Silvia Barbotto F.

“It makes sense”; “it does not make sense”; “it is meaningful”; “it is meaningless”: when individuals or whole societies find meaning through language in reality, they are guided by invisible schemes called “language ideologies”. Language ideologies have been variously defined, but a common description designates them as “sets of ideas a community holds about the role of language”. They have become a key object of investigation for linguistic anthropology, that is, the branch of ethnology that concentrates on the role of language in human communities. Language, however, is not only verbal. It does not manifest itself only through words, but also through other patterned articulations, involving mental representations and non-verbal systems of signs. That is why linguistic anthropology must give rise to a semiotic anthropology in order to fully grasp the place of language in human groups. It must expand the study of language ideologies into that of semiotic ideologies. These can be defined as implicit guidelines that pattern meaning-making in societies. Using language to give value to space and time, perceive reality, interpret it, keep memory of it: these activities seem spontaneous exactly like speaking one’s ‘mother tongue’. Yet, exactly like ‘natural languages’, non-verbal meaning-making too follows rules, which together compose a mysterious ‘grammar of signification’. Building on linguistic anthropology, semiotics, and semiotic anthropology, the course will help participants understand why they conceive of verbal and non-verbal meaning as they do, and how different cultures develop alternative understandings of meaningfulness and meaninglessness through both verbal language and other systems of signs.

Neurophysiology and cognitive psychology, visual history and digital art, artificial intelligence and plastic surgery constitute the daring cross-disciplinary perimeter of the symposium, which is meant to be an important step in a major research agenda, awarded an ERC Consolidator Grant in 2019 (FACETS: Face Aesthetics in Contemporary E-Technological Societies, June 2019 – May 2024, 2 million Euros). Within this perimeter, a specific issue is investigated: the agency of facial images.
As a vast literature indicates, the face is the most versatile interface of human interaction: most known societies simply could not function without faces. Through them, human beings manifest and perceive cognitions, emotions, and actions, being able, thus, to coordinate with each other. The centrality of the face is such that it is often attributed to non-human entities too, like animals, plants, objects, or even landscapes and, in certain circumstances, countries and cultural heritage. Symmetrically, defacing people literally means denying their faces, debasing their humanity. Such centrality of the face is the outcome of biological evolution, as well as the product of cultural post-speciation and social contextualization. On the one hand, as Darwin already showed in a seminal essay, the facial expression of some emotions, like shame, cannot be faked; on the other hand, countless cultural devices can alter faces, from makeup to tattoo, from hairdressing to aesthetic surgery.
The social centrality of the face manifests itself also in the omnipresence of its representations. The human brain is hardwired to detect face-shaped visual patterns in the environment, as the phenomenon of pareidolia or the syndrome of Charles Bonnet indicate; at the same time, most human cultures have extensively represented the human face in multifarious contexts, with several materials, and through different techniques, from the funerary masks of ancient Egypt until the hyper-realistic portraits of present-day digital art. Depicting the face, moreover, plays a primary role in religions, with Christianity setting the long-term influential tradition of a deity that shows itself through a human face whereas other traditions, like Judaism or Islam, strictly regulate the representation of the human countenance so as to avoid blasphemy.
Within this complex trans-historical and trans-cultural framework, the symposium essentially revolves around a straightforward hypothesis: since the face is so central in human behavior, facial images that are considered as produced by a non-human agency receive a special aura throughout history and cultures, as if they were endowed with extraordinary powers. Furthermore, since in many societies the face is read as the most important manifestation of interiority, ‘non man-made’ images of faces are attributed a status of authenticity and earnestness, as if they were the most sincere expression of some otherwise invisible agencies. So as to test this hypothesis, the symposium cross-fertilizes several methodologies.

Este es un volumen de semiótica dedicado a las culturas del rostro en América Latina. Ha tomado su forma a raíz de una serie de diálogos seminariales organizados virtualmente con las personalidades más destacadas de la semiótica latinoamericana durante el período pandémico. Gracias a las trasducciones de las rostrosferas incorporadas por las múltiples y variadas comunidades que atraviesan el continente, el rostro ha devenido un dispositivo en tensión entre dimensiones públicas y privadas, identidades y alteridades. En las contribuciones, la significación del tiempo transversal, así como la argumentación del espacio liminal son elementos importantes del recorrido en su conjunto: épocas pasadas se plasman en rostros contemporáneos, se vuelven carne, papel y pixel en paradigmas decoloniales y fundamentos críticos hacia la historia dominante; cuerpos, materias e imaginarios se agregan en un abanico híbrido, mestizaje policromo, remix narrativo resemantizado. rostrosferas de américa latina culturas, traducciones y mestizajes.