Prof. Sung Do Kim, a renown semiotician from Korea (see the bionote below), will visit our group in Lund this week, as part of joint small project on "ritual and gesture", aiming for a future larger grant proposal. We will have a closed workshop in the morning of the 12th, but if anyone with interest in the field would wish to join, please contact jordan.zlatev@semiotik.lu.se This seminar is public and open for all, and no pre-bookings are needed. We ask however that you join from 15:00, either "in real life" on on zoom (see info on the right), with cameras on for very short self-presentations. The seminar itself will start from 15:15 and last for about one hour, followed by general discussion. Note: if you wish to join the post-seminar at Valvet, please email Jordan by Tuseday Feb 10, 10am!

Ritual is a semiotic system par excellence. However it is also a complex, multidimential and highly symbolic one. This study is a proposal for a semiotic description and analysis of buddhist ritual gestures performed in Korean buddhist monasteries. The need to address the topic stems, on the one hand, from the rather poor state of previous research, and on the other hand due to the lack of a single appropriate research methodology. Furthermore, culinary ritual gestures in Korean temples, as important and significant elements of the meal ceremony, have not yet been systematically and holistically studied despite its great anthropological and semiotic richness. The Buddhist ritual of monastic meals, with its ancestral culinary art, has been practiced for centuries in Korean temples. In order to establish the epistemological and methodological framework, I will propose an anthropo-semiotic approach adapted to the Buddhist culinary ritual of the meal, based on three dimensions: ethical-ecological, ritual, and physical. Through a discussion about the methodological assumptions ritual gestures might be placed on the borderline between two scientific disciplines of contemporary humanities: semiotics and cultural anthropology. The combination of these two research traditions will allow for the most complete possible explanation of buddhist ritual gestures and the construction of an anthrhopo-semiotic model for their description based on a multi-faceted and multi-level contextual interpretation.

Secondly, I will endeavor to describe in detail the staging of this highly symbolic and highly coded ritual, which is rich in meaning and multidimensional depth, drawing not only on semiotics and anthropology but also on ethics, ecology, and cosmology. While understanding the key moments of this process from an anthropo-semiotic perspective, I will attempt to build a database of etymological, lexical, and textual information on the term Baru Gongyang, whose semantic interconnections concern the origin of the lexicon in Sanskrit and the various meanings of Chinese writing.

Thirdly, I will draw on narrative semiotics and tense semiotics to analyze the process of this rituality. I will thus put forward semiotic observations and hypotheses concerning the ecological and spiritual nature of food and meals among Buddhists, and more particularly in Korean Buddhism. Overall, this reflection is close to a Buddhist vision which, reinterpreted from a semiotic perspective, manifests itself in ritual, in gestures, in the economy of verbal and material signs, in beliefs, in cognition, and in affectivity, with reference to the act of eating and the act of giving food. This semiotic description model can also become a template for describing other cultural phenomena related to the gestural system of rituals. 

Bionote: Professor Sung Do Kim is a scholar of linguistics and semiotics, educated at Korea University (B.A. in French Language and Literature) and Université Paris Nanterre (M.A. and Ph.D. in Linguistics and Semiotics). He has held major leadership roles in the field—including Vice President of the International Association for Semiotic Studies, and Founding President of the Asian Semiotic Association—and his contributions have been recognized with the SEMIOTICA Mouton d’Or Award.