Overview

Discussions of both semiotics and ritual have undergone a fundamental reorientation over the past several decades. Traditionally, both were east in a cognitivist vocabulary in which what is known is regarded as primitive and what is done is treated as behavior scripted by knowledge. When treated in this way, semiotics reduces to studies of the encoding and decoding of messages and ritual studies to articulations of the mythic content imbedded in ritual practices.The inadequacy of a cognitivist vocabulary for these purposes has recently been argued by researchers who mounted historical studies of both sign systems and ritual practices. These studies flesh out an alternative, non-cognitivist vocabulary. According to this approach primacy is to be accorded to process over structure, to practice over knowledge, to ritual over ideology. A non-cognitive approach has not only invigorated both ritual studies and semiotics, but has also uncovered mutual dependencies that have previously escaped attention. In many respects, sign systems alternatively emerge ritual practices and in turn transform ritual practices in fundamental ways. The essays in this volume explore some of the key aspects in which rituals and sign systems form, interact, reinforce, transform and interpret one another, especially in the context of legal institutions.

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The Editors: J. Ralph Lindgren is the Clara H. Stewardson Professor of Philosophy Emeritus at Lehigh University. In addition to numerous articles and essays in the fields of semiotics, philosophy, law, and economics, he has written The Social Philosophy of Adam Smith and The Law of Sex Discrimination. He also edited Horizons of Justice, which is volume 8 in the Critic of institutions series. Until his death in 1995, Jay Knaak was Professor of Philosophy and Religion at t he university of West Florida in Pensacola, Florida. He was a regular participant in the Round Table on Law and Semiotics and a frequent contributor to its proceedings. Roberta Kevelson is Distinguished Professor Emeritus at Penn State University where she founded, and for many years directed, the Center for Semiotic Research in Law, Government, and Economics. She has written more than a half dozen books on the semiotics of C. S. Peirce and for a decade edited the publication of the annual Round Table on Law and Semiotics. She is general editor of the Critic o Institutions series and editor of the inaugural volume in the series, Codes and Customs.

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