis travelers used a combination of these criteria to create their subjective notion of the hierarchy of different cultures. The authors find that we also use these same criteria for the formation of a vertical hierarchy in other areas of (socio)semiosis (for example, in forming the hierarchy of foods, or of social groups that distinguish themselves from each other on the basis of differences in linguistic usage). The authors assume that the analytical dimensions proposed can be applied uniformly in all cases when sociosemiotics wishes to describe the sign system of social hierarchies, vertical classifications, and self-classifications.
About the author
Ágnes Kapitány (b. 1953) and Gábor Kapitány (b. 1948) are full professors at the Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design (MOME) and scientific advisers for the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. Their research interests include the problems of the symbolization process, sociosemiotics, and cultural anthropology of modern societies. Their publications include “Cultural pattern of a museum guide (House of Terror, Budapest)” (2008); “Globalization and mode of habitation in Hungary” (2011); and “Symbolic elements of everyday culture” (2012).
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