The Semiotics of Religion

If there is a central theme to this work by Yelle (history, U. of Memphis), it is that any adequate account of the structural and historical dimensions of both religion and the secular must attend to semiotics, as semiosis is central to the self-definition of both, even if this has been obscured because of the secular bias against symbolism and poetic performance, and that any semiotics of religion must also attend to the structural and historical dimensions of religious and secular culture. Yelle's approach to semiotics draws on Roman Jakobson's studies of the "poetic function" of language; the Peircean semiotics developed by linguistic anthropologist Michael Silverstein, who emphasizes the pragmatic function of poetic form; and Webb Keane's studies of the semiotic ideology of secular modernity, as revealed in his examination of the colonial encounter between Dutch Protestants and native Indonesians. He has organized the discussion around select themes: the poetic features of magic spells and rituals, the naturalization of arbitrariness in ritual systems and in efforts to construct a universal language in Hinduism and the tradition of Francis Bacon, connections between Protestant iconoclasm and the critique of taking words for things in the Baconian tradition, the causes of the repudiation of ritual and transformations in attitudes toward poetic performance and ritual repetition in the early modern and modern eras, and reappraisal of the structuralist doctrine of the arbitrary nature of the sign. Bloomsbury is an imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing. Annotation c2013 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)