浮遊するシニフィアン : 伊勢神宮の多義性と神道の意味のうつろい

According to received understanding, the Grand Shrine of Ise (Ise Jingū 伊勢 神宮), as the center of the Shinto tradition, plays an essential role in the history of Japanese culture. However, premodern documents concerning Ise Shinto show that such understanding are mostly modern and contemporary results of multiple reinterpretations of Ise’s role throughout history. This article proposes a semiotic approach to understand some instances in which aspects of the cultural meanings attributed to the Grand Shrine of Ise—symbolism, rituals, and representations—have been re-contextualized, re-signified, and reinvented. In particular, this article suggests that emphasis on Shinto continuity tends to ignore cultural and discursive contexts and, even more crucially, the distinction between forms (signifiers) and their contents (signified), thus resulting in a more or less voluntary erasure of traces of historical and conceptual change. A semiotic approach will show that much of the Shinto tradition at Ise consists in the preservation, transmission, and repetition of ritualized forms without clearly defined meanings; this aspect in turn has produced an ongoing “quest for significance” regarding the Shinto tradition in general, and Ise in particular. This paper is a contribution toward a different kind of understanding, open to the diversity and plurality of sources, approaches, and sensibilities that characterize the history of Ise and of Shinto in general, away from reductionism that characterizes received discourses on Shinto

Tráfico e navios negreiros: contribuição da Arqueologia Náutica e Subaquática

The papers aims at contributing to producing a new approach, nautical and archaeological, on the maritime slave trade. It refers to a classic topic in international historiography, namely the African slave traffic to Brazil. It also aims at studying the wreck of a US slave ship, at Angra dos Reis, where it sunk in 1852. Through the study of material culture it will be possible to understand history as it is not written in history textbooks

A arqueologia subaquática no Brasil

The paper aims at discussing the main issues relating to underwater heritage in Brazil. Underwater heritage has been subjected to unscientific approaches and practices, as it was isolated from mainstream Brazilian archaeological discussions. The paper then turns to the possible solutions and proposals, aiming at addressing entertainment diving practices and encouraging professional archaeologists to div

Compositionality as an Analogical Process: Introducing ANNE

Usage-based constructionist approaches consider language a structured inventory of constructions, form-meaning pairings of different schematicity and complexity, and claim that the more a linguistic pattern is encountered, the more it becomes accessible to speakers. However, when an expression is unavailable, what processes underlie the interpretation? While traditional answers rely on the principle of compositionality, for which the meaning is built word-by-word and incrementally, usage-based theories argue that novel utterances are created based on previously experienced ones through analogy, mapping an existing structural pattern onto a novel instance. Starting from this theoretical perspective, we propose here a computational implementation of these assumptions. As the principle of compositionality has been used to generate distributional representations of phrases, we propose a neural network simulating the construction of phrasal embedding as an analogical process. Our framework, inspired by word2vec and computer vision techniques, was evaluated on tasks of generalization from existing vectors